TUCKED AWAY in the inner pages of a newspaper was a story, recently, that proves (if any proof was needed) that many times life is indeed stranger than fiction. This is a story with a lot of similarities with the film Parzania (based on a real life story). That film tells the heart rending story of the struggle of a Parsi couple to find their son, lost in the chaos that reigned in post-Godhra, Gujarat in 2002.

Many children were killed or separated from their families during those tragic times and this is the story of nine year old Muzaffar who was separated from his parents, Mohammed Salim Sheikh and Jaibunnisa, during the riots of 2002. They lost track of their two and half year old son as they sought refuge in late MP Ahsan Jafri’s house in February 2002.

They later filed a missing person’s report and searched as best as they could. As it turned out, that boy not only survived the insane brutality of that day but was also found by a constable of the crime branch who took him to his cousin Vikram and his wife Meena in Saraspur. This couple has since raised the boy, now named Vivek Vikram Patni, as their own son.

Apparently the boy had actually been found a year and a half ago but it was only on July 14th this year that the biological parents were informed that their lost son had been found. A subsequent DNA test confirmed the Sheikhs as the parents. They then filed for custody in a metropolitan court and the court ordered the Patnis to hand over the custody of the boy to the Sheikhs. Meena is said to have refused and thus the court had to ask the nine year old with whom he would like to live. The boy, not surprisingly, chose to live with Meena. The heart broken biological parents are now planning to move the High Court to get their son back and vow they will go to even the Supreme Court if required.

It is hard to imagine how this story that has brought so much pain to the Sheikhs, so far, can be resolved without one party or the other suffering heart ache. Apparently, the couple who has raised the boy for nearly six years now had told the police in 2002 that they would return the child if his parents were ever found. Most probably they did mean to give the boy back at that point, thinking that the parents would either be found soon or be possibly dead. But as time passed and they grew to love the boy as their own that intention became harder to act upon.

Well, six years is a long time and the child by now has become their ‘own’. It would be as painful for them now to ‘lose’ the boy as it was for Sheikh and Jaibunnisa in 2002. How can the courts now reconcile the very genuine interests of these two sets of Vivek/Muzaffar’s parents? It seems, which ever set they go with there is bound to be hurt.

Whose claim is more; the ones who gave him birth and then lost him under most traumatic circumstances or the ones who nurtured him for the last six years? As if this was not hard enough to decide, what about the boy at the centre of this triangle of ‘love’? What decision will do justice to him? Is it the right thing to do to make him go to live with the Sheikhs? What about the attachments he has formed with his adoptive parents? As far as he is concerned they are his parents and he is attached to them as any child is to his/her parent. What harm will it do to his psyche to be now taken away and made to live with a family and a culture that is alien to him? What would be the right thing to do? Should the interest of the child supersede those of his parents or vice versa?

Whichever way you look at this case, it seems headed for a lot more of legal wrangling and emotional pain. There can never be a right or easy decision in a story like this.