The only way Geeta can go home is if somebody recognizes her. “I wish we could spread her picture all cross India,” says Faisal Edhi
By Ammar Shahbazi
On August 4, 2012, Aman ki Asha reported on a deaf-mute girl stranded in Pakistan headlined “Homeless Indian girl wants to go home”. When we broke the story about “Geeta” as she had been named, media persons queued up at the door of the orphanage where she has been living, run by the Edhi Foundation in the heart of old Karachi known as Mithadar.
Several journalists reported about her at the time. Pakistani Rangers had found her on November 23, 2002, wandering in the border areas near Lahore. She was then about 11 years old. Realising that she was an Indian national who had entered Pakistan on foot, they handed her over to the local Edhi Center rather than to the police.
“They knew that if they gave her to the police, she would end up in prison for years,” says the respected social worker Bilquis Edhi, who looks after Geeta along with dozens of other orphaned, disabled and homeless children. Geeta has been living in the Edhi Shelter Home in Karachi for over ten years now, since being sent there a couple of years after being found.
Today, exactly three years later, her case is once again in the media spotlight, thanks to the Salman Khan Starrer movie Bajrangi Bhaijan. The film coincidentally closely depicts Geeta’s predicament – and the power of social media that has forced politicians to take note of it. Director Kabir Khan says that he only heard of the case recently.
“Had I known of it before, the film might have taken a different turn,” he told Barkha Dutt in a television show that also featured Geeta, along with the Edhi Foundations’ Bilquis Edhi and her son Faisal Edhi.
Geeta with social worker Abdus Sattar Edhi whose wife Bilquis has been looking after her personally. Photo: Help Geeta Facebook page
Faisal Edhi, who heads Edhi Foundation started by his father, the legendary social worker Abdus Sattar Edhi, is sceptical of the media hype, remembering the excitement of three years ago. He expresses his scepticism about the mainstream media’s short memory span. A few months after the initial reports, Geeta’s story was all but forgotten.
“I was really disappointed, because Geeta got very excited and then no body turned up after a while,” he told me when we met at Edhi Shelter Home.
Geeta’s de facto guardians at Edhi Foundation want the people of both India and Pakistan to capitalise on the renewed attention on her case and help find family her in India.
The good news is that this time, the media attention has led to politicians stepping in.
On Monday, as the Indian media picked up the story again, India’s Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj tweeted that she had asked the Islamabad-based Indian Ambassador to Pakistan to visit Geeta in Karachi.
However, officials at the Edhi Shelter Home are not too hopeful that India and Pakistan’s governments will make genuine efforts to find her family. They fear that the red tape associated with the process will once again relegate the issue to the back burner and nothing concrete will happen.
Faisal Edhi says the time to act is now. He wants to use social media to help keep her story alive and spread the word in order to ascertain the whereabouts of Geeta’s family.
Aug 8, 2012: Geeta, a deaf and mute Indian girl, communicating her story through her own form of sign language during an interview by Hasan Mansoor, AFP at Edhi Home, in Karachi. Photo: Rizwan Tabassum, AFP
“Social media is the only way out. We already made a Facebook page and we want more and more Indians to join, as it is only the people who can help her,” he said.
The page is titled: Please Help Find Geeta’s Home. An Indian Girl Stranded in Pakistan.
He is also sceptical of those who meet Geeta in the presence of the media to score brownie points.
“My mother raised her. Geeta has been living in our shelter home for 13 years; she is like family to us. But some people just walk in when the world is curious to know about her, or they will never show up.”
Geeta is again excited at the prospect of going home, as she expresses, miming an airplane and outlining a house in the air. As a slew of journalists visit her since the release of Bajrangi Bhaian, she greets them with a smile and shows them the small temple she has set up in the shelter.
She scribbles words in a script that contains Hindi words but that has been identified as primarily Mundrai, a tribal language south of Jharkand. Since she has picked up Hindi words from magazines, she uses both.
Geeta also eagerly tries to explain her home address in India.
“Every time a person comes to interview her, she feels he or she can help,” says Faisal, apprehensive that she will again be disappointed.
He also fears that the information she is able to provide is not enough to track her family down. “Somebody has to recognize her. I wish we could spread her picture all cross India. We know nothing about her. Even Geeta is not her real name, my mother calls her that.”
He appealed to the people in India to spread the word and help find her family using her pictures from childhood.
“It is not going to be easy, but that’s the only way Geeta can be reunited with her family and be sent home,” he says.
This time, with more people galvanized than ever before through social as well as mainstream media, and with politicians taking an active interest, perhaps Geeta’s dream of going home will come true.
The writer is a freelance journalist formerly with The News, Karachi. He tweets @ammarshahbazi
