The Stolen Children of Bangladesh
" I want to go home… I want to go home… I want to go home…" The drone goes on like the chant of a mystic as if the words will magically transport her thousands of miles back to her home in rural Bangladesh where she has left an 18-month-old daughter and memories of endless hunger. Rashida sits on the airy verandah of a custody home run by the Edhi Foundation in Karachi as she continues her refrain. She is already mentally unstable and her talk follows the course of her mind as it shifts from one place to another, from one language to another, from one nightmare to another. She has travelled from a distant Bangladesh gram to a faraway gaon in Punjab, and then to the shahar of Karachi.
Hunger holds a special meaning for Nadia who was smuggled into Pakistan, just a month or so before she found herself in the home. She has a horrible limp. The man who was buying Nadia threw her down from the first floor for refusing his advances, breaking her leg. Before that she had been beaten by iron rods. She burst into tears when-she showed the body wounds. She cries incessantly and the 13-year-old´s eyes and face are distorted with pain and fair.
Yet, Rashida and Nadia are among the lucky ones for having found sanctuary in a home. Thousands of others like them from Bangladesh roam the villages and cities of Pakistan and India, as prisoners of a hell that does not end. It is just a handful that land up at institutions like the one set up by Edhi where many of them spend years, if not decades, waiting for something to happen. Most have even forgotten Bangla and their children do not learn the language.