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Shoaib Malik meets his Indian wife after telephone marriage

HYDERABAD: Between cricket matches on the razor-edge Indian tour, Pakistani batsman Shoaib Malik also attended to some important business in this southern Indian city – he met his Indian wife who he married on the phone.

Malik is using the Pakistani team’s visit to Hyderabad to meet Ayesha Siddiqui, his Indian wife. The couple first met in 2000 in Dubai, where Siddiqui works as a school vice principal, and secretly got married in 2002 in a ceremony conducted by an Islamic cleric over the telephone from Pakistan. On Tuesday night, the visiting team took a break to savour Hyderabadi delicacies at a lavish dinner thrown by Malik’s father-in-law. There, Malik met his bride who will start living with her husband only after a formal ceremony in August.

Marriage documents were mailed to Malik’s bride after the telephone wedding, which took place when she was at home in Hyderabad and he in his hometown Sialkot, Pakistan. Ayesha Siddiqui said her husband had visited Hyderabad twice over the past two years without being recognized in public. “We are very happy. It is our good luck to find a son-in-law like him,” said Malik’s father-in-law, Ahmadullah Siddiqui. “We hope that this relationship will make its own contribution to improve the relations between India and Pakistan.”

Ayesha Siddiqui said the couple was initially apprehensive about whether their parents would give their consent to the wedding. “But there is nothing unusual about it. Marriage over the phone is very much Islamic and a normal thing among Muslims,” she said. ap

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