Love milestone: Batala man’s Pakistani fiancée gets visa

AMRITSAR: A young Punjab advocate engaged to his Pakistani love in 2016 is set to get married after her Indian visa knot was untangled Thursday and the couple got the chance to crown their Veer-Zaara-like saga with triumphant strides to the altar.
Naman Luthra, 24, and Shaleen Javed’s romance is redolent of the 2004 Shah Rukh Khan-Preity Zinta blockbuster, kept alive largely through social media and the occasional trips across the border.
“Yesterday, Shaleen got a visa and now she is arriving here in the first week of April. Once she is here, we will marry,” the advocate from Gurdaspur’s Batala said while thanking the Indian government.
Despite fulfilling all formalities, Luthra said his fiancée was earlier denied a visa a couple of times. Now, both families are preparing for the wedding and he is eagerly waiting for his bride, her parents and her relatives to arrive in Batala. Luthra made it clear that he would live in Batala with his wife after marriage. The lawyer and the Lahore-based Shaleen Javed, also 24, happen to be distant relatives. They fell in love when Luthra visited Pakistan to meet some of his relatives who had preferred to stay on in the newly-created country after Partition in 1947.
Luthra’s family had migrated from Lahore and settled in Batala. However, his great grand maternal uncle had opted to stay on in Lahore with his family, later embracing Christianity. Despite living on both sides of the Radcliffe Line, the two families stayed in touch. After Luthra and Shaleen told their relatives they wanted to get married, they got engaged as teenagers in Lahore in 2016. Shaleen visited Batala in 2018 but she was denied a visa after that on various grounds. The Kartarpur Corridor’s opening helped the couple meet each other physically last year at Gurdwara Darbar Sahib and seek blessings for their reunion. Chaudhary Maqbool Ahmad, a social worker in Gurdaspur’s Qadian, spoke about helping Luthra and Shaleen by pursuing their case with the government departments concerned.