Damayanti Tambay had been married for little over a year when her husband Flight Lieutenant V V Tambay went on a bombing mission in the Western Sector. His plane was shot down and he was captured.

On December 5 that year, the Sunday Pakistan Observer newspaper printed his name along with those of four other Indian officers who had been captured.

Damayanti, a former national badminton champion who is now the sports director at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, never lost hope. She refused to remarry.

"I knocked at all doors," she says, "but nothing helped. My husband continues to languish in a Pakistani jail."

It has been 34 years. "I live on hope alone," she says.

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