Story of Rehana shows that justice must be human, and love can survive even the hardest trials.

Story of Rehana  shows that justice must be human, and love can survive even the hardest trials.

Rehana Khatun thirty-two, mother of two little girls, and spoke Bengali in the soft, quick way women from Murshidabad do – a sound that sometimes feels strange to Delhi ears.

On a normal Tuesday in 2024, she went to the market in Seelampur. She wore a faded red salwar-kameez and carried her youngest child on her hip. She asked the price of potatoes in Bengali. Someone overheard. Someone whispered. Within hours the police arrived. She showed her Aadhaar card, voter card, ration card – everything she had – but the officers said the papers looked “suspicious.” That was enough. They pushed her into a van. Her daughters screamed as it drove away.

At the border, they told her she was Bangladeshi. Rehana begged and cried. She showed her children’s school certificates, her husband’s electricity bill, even a photo of her wedding in a small Delhi mosque. No one listened. At night they forced her across the barbed wire with only the clothes she wore. Bangladeshi officers said, “We have no record of this woman.” Still, they locked her in a detention camp near Sylhet, because India had already stamped her file “deported.”

For eighteen months she lived in a tin shed with fifty other women. She ate thin dal once a day, slept on the floor, her body growing weak, her mind stuck on one thought: my girls.

She wrote letters on scraps of paper, gave them to anyone leaving, but every letter came back marked “address not found.” Her husband, a poor painter, sold everything to search for her. The children stayed with their grandmother in a leaking one-room house.

Then, in October 2025, the Delhi High Court finally heard her case. Judges looked at birth certificates, school records, neighbours’ statements. They said clearly: Rehana Khatun is Indian. Bring her back.

When the van brought her to the border again, this time from Bangladesh, Rehana could hardly walk; her legs shook. An Indian officer held her arm. On the other side waited her husband, thinner, greyer, and two little girls who had grown taller and did not recognise the frail woman in the torn red salwar.

She fell to her knees on Indian soil, pressed her face into the dust, and sobbed silently. Her daughters stood still until she opened her arms. Then they ran. The youngest buried her face in her mother’s neck and whispered the first Bengali words Rehana had heard from her own children in eighteen months: “Maa, you’ve come home.”

Rehana held them so tightly it hurt. And for the first time in a year and a half, she cried out loud – the sound of a heart breaking open after being locked away too long.