The Hindu : Front Page : The media is back at Firdous’s house

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Saturday, Jul 28, 2007
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The media is back at Firdous’s house

Sudipto Mondal

Haneef’s wife longs for return to routine life

— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

Happy moment: Sumaiyya, younger sister of Mohamed Haneef, distributing sweets, in Bangalore on Friday.

Bangalore: As yet another chapter unfolds in Mohammed Haneef’s tumultuous saga, the media scrambled for one last sound bite from his beleaguered wife, Firdous Arshiya, at her father’s residence in BTM Layout even as the walls of the house resonated with recitals from the Koran and thanksgiving prayers.

With signs pointing increasingly in favour of Dr. Haneef, the mood in his in-laws’ house was that of massive relief. In a sharp contrast to the spontaneous jubilation displayed by certain mediapersons who greeted Ms. Firdous with beaming smiles and shouts of “congratulations,” the young mother herself was a picture of dignity.

The palatial house itself looked like a marked zone with the media continuing to picket it. Outdoor broadcast vans, cameramen together with mike-totting journalists aroused the curiosity of passers-by in the otherwise quiet street.

The besieged wife of Haneef seemed a lot more at ease with the media as she graciously conceded requests and posed for photographs along with her month-old infant in her arms.

“He said the baby looks like me,” she gushed, still on a high when at last she could speak to her husband who had just been freed from incarceration.

Ms. Firdous, who had been so unexpectedly flung into the media glare barely days after she gave birth, displayed splendid poise before the clutch of mediapersons. Her responses to queries were brief and to the point.

In the brief interaction, she used the occasion to mildly rebuke sections of the media for the overwrought speculations that immediately followed the news of her husband’s detention. “The media should not have jumped to conclusions before anything was proven,” she said. Confessing that the painful scars of the recent event would take time to heal, both for her and for her husband, she said: “All I want now is a speedy return to normality.”

While she pondered over how to respond to questions of “How are you feeling now?” from concerned journalists, her sister brought home the family’s trauma when she said: “Tonight Firdous will not need sleeping pills when she goes to bed.”

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