47 YEARS OF WAITING

Damayanti Tambay was switching radio stations on her transistor when she first heard the news. Her husband of 18 months, Flight lieutenant Vijay Vasant Tambay,  had been captured on the other side of the border. It was a day of December 5,1971.
Over the decades, Damayanti and the relatives of other POWS have met several PMs, bureaucratic and diplomats and appealed to various human rights group."Initially I thought everything will be sorted out. Then gradually you realise it may not be. The government needs  a certain degree of intent to match my hopes." says the 70-year old, sitting in Munrika, New Delhi.

Badminton  champ looks Back
She grew up in Allahabad. Father a lawyer and mother a school principal. She excelled at badminton. "MY backhand was my strength", says the three times national champion.
A small black and white photograph of the two is in the sitting room. It's a post wedding photograph taken at a studio. An album of there honeymoon in kashmir is carefully preserved, every photograph captioned in clean capital letters by Vijay. " life certainly, is unpredictable, " says one caption.
By the winter of 1971, war was in the air. It began on December 3. A day after  she heard it on the radio , She Received  A Government Telegram Informing Her Of Vijay's Capture.  " I thought since he is captured, he is out of danger and as a prisoner of war, sooner or later he would  be sent home",  she said on 2004.
She took up  a job of a sport officer in JNU in November 1972 just a day after receiving  a Arjuna Award.

Hopes Raised only To be Dashed
The decades passed in a see saw of despair and hope. Sunday Pakistan Observer carried  a story  of five Indian pilots.
Further hope of Vijay's survival came in 1975.  T A Yusuf, a Bangladesh naval officer met Vijay's cousin , Dr Y G Tambay,who was a army doctor  in Jamnagar. "Yusuf said the prisoners had scribed his surname,Tambay, on the wall of his prison cell and had a scar on his jaw" says Damayanti.
In 1989, Jayant Jatar , Vijay's uncle,  went to Pakistan as the manager of the U-19 cricket squad. In a 2004 article  put out by news agency PTI, Jatar had said that he met Gen Tikka Khan (then governor of Punjab ) in Gujranwala during the tour and begged for permission to see his imprisoned nephew.  Jatar was taken to a prison in Lyallpur, where he saw a man , dressed in a kurta-pyjama, reading  a newspaper in a cell. Jatar recognised him as his nephew though he wasn't allowed to talk to him.

Returning Empty-handed

In June 2007, 15 members delegation of PoW relatives was finally allowed to visit some jails across Pakistan.
Damayanti retired in 2013 as a deputy director, physical education and is currently general secretary, war widows Association. Fond of classical music, she listens to D V Paluskar and Nikhil Banerjee.  "MY friends and family have been very supportive. Over the  years, I have learnt to cope with  his absence and live by myself",she says.
There are occasions when her mind travels back to 1970-71. "Those memories are my treasures ". Even the spools of tape on which her husband had recorded his favourite English music have been preserved. And she shows with pride a WhatsApp forward that displays Vijay's name on the National War Memorial in New Delhi. "He is a part of Indian history " says Damayanti.