Media notes from Shoaib Malik

Hot News | | April 4, 2010 at 9:36 pm

Media Release From Shoaib Malik I want to clarify a few wrongly reported facts about me in some sections of the media, newspapers and television channels in India and Pakistan.

I want to make my position clear especially because I am to wed Sania Mirza in the near future.

Ayesha first started calling me on the telephone when I was in Sharjah with the Pakistan cricket team in 2001.

On the phone, she introduced herself as my fan, she said, she was living in Saudi Arabia.

Gradually, we started speaking every day. Naturally, I wanted to meet her. Every time I brought up the topic of meeting she would send me a bunch of photographs, I was made to believe the girl in the photograph was the one I was speaking to.

The truth is, I haven’t, to this day, met the girl in the photograph Ayesha sent me.

We had become close, thanks to the telephone conversations. In 2002, I came to Hyderabad specifically to meet Ayesha. Just before I left Pakistan, she told me she had to rush to Saudi Arabia on urgent work and her cousins – Reema and Maha Apa (meaning older sister) — would take me around.

I waited in Hyderabad for five days, hoping she would return. I finally asked her family where she was and they said, that in the last year she had put on a lot of weight, because of which she didn’t want to meet me until she could shed some of that. I told them I had photographs of her and that she wasn’t fat, but they told me those were older photographs.

Ayesha wanted us to get married. She had been talking about it for some time, saying we would only meet at our shaadi. In 2002, she told me that people in Hyderabad were talking about our relationship, and it was putting her parents in an embarrassing position.

She also told me she was feeling insecure. She wanted us to have a telephone Nikah to stop the talk. I knew that my parents wouldn’t agree to a telephone Nikah. They wanted to celebrate my wedding, and so did I.