An extraordinary life doesn't necessarily mean a journey that's exemplary or inspirational. Sometimes, it could mean experiencing the unfathomable, and living to tell it. The story of Hamid Ansari, a 27-year-old Mumbai-based techie, who disappeared into thin air in the nippy November of 2012, is extraordinary for those reasons. Even as his parents, Fauzia and Nehal, and brother Khalid, were running from pillar to post to trace his whereabouts, an undiscerning Hamid, on a mission to rescue Fiza, a young woman he befriended online, had found himself across the border in Pakistan, and illegally. The tragedy that befell him soon after is revisited in a new book, Hamid: The Story of My Captivity, Survival and Freedom (Penguin Random House), which Hamid has co-authored with senior journalist Geeta Mohan.

Hamid had been missing for nearly three years, before the Ansari family, who had traversed political and diplomatic hurdles, learnt that he was still alive. By then, he had surreptitiously been tried and charged for being an Indian spy in Pakistan. An equal number of agonising years followed, before he crossed over from the Wagah border on December 18, 2018, and was united with the family. Mohan, the foreign affairs editor with a national media house, had been following Ansari's story, from the time it broke in the media. "I was deeply involved in it, not just as a journalist, but also personally. Every time Fauzia would come to Delhi, I'd go and meet her. It was important [for me] to raise the issue with the authorities, primarily, because Hamid was still languishing in prison, and he wasn't a 'spy'," she tells mid-day. The idea to pen a book came closer to his date of repatriation.