It was in July this year Anju, a 34-year-old woman and mother of two children, left her home in Rajasthan and travelled hundreds of miles to a remote village in Pakistan to marry the man who she had met and fallen in love with on Facebook.
The cross-border tale of love hit headlines after Anju converted to Islam and received a new name, Fatima. Her 29-year-old Pakistani friend Nasrullah is a native of Upper Dir in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The Pakistan government initially granted a 30-day visa to Anju and later extended it by one year after the duo got married.
Now, after four months, Anju has returned to India to meet her children—a 15-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son. She crossed the Attari land border on Wednesday afternoon and will be flying to Delhi from Amritsar later in the day.
"She was alone, carrying a couple of pieces of luggage, and appeared very composed," the Times of India quoted a source as saying.
Anju and Nasrullah met and became friends on Facebook in 2019. They tied the knot in a local court of a district and sessions judge in Upper Dir amid tight security.
Anju was born in Kailor village in Uttar Pradesh and lived in the Alwar district of Rajasthan. She travelled to Pakistan legally from India via the Wagah-Attari border.
Anju's husband Arvind had told the media that she left home on the pretext of going to Jaipur but later the family came to know that she was in Pakistan.
Anju's incident is similar to Seema Ghulam Haider's case. Seema, a Pakistani mother of four, sneaked into India to live with Sachin Meena, a Hindu man she got in touch with while playing PUBG in 2019.