Wagah, April 22
After two-and-a-half-year-old Noor Fatima, a Pakistani girl whose heart ailment had aroused emotions across the Indo-Pak divide two years ago, another girl from Pakistan, Binish Fatima, of the same age group, reached here today to undergo surgery for plugging multiple holes in her heart at a super-specialty hospital of Bangalore.

The family reached here by the Lahore-Delhi bus of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation. The bus crossed the Radcliff line this morning. Unlike the media hype that surrounded Noor Fatima, Binish was neither mobbed by the media nor received by any official.

Dr Rajesh Sharma, a world-renowned paediatric cardiac surgeon, will operate on Binish who was diagnosed as suffering from multiple ventricular septal defect (VSD) in Pakistan. Dr Sharma has been monitoring her condition through e-mail for some time.

With strains of anxiety visible on their faces, Mr Iftikhar Ahmad, a resident of Gulshan-e-Hadid, Karachi, his wife Ms Humaira Iftikhr and brother Mr Asim Adhar said that they had come to India with great hopes. They hoped that like Noor Fatima, Binish Fatima, too, would be cured by Dr Sharma. They said cardiac surgery in India was much advanced as compared to Pakistan.