Gudiya with Arif at Mundali on Wednesday. Picture by Rajesh Kumar

Mundali (Meerut), Sept. 22: War separated them, but the child it spawned has sealed their reunion.

Army man Mohammad Arif had at first refused to accept his wife Gudiya?s unborn child, fathered by another man when he was given up for dead or a deserter. But he relented when his wife, restored to him by a village council, put her foot down.

?I did not want the child initially. But Gudiya wanted the child should be where she is. She told me, ?If you love me, then you must also care for my child. Chhota bachcha hai, kahan jaayega?? Then I told her that I will take it also,? said Arif, who disappeared during the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan and was released last month as part of a prisoner swap.

?I told him that if you love me, you will accept the child,? Gudiya recalled telling Arif. ?Where I go, the child goes with me.?

?I will raise the child if he (Gudiya?s second husband) doesn?t want to. And when the child grows up, Taufiq can take it,? Arif told a television channel.

Both Gudiya and Arif blame the events that destroyed their former lives on fate. But now love is what they are both shyly professing for each other after their marriage was revalidated by maulvis and asserted in the media.

?I love her. She had to go through the second marriage (with Taufiq) because her stepmother had pressurised her,? said Arif, who returned to his home in Mundali, a village in Meerut, today at 4 in the morning after four days of media circus.

?Unko mujhse pyaar tha. I also want to stay with him,? Gudiya said. ?He convinced me. I had married a second time because my stepmother had pressurised me.?

What about the child she is carrying from her second marriage? ?Time will tell? is all she could say.

A casualty of war, it is a symbol of an emotional fissure ? the wound of a colonial legacy that continues to reopen time and again with a will of its own.

But kismet, as Gudiya called it, has taken its toll on her.

Eight months? pregnant, Gudiya was hospitalised with fever and put on glucose drip after her condition took a turn for the worse since the Muslim clerics pronounced the fatwa reuniting her with her first husband. Arif said the doctors blamed her condition on the heat.

For the delivery, Gudiya will go back to her parents? house in Kalaunda village in Naurangabad, Uttar Pradesh.

Looking back on his life, Arif said: ?It is a second birth for me. God has given me a second life. Shariat ka kanoon hai, use sab mussalmaan maante hain.?

What about Taufiq?

?What of Taufiq,? Gudiya shot back. ?He will get many other girls. We will give him any of the girls from our family. After all, he is my cousin and I have known him since childhood.?

Asked why an un-elected panchayat comprising members of their community was called in Naurangabad in the absence of Taufiq, Arif said: ?It was a sensitive matter. We wanted to do things quietly.?

After the fatwa, why go to the extent of going on TV to assert their marriage?

?We wanted to make sure that whatever decision was taken was done with everyone?s knowledge and consent,? Gudiya said.