Separated by HC for 7 days — their first time in 10 yrs — Faeiz and Payal fasted
ORDEAL Payal had been put in shelter home after her brother alleged that she was forcibly converted to Islam and married JAIPUR
: Faeiz Modi was the only Muslim in his class at Sardar Children’s Senior Secondary School in Jodhpur’s Jalori Gate area near Behru Bagh Mandir. He and Payal Singhvi became friends in Class 7. The two didn’t realise back then that their friendship will turn into marriage one day.
“Our families found out about our affair when we were in Class 10 and both of us faced the music at home. That was the first indication that our families will disapprove of our alliance but we didn’t know we will marry one day,” Faeiz said, talking to Hindustan Times on the telephone from Jodhpur.
The two got married in Jodhpur on April 14, according to Islamic wedding rituals. Payal became Arifa to be Faeiz’s wife. This led to her family approaching the police and then Rajasthan high court against what they called forced conversion for marriage and charged the man with kidnapping their daughter.
The HC asked the police to produce Arifa in court on November 1 and sent her to a government home even as it fixed November 7 for hearing the government’s reply on whether the conversion and wedding were legal.
“After school, we decided to spend our lives together but the trigger for the wedding was my wife’s family trying to fix her marriage with a Bangalore man who was 10 years older to her. We decided to get married and I approached a maulvi. Our families were kept in the dark about this because we knew they will not approve of the wedding,” Faeiz, 24, said.
Arifa, 22, is a postgraduate in commerce and Faeiz a graduate. “I left college after graduating because I wanted to set up a business to look after her. I set up a
I was fasting to pray to Allah for the issue to settle down. Today, she told me that she too had not eaten anything in the government home
FAEIZ MODI, Payal’s husband
small readymade garments shop near my house and began earning Rs 20,000 a month on an average,” he said.
After their wedding in April, Arifa didn’t move into Faeiz’s house. “We would be together in the day and she would go home at night. This continued for six months – until October – when we decided to go for honeymoon. But we followed the legal process before travelling. We went to the police station to inform them about our wedding. We also met the police commissioner for this,” said the man.
Faeiz said Arifa and he were away for a week for the first time in 10 years. “I was fasting to pray to Allah for the issue to settle down. Today, when she came back to me, she told me that she had also not eaten anything while she was in the government home,” he said.
The man said the two only want to live together for love. He refused to share the couple’s photograph, saying they didn’t want to get famous. “We only want to live happily,” he added.
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