For Mohammed Anis Bashir Saboowala (49), stepping out of the green channel at Mumbai Airport to be greeted by his 20-year-old son Afzal must have been like stepping out of a time warp.The last time they met, he was 36 and Afzal was just seven years old. ‘‘I am very tired, son,’’ Saboowala said simply. ‘‘Take me home quickly.’’Saboowala was recently freed from an Iraqi jail by coalition forces. On Thursday he finally returned to India and his family after a separation of 13 years.Today he met his youngest daughter, Khairunnisa (13), for the first time. She was born at Baghdad airport as the family fled Kuwait, where they ran a perfume business, after the Iraqi invasion of 1990.Before he could join them, Saboowala was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in a Baghdad jail for ‘insulting Saddam Hussein’. He spent nine years behind bars, and another four stuck in Baghdad in a fruitless struggle to bail himself out of Saddam’s tyranny.‘‘I still have a hazy memory of the first Gulf War when our father helped all the five children and mummy to escape to Mumbai from Amman; but father was arrested by Iraqi troops,’’ said an emotional Afzal, a student at National College, Bandra.Saboowala got his first taste of liberty on April 10, after heavy bombing in Baghdad forced the guards at Abu Garib jail to flee. But he still had a tough road ahead to Jordan and freedom, travelling continuously for 15 days without rest as heavy shelling rocked the countryside. Now back in his Dongri home after his flight from Jordan, Saboowala is exhausted. ‘‘Life in jail is hopeless and humiliating,’’ he said wearily. ‘‘For the first year-and-a-half in Baghdad I didn’t even see sunlight.’’His aged parents Bashir and Rashida were too emotional to talk. ‘‘We are all very thankful to God that our eldest brother has returned safe and sound and as a free man to India,’’ said his younger brother Shoeb. Ayesha, one of Saboowala’s five children, couldn’t quite believe that it really was her father. ‘‘Just as Saddam has many clones, I thought the Iraqis had sent home a clone of my father, as he looks very different now!’’Forbidden to grow a beard in prison, Saboowala got accustomed to being clean-shaven, and the years have put a few extra pounds on him. Now home, the smiles on the faces of Khairunnisa and his wife Zaibunnisa may start to make up for his those lost years. ‘‘It is a new beginning for me now in Mumbai,’’ he said.
