In the frozen stillness of the Himalayas a story is in motion. A tale of two countries united by beauty, poetry and music. And divided by war, bloodshed and turmoil. Caught in the crosshairs are the people. Like Shehnaz Parveen, a Pakistani woman who is imprisoned in India for eight years after she is mistaken for a Pakistani mole. She is raped in prison, gives birth to a daughter, Mobin, and would have been left to languish if it were not for a lawyer who was determined to get her justice. It is the true story of Shehnaz that inspired the series Kaafir, starring Dia Mirza as Kainaz Akhtar and Mohit Raina as the lawyer, Vedant Rathod. It started airing on Zee5 on June 15.
“It was just horrific to see a little girl as a jailbird,” says A.K. Sawhney, the lawyer who inspired Raina’s character. He met the mother and daughter at Wagah, when they failed to get deported to Pakistan. Sawhney, who was publishing a legal journal at the time, decided to dig a little deeper. He then met them at the district jail in Jammu, where they were being held.
Legal eagle: Sawhney
Unable to bear her in-laws’ harassment, Shehnaz had tried to drown herself in Pakistan’s Neelum river in 1998. She is not sure how she ended up on the other side of the border. Suspected of being a Pakistani mole, she was imprisoned in a prison in Poonch. “With time, the case got buried,” says Sawhney. “Thankfully, I was able to prove that the duo were being detained illegally.”
Still, there were many roadblocks. The child could not be deported as she was born in India. Also, if sent to Pakistan, Shehnaz could face a jail term of 10 years for attempted suicide. Sawhney utilised many channels to secure the release of Shehnaz and her daughter. He even reached out to the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and the then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
“The story was brought to me by Bhavani (Iyer, the writer of Kaafir) when she read it in a newspaper report,” says Siddharth Malhotra, the producer of the series. “She then showed it to me as a script in 2011. I asked Bhavani if she could write it and she immediately said yes. Everything sort of fell into place after that.”
While Mirza and Raina deliver admirable performances, it is the young Dishita Jain who steals the show with her nuanced portrayal of Mirza’s daughter. Although the story is set in Kashmir, the makers had to shoot Kaafir at Sangla in Himachal Pradesh. But the wide vistas and shadow-laden plains are beautiful to behold, a fitting backdrop to this poignant story.
The series begins with poetry: hum rahen na rahen.... rahengi yaariyaan (Whether we live or not, our friendship will live on). One may wonder what friendship has to do with the life of a woman mistaken for a Pakistani mole. But as the plot develops, one realises that her story is only a shimmer of light glinting off a larger surface. A story within a story—of poetry drenched in warfare, beauty gift-wrapped in bloodshed. A tale of two countries.