Every evening, 95-year-old Tamiz Uddin Howlader’s cloudy eyes light up. Hard of hearing, he almost cranes his neck to catch the sound of his phone ringing -- it means his daughter is calling. Since they first spoke, he has asked her the same question every day, “When will you come? I just want to hold you once.”
It has been 32 years since Achia disappeared from her family's home in Dhaka. Now 52 and living in Pakistan, she speaks to her father and brother daily by video call -- but a passport, a visa and an international border still stand in the way of the happy reunion.
Tamiz Uddin lives in a weathered tin-roofed house in Charabhanga village, Barguna Sadar upazila. Age has bent his back and dimmed his eyesight, but he beams with delight whenever his daughter appears on the screen. He smiles. Sometimes, he wipes away tears.
The landless family's ordeal began in the early 1990s, when poverty had forced them to move to Dhaka in search of work. They settled in the Borobag of Mirpur, where Tamiz Uddin worked as a day labourer.
One afternoon in 1994, Achia -- then in her late teens -- said she was going out, and never returned. Relatives searched everywhere but found no trace of her. Eventually, the family gave up and returned to their village.
Life went on.
Achia's five sisters got married, and her brother started his own family. But the wait for Achia never ended. Her mother, Rahela, died three years ago still carrying her daughter's face in her memory.
According to the family, a human trafficking ring had lured Achia abroad with the promise of a job and smuggled her across the border. She eventually reached Muzaffarnagar in Pakistan, where she married a local man. They had six daughters and a son. After her husband died roughly a year ago, memories of the family she had left behind in Bangladesh began to resurface more strongly.
Achia wrote a Facebook post describing fragments of her past with her father's address. The post reached Manzur, a Bangladeshi administrator of a Facebook page dedicated to tracing missing people, who shared it on his "Nikhoj" (Missing) page. It was spotted by Riaz Uddin Khan, a neighbour of Tamiz Uddin's family, who recognised the address and contacted Manzur. Photographs of Tamiz Uddin, his son Mostafa and Achia's sisters were sent to her and she recognised them instantly.
After 32 years, the missing daughter had found her way home -- at least on screen.
On July 20, she spoke to her father and brother for the first time by video call. When Tamiz Uddin saw his daughter's face after three decades, he wept with joy; Achia could not hold back her tears either. They have spoken every day since.
"I feel like spreading my wings and flying to embrace them all," Achia told this correspondent, speaking from Pakistan.
Technology has narrowed a 32-year gap to the width of a phone screen, but no further. Father and daughter can see each other, talk and share their feelings, but they cannot touch. For Tamiz Uddin, that may be the hardest part of all.
He wants no money, no gifts -- only to see his daughter in front of him once before he dies, and to hold her close.
Achia wants the same, to sit beside her father and hold his hand.
Between them now stand a border, a passport and a visa.
Achia said she has applied for a Pakistani passport and plans to apply for a Bangladeshi visa as soon as it is issued, so she can finally travel home. She has appealed to the governments of Bangladesh and Pakistan, and to all concerned authorities, to help speed her return to her family.
Six of Achia's daughters -- two of them now doctors -- and her only son, an engineering student, remain in Pakistan, where she says family life is stable. But her heart, she says, is still in the small, ageing house in Barguna where her father waits.
Neither of them knows how much longer that wait will be. But every evening, when the phone rings and her face appears on the screen, something lights up in the old man's eyes.
And just before the call ends, he asks her, "When will you come, my child? I just want to hold you once."
