'I miss my family': 90-year-old Indian woman visits home in Pakistan after 75 years | Watch

"At this time, I have mixed feelings. I am very excited to see my old home again, but I miss my family terribly," Reena Chhibber Varma said.

A 90-year-old woman crossed the Wagah-Attari border to reach Pakistan on Saturday only to visit her ancestral town Rawalpindi.

Moist-eyed Reena Chhibber Varma, after her arrival, immediately left for her hometown to visit her ancestral home Prem Niwas, her school, and childhood friends. It has been 75 years since she was separated from them.

In a video she uploaded on social media, Varma said her family was living on the Devi College Road in Rawalpindi when the Partition took place.

"I studied at the Modern School. My four siblings had also gone to the same school. My brother and a sister also studied at the Gorden College located near the Modern School," she recalled.

"My elder siblings had Muslim friends who would come to our home as my father was a man of progressive ideas and had no issue of meetings of boys and girls. Before Partition, there was not any issue of Hindu and Muslim thing. This happened after the Partition. Although the Partition of India was wrong, now that it has happened, both the countries should work together to ease visa restrictions for all of us," she said.

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In a Facebook post, she also sought information about the families of her uncle and aunt who used to live in Lahore.

Speaking to Kashmir Images about her feelings while travelling to her hometown after 75 years, Varma said, "At this time, I have mixed feelings. I am very excited to see my old home again, but I miss my family terribly." She is the only survivor of her then family of eight.

Watch her talk about the excitement of revisiting Rawalpindi.

The Pakistan High Commission in India, in a goodwill gesture, has issued a three-month visa to Varma, who was only 15 when her family moved to India during the Partition in 1947. She had applied for a Pakistani visa in 1965 but failed to get it because of high tension between the two neighbours because of the war.

The elderly woman said she had expressed her desire to visit her ancestral home on social media last year. A Pakistani citizen, Sajjad Haider, contacted her on social media and sent her images of her home in Rawalpindi.

Recently she again applied for a Pakistani visa which was denied. She then tagged her desire to Pakistan's Minister of State on Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar who facilitated her visa to visit her ancestral town.

(With inputs from PTI)

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