Strains Of Love Across Pakistan-India Border

Indian tennis ace Sania Mirza and Pakistani cricket player Shoaib Malik are making headlines off the sports field. They're getting married, despite six decades of hostility between their nations, reports National Public Radio.

That makes them what's known in South Asia as a "cross-border" couple, whose romance transcends rival national arguments over disputed Kashmir and religious extremism.

Mirza, who earlier this week confirmed their wedding plans, said the marriage had nothing to do with politics. The young Muslim couple are just getting married, she said, like anyone else.

Mirza, 23, is the first Indian woman to have made the world Top 40 in tennis, reaching No. 27. She has since slipped to 92. Malik, 28, was captain of Pakistan's cricket team for a couple of years, though at the moment he's banned after the team went to Australia and lost every major game.

"For me it was a little difficult because my family background was army," says Masooma Syed, a Pakistani Punjabi from Lahore. A year and a half ago, she married Sumedh Rajendran, an Indian from Kerala in India's south. The couple lives in India's capital, New Delhi.

Syed is a Shiite Muslim and a painter. Rajendran is Hindu and a sculptor. He thinks their medium — art — helped bring them together.

"It is a platform without any boundaries or religion. ... Human can communicate to human," he says.

Syed says her parents still have reservations about the marriage and do not speak of it to members of the extended family.

"They haven't fully reconciled, but slowly and slowly, gradually they are fine," she says. "They want me to be happy wherever I am, and they have spoken to him, and they have found him a very, very good human being."

Syed says her parents are also just plain worried that a political crisis will blow up between India and Pakistan and that their daughter will be cut off from them.

Only 15 months ago, militants sailed into Mumbai from Pakistan and killed more than 160 people. Since then, relations between India and Pakistan have been very frosty.

As for the sports stars, Rajendran thinks that Mirza and Malik being celebrities makes their position even harder.

"They represent two countries. This is a kind of marrying of two countries. They are carrying a lot of emotions of thousands and thousands of people from both sides. So it has different dimensions," he says.

His wife agrees, adding that marriage is really about people, not politics, no matter where you live, or what your passport says.