Arshi Haider has not been able to sleep for the last four days. In the wee hours of an unusually humid Thursday, she sits on a thin ledge in front of the Arrivals Gate Number 4 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting tirelessly for an important passenger to arrive — it is her 21-year old son Maaz Haider, who is currently in his first year of medical education at the Urmia University in Iran.

Maaz is among the 110 Indian students on the first flight reaching India after they were evacuated from Iran as part of Operation Sindhu. Indigo flight 6E 9487 which is carrying the students from Armenia to Delhi via Qatar was scheduled to arrive at late night on Wednesday itself but was postponed to around 3.30 am Thursday morning.

Haider and Arshi, Maaz’s parents are not the only ones who have been waiting.

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Naseem, 70 is also at the airport, waiting for her maternal grandson, Sameer, along with Sameer’s parents and aunts and uncles and cousins. The entire family takes chances sitting on luggage trolley available in front of the gate.

When students finally arrived, parents take a sigh of relief and scramble to find their kids. But Arshi is unable to find her Maaz in the crowd. Eventually a friend of Maaz tells her that he maybe headed to another gate; Arshi, who has been waiting for more than five hours now, sprints to the other gate.

Meanwhile, Tamheed Islam, 24, a final-year MBBS student from Urmia, Iran, who hails from Jammu and Kashmir, was among the first students to come out of the gate.

Describing the conditions in Iran, he said, “Urmia was relatively safe, but other areas were more dangerous. We did see some missiles and drones.”

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He praised the role of the Indian authorities: “The Indian embassy and Ministry of External Affairs were very good. They were coordinating with us and remained in touch throughout.”

Mariam Rose, 24, who hails from Delhi’s Trilokpuri says she was not scared at all. “I was in constant touch with my family and were seeing updates on the internet. So we were not scared at all,” she said. The first thing she did was hug her mother.

25-year old Muskaan Shabir recounts an experience that she will remember all her life. At the Armenian border, they found out that four people had some visa or passport issues.”Three guys had some visa issue and one person’s passport had some issue. At that time, we thought the visa issue would be resolved but none of us thought that the passport problem could be resolved. We thought we would have to leave him back,” Shabir, an MBBS student who hails from Jammu and Kashmir, said.

“But the Indian embassy officials said they will get it resolved and if necessary, they will accompany him to Tehran to get the issue resolved. Tehran is a 15-hour drive. But thankfully, that didn’t happen and the issue was solved on the spot by embassy people. All of us were so happy when we saw that person cross the border,” Shabir recounted, and added that embassy officials treated them like they had known them for years, “like family”.

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But with no flights arranged for them to take them back home in Kashmir, Shabir has just one disappointment on landing in Delhi: “We are jet lagged, sleep deprived and exhausted. Now they are telling us that we have to take a bus to Kashmir? How can they expect us to take a 20-hour bus which is not even a sleeper bus?” Shabir asks.