Bringing Home Sunny

Can love conquer geography, politics and Southwest Missouri culture? Peggy Tucker waited almost two years to be reunited with her Pakistani husband. Her answer is yes.

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Welcome to the Springfield-Branson National Airport. The national security level is orange; that means that the chance of terrorism is high.”

Peggy Tucker couldn’t care less about colors or codes. She sits on an asphalt-gray row of chairs in the airport lobby in a gray sweatshirt and jeans, staring through the glass partition dividing the terminal from main concourse. Her black canvas shoes shuffle beneath her with two years of anticipation. Somewhere on the other side of that glass is her Sunny, her husband, flying in from Pakistan. It took two years and a four-inch stack of paperwork to get to this moment. She passed through countless obstacles to be a wife to Sunny, but she won’t get to start tonight. Dozens of people emerge from behind the glass, but Sunny never walks through the door.

After about 30 minutes of confused glances and theorizing about what had happened, Peggy’s friend Mark Daughtry walks over to the airline counter to ask questions. The plane came in on time, the clerk said, only Sunny wasn’t aboard, and the clerk couldn’t figure out why. Peggy had no choice but to go home and check her messages, hoping Sunny had called to explain. Whatever the case, he wouldn’t be home now until tomorrow. Peggy never lost her composure. If she had waited this long to be reunited with him, what was one more day?

Getting to Know You

Every couple has a story about how they met. Some of them begin with a phrase such as “you’re never going to believe this.”

You’re never going to believe this. It was late the night of July 8, 2004—Peggy’s 50th birthday. It was about 10 p.m. One of her friends came over to help Peggy learn her way around her new laptop and to show her how to surf the Internet. They started off by looking at chat rooms for some interaction with people. The two found an Ozzy Osbourne chat room, signed on and, for fun, started talking to people about Keith Urban. He’s Peggy’s favorite musician.

In Lahore, Pakistan, 21-year-old Salman “Sunny” Alam was in the same chat room, staying late at his graphic design firm to wait for his ride home. Sunny says he knew right away that KUMYWAY (Peggy’s screenname in the chat room, which stands for “Keith Urban, my way”) wasn’t like any other girls he had met online. “She was so different because she never got [online,]” Sunny says. “She was so genuine.”

The conversation quickly became personal. After they signed off, Sunny called Peggy, and they talked for another few minutes. From then on the two called each other regularly, rarely missing a night. The phone calls got longer each time. Both of them say they sensed a connection. Soon they were both planning their schedules around their late-night phone calls and online chat sessions. To work around the 11-hour time difference, Peggy stayed up later and Sunny built time into his workday. Any relationsip talk remained hypothetical until August 14, when Sunny made the decision to propose.

Peggy had given up on the idea of getting married until she met Sunny. American men, she says, don’t respect women anymore, and it proved to be true as much in her dating life as it was on TV, as far as she was concerned. In Sunny, she says she has a man who respects her and who is dignified. Sunny had always talked about how he hoped his ailing father would live long enough to see him take a wife. Peggy was sure she wanted to be with Sunny, and she took matters into her own hands in an attempt to make Sunny’s wish come true. So Sunny could show friends and family—especially his dad—that he was spoken for, Peggy bought an engagement ring and shipped it to Sunny in a FedEx package.

The ring arrived a few days later, but not wouldn’t be there for another two months. By then, Sunny’s hopes for having his dad at the wedding were dashed. His father passed away two weeks before Peggy arrived. On February 5 she touched down in Lahore and met Sunny’s family for the first time, including his mother, Gulzar Perewin, a frail woman of 66 at the time, his brother, Imran, and his sister, Aluina. Two days later, they gathered for the wedding.

It was a ceremony of about 85 people, all family and friends of Sunny’s whom Peggy had met just days before. The best man was Sunny’s best friend, Zaheer, nicknamed “Row Row” because he was captain of the national Pakistani rowing team. Sunny’s mother gave her blessing to the union when she met Peggy, an event without which the wedding would not have taken place. Decked out in red robes and gold jewelry, Peggy looked every bit the Pakistani bride.

Peggy stayed in Pakistan with Sunny for almost a month after the wedding. He describes the experience as “the only days where I was carefree and having fun.” They visited the annual kite festival in Lahore to see the kites people would fly in head-to-head battles later in the year. At night they fell asleep to chanted prayers that played on loudspeakers throughout the city between each of the five daily calls to prayer. A couple of days before Before Peggy’s flight home they talked about the future and where they would live. Peggy has severe arthritis in her hands and hip that leaves her with terrible pains and $1,600-a-week painkiller shots that she couldn’t get in Lahore. The only sensible choice was for Sunny to move to the United States, which they were told would take about three months.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

What it Took

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan sits in the heart of the Middle East between Afghanistan and India. The city of Lahore, where Sunny lived at the time he was married, is in Punjab province on the country’s eastern border, about 200 miles east of Afghanistan. After members of Al Qaeda crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, U.S. immigration policy changed. The USA Patriot Act of 2001 mandated FBI tracking of fingerprint records on all foreign-born people entering the country. The Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 imposed tighter restrictions within U.S. embassies and consulates, imposing stringent screening processes for people coming to America from countries such as Pakistan, with a history of terrorism. It was a change set in motion long before Sunny first set foot in the American embassy in Islamabad in 2006, but it was then that he first saw the effects. “How did you get your family’s approval to move to America?” the woman behind the counter asked him. “I’m a man,” Sunny replied matter-of-factly. “I can do what I want.”

At 21, Sunny wasn’t just a man; he was the man of the house. After his father passed away, Sunny was left to provide for his mother, his sister, Aluina, and his mentally disabled brother, Imran. Jobs in graphic design—Sunny’s field—don’t pay well in Pakistan, which made saving money almost impossible. Sunny’s mother, however, always told him she wanted to see him in a better place. She wanted it so badly, in fact, that she hid medical problems such as ulcers from him, eating nothing but bread and water for six months so Sunny wouldn’t pay to send her to the hospital. In the meantime, she scrounged up 100,000 rupees—about $2,000—for his eventual trip to the U.S. On Sunny’s first trip to the embassy, he was told it would take another four weeks to get clearance. Wrong again.

On the other side of the world, Peggy and her friends began writing letters to anyone who would listen. Some went out to the media, others to congressmen. One of the letters reached the office of then–Missouri Senator Jim Talent. He read it and responded, taking up Peggy’s cause with the American embassy with calls and letters of his own. She got others to write letters, too. She had doctors write the embassy to explain the severity of her arthritis and her need to stay in the United States. She had Daughtry write the embassy as Sunny’s financial sponsor in case he couldn’t find employment. In all, 45 letters were sent to the embassy on Peggy’s behalf, all of which she keeps in two folders in her apartment, each folder more than two inches thick.