Click to play videoNew Delhi: Damyanti Tambe was 23 when she last saw her husband. Today, she's 60 and making what is perhaps the most important journey of her life.
Damyanti is on her way to Pakistan to look for her husband, Flight Lieutenant Vasant Tambay, who went missing during the 1971 War.
Damyanti was told that he had died in action, but all along she has refused to believe it. She insists that her husband was taken in as a prisoner of war and is now waiting for her to come and take him home.
But will she recognise him after all these years? "I'll recognise him like this (snaps)," a confident Damyanti claims.
On the flight with Mrs Tambe are 13 other relatives of soldiers, who never came home after the war. Bharat Suri has met four prime ministers and almost everyone else who matters to trace his brother Maj AK Suri.
Years after the war, a letter arrived at his doorstep in Delhi in 1975 with his brother's signatures. It's his reason to believe that his brother is still alive and is there somewhere in a Pakistani jail.
"Hum aanson bahate in. Hum hi jaante hain hamara saath kya hua hain. Hum jab chadar letein hai to aankhon main aanson nahi, dil se khoon bahta hain (It still hurts. Only we know what we have gone through)," Bharat Suri, brother of Maj AK Suri, says.
Pakistan has denied having any of these 14 Indian POWs in its jails. Yet hope has triumphed over logic for these families, who crossed over to Pakistan on Friday to look for them.
And it's this very hope that is making Nirmal Kaur shed her shyness and travel without her family to a distant land. Her husband, Subedar Assa Singh of the fifth Sikh Regiment, went missing from the Chamb sector during the war. Sub Assa Singh's photographs are her constant companion. And they are with her on this journey too.
"All we want is that our people should come back," Nirmal Kaur says.
The cynical amongst us may argue that it's a journey being made 36 years too late. But for each one of them, it's perhaps better late than never.
As for these families, they have waited 36 years to make this journey, a journey that is more than anything else, a journey of faith. At least, they will now have a chance to check if their loved ones are really there or not.
One can only hope that Mrs Tambe and the rest find what they are looking for. If not their brave soldiers, then at least a closure for what has perhaps been one of the most difficult chapters in their lives. "You wait and see, they are there. We will get them home," Damyanti hopes.
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