article: Thirteen years, in the case of Muhammad Idrees. In 1999, Mr Idrees left his wife and four young sons in Pakistan's port city of Karachi to attend to his sick father in the Indian city of Kanpur. He was born in India, and had moved to Pakistan and become its citizen after he married a cousin in Karachi. His father died soon after he reached Kanpur. In the chaos and grief that followed this personal loss, Mr Idrees overstayed for three days and his visa ran out. So did his luck. When he went to the authorities in Kanpur to seek a visa extension, they suspected him of spying for Pakistan and put him behind the bars. It took 10 years for a court to exonerate him of the charge, fine him 500 rupees ($9.17; £5.68) for overstaying and order his repatriation. Justice delayed is justice denied, and in the case of Mr Idrees, even justice delivered did not turn out to be liberating. For 13 years in all, he has been trying to return home without success. According to India's Ministry of External Affairs, Mr Idrees travelled to India on a Pakistani passport (number G057703), issued in Karachi, on 10 May 1999. To add to his woes, his passport expired in 2003. But Pakistan denies he is a citizen, and believes he has separated from his wife and has been disowned by his family. "Our interior ministry told us that he's not a Pakistani citizen. To our knowledge he's separated from his wife and his in-laws. They disown him. We have communicated this to Indian authorities," Manzoor Ali Memon, spokesperson of Pakistan's High Commission in India, told me. Today, at 40, Muhammad Idrees is a nowhere man, a victim of unkind fate and hostile borders. I met him in Kanpur, a fume-choked industrial city in Uttar Pradesh, on a balmy morning recently to listen to his heart-rending story. Mr Idrees is a frail man with a gaunt face and intense eyes. He's dressed in white shirt and trousers and his only possession, a cloth bag, is slung around his neck. It contains some fraying papers, a comb, a tooth brush, a tube of tooth paste, a towel and some fading family pictures. We walk to the relative solitude of the banks of the Ganges and sit down. Mr Idrees catches his breath, looks into the distance and begins talking in a clear, low voice. He says he spends his waking hours clinging onto memories of time spent with his family back home in Karachi, where he ran a small business selling leather goods. It feels like an eternity, he says. "I would take my wife and our four children on my motorbike for a drive down the windswept seaside in Karachi. We would laugh and chat. We would stop to have ice creams. Just like any other family." This was before his world turned black. It was before, he says, two nations and their strange, intractable ways, conspired to deny him from returning home. "India should have sorted out my case
summary: What price can a man end up paying up for the crime of overstaying in a foreign land for three days?