PoK boy looks for home in Kashmir

Pampore (J&K): Sajjad Ahmad Khan, who is only nine-year-old, knows that crossing the Line of Control means trouble and even imprisonment.

Perhaps that is the reason why he hides his head in his newly-bought pheran. But now that he's on the Indian side of the LoC, he does not want to go back.

"I want to work and study here. They want to adopt me. I'll stay with them forever," says Sajjad.

This little boy is the only one from his family to survive the October 8 earthquake in Kashmir.

He is from Muzaffarabad in PoK, but strayed across the LoC. Lonely and hapless, he's been wandering for months.

Two days after the earthquake hit the Kashmir region, Sajjad walked unknowingly into Uri after burying his parents.

On the Indian side of the LoC, the scene was no better with most of the people in distress.

Since the dialect in both Muzaffarabad and Uri is almost the same, Sajjad was taken as a local earthquake victim and survived the bitter cold and hunger as he was given food and shelter by the agencies involved in relief work.

After staying in Uri for nearly two months, he left for Srinagar.

"I climbed on to a ration truck, which brought me here," narrates Sajjad.

Instead of Srinagar, the truck dropped him at Pampore, where the police stepped in. He is in safe custody now.

"We took him into custody. We have resgistered an FIR, but under Section 83 of RPC, he will escape stringent punishment," Station House Officer of Pampore police station Manzoor Ahmad Lone explained.

And then a good samaritan of the locality stepped in and has moved the court seeking Sajjad's custody.

He wants to bring up the boy and Sajjad has also refused to be pushed back into PoK.

But it may take some time before the legal hassles are settled and Sajjad gets a new family to call his own.