Read it Live
dedicated to promoting budding poets, writers and bloggers

June 5th, 1980:

The room rang with the cries of the baby as the exhausted mother fell back on the bed. Cutting and tying the umbilical cord, the doctor announced to the mother and nurses around, “It’s a boy,” with a pride and exhilaration that only comes with announcement of that sex. Sadia smiled feebly, silently thanking God that she was done and over with it. She did not care whether it was a girl or a boy, as long as it was healthy.

Within a few hours the first-time mother was out of the delivery room, transported to a private one, and entrusted to the care of her loved ones. The initial processes all performed, the baby was returned to the mother with a blue band tied around his wrist. The paper neatly tucked inside its plastic fold read:

‘Baby Sadia Naveed. 509.87. Male. Private. Dr. Rashid Zaman. 1.45 a.m. 3.3 k.g. 05.06.80.’

The baby cried and squirmed in his blue wrapper as the nurse handed him over to Sadia’s mother.
“He’s a very cute boy, Masha’Allah,” the nurse said, looking around the room for indicators of the patient’s economic status. Usually how the family members dressed, the way they spoke with each other, or the number of bouquets for the expecting mother gave her a pretty good idea of how many more ‘Masha’Allahs‘ she would have to dish out to make a reasonable amount of money.
“Give some sadqa for him right away, Baji,” she said, addressing the child’s grandmother with her oft practiced smile, “or else bad nazr would eat him up!”

There was a hustle in the room with the arrival of the child. Everyone wanted to see him first. All first-time aunts and uncles, him being the first child in the family from both sides, passed him from lap to lap, smiling down at him with love and affection that took a leap in their hearts, born in that very moment.

“He looks exactly like you Sadia,” commented her sister, looking at the baby and his mother in turn, trying to compare their faces.
“Really? I think he looks exactly like me,” said Sadia’s husband, smiling rather clumsily at his son. “He even has my ears!”
“That’s the stupidest thing you could’ve noticed bhaiyya,” his sister said between laughs.
And the whole question of ‘he resembles who?’ the most loved debate whenever a child is born, started to make its way around the room. Everyone had an opinion of their own and the tired mother was quite forgotten amidst the discussion.
“You know what,” said Sadia’s mother, looking again at the sleeping child in her lap while everyone hushed up to listen to her, “I think he looks like a Raheem.”
“Who’s Raheem?”??asked Sadia, voicing the question for everyone.
“He’s Raheem,” the grandmother smiled and looked at Sadia, finding in her eyes an approval for the name.

In the next room, a couple wept silently at the birth of a still born.

*

13th August, 1987:

Raheem stood beside the cage of pigeons, staring into it in disbelief. He slowly bent down, opened the cage and took out the dead pigeon that has been in seemingly perfect health until the day before. He knew everyone would blame him for not feeding it properly, “but the rest are alive,” Raheem thought to himself, blaming the pigeon’s death on the pigeon solely. He went inside and told his mother, who took special care not to show how surprised she was at the sudden death, fearing it would sadden him.
“Oh how did it die?” she asked, looking sorry for her child’s sake.
“I don’t know, he was just fine,”??replied Raheem.
“Sometimes animals just die like that,” she said, unable to come up with a better explanation, “You should put it outside the front gate though. The garbage man will come tomorrow and take it away. Otherwise it’ll infect the other pigeons too,” Sadia cautioned her son and returned back to her work. Half an hour later, she saw out of the kitchen window, Raheem digging a hole in a corner of the backyard with a small stick. Placing the dead pigeon in it, he covered it with mud again and placed the stick on top, upright, to mark the grave.

Sadia expected her son to mourn his pigeon???s death, at least for a day. She remembered her own six year old self, crying with alligator tears when her goldfish died, and then recovering from the loss only a few hours later when her mother had bought her a handful of candies. Children always recover fairly quickly, but they need to mourn. To her surprise though, Raheem did not cry, he did not even go silently about the day. He acted as if nothing had happened. Sadia excused it, thinking it would take a while for it to hit him, but even after several days when Raheem did not act according to her expectations, she started fearing he was handling grief by shutting it out completely.
“Gudkoo was a good pet,” she said, slipping it in a casual conversation, to confront him.
Raheem only nodded in agreement.
“Don’t you miss it?” she proceeded cautiously, paying special attention to Raheem’s expressions.
“No Amma,” Raheem replied, adding after a pause, “I saw the person who took it. He was good and Gudkoo was happy.”
That was not a reply Sadia was expecting. Half astonished, half scared, she decided against pursuing the subject any further.

At night, she shared with her husband her anxiety about their son’s well being.
“What do you suppose he meant by ’seeing the person who took it?’ No one took Gudkoo, Naveed. It was dead in its cage.”
“Oh you know how a child’s mind can work. He probably made up that story to make himself believe that it was someone else’s fault that Gudkoo died. You know, someone ‘took’ it,” he replied groggily, half asleep already.
Sadia opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it. Perhaps her husband was right; a child’s imagination is a wild thing. She lay in her bed for a few minutes thinking about it but decided to dismiss the thought, turned a side, and went to sleep.

*

October 24th, 1995.

The beginning of adolescence is always a complex age, everyone had told Raheem that. And although he had nodded along because it seemed like the right thing to do and said yes, he was experiencing it, Raheem didn’t feel that ‘complex’ at all. Until recently, very recently, when he had become aware of a new emotion…love.

He knew about love, he loved his parents, he loved his younger siblings; he knew the natural kind of love. He knew about the acquired kind too; several crushes on cousins, class fellows, Hollywood actresses, he knew about it all. But this love….was different. He was in love, deeply, with what, that he didn’t know. There were moments, sparse, but very real, when during a regular day; looking out of the car window on the way to school or passing by a house on his way to the play ground with friends, he would feel an emotion beyond control, complete and bursting, his heart filled to its very brim.

That autumn evening of 1995, Raheem sat by the window, with his history book to prepare for a test the next day but the orange autumn leaves, dangling from the oak tree outside were so much more captivating than drab historic words. He enjoyed autumn, enjoyed seeing how some withered leaves struggled against the wind, as if begging it not to tear them away from the branches that had been their homes, while others gave in easily, readily, almost happily. All were fated to fall to the ground sooner or later but some embraced it happily and others denied it even after falling. Like a few people he knew, who struggled for every last breath even in the throes of death, even when their end enveloped them with the utmost certainty, there were leaves that seemed adamant about not lying down straight on the ground. They curved themselves into some semblance of standing upright.

It was in that moment Raheem felt that sensation in its full force for the first time. It wasn’t a vague, fleeting feeling; it was a strong sensation of wholeness. It was contentment; happiness not to the loud extent of wanting to shout out and share it with others, but happiness that makes you smile at an inanimate object and find satisfaction in it. Raheem felt that there was a bond, between him and something unseen, something that was above the clouds, above the sky. He felt he could fly if he closed his eyes, fly and touch the extremities of the universe. All was behind, all was over, all was done for good and he was peaceful.??

Raheem sat there for about an hour it seemed, looking at the dead leaves falling to the ground and reveling in that wonderful sensation, when a voice droned over the loudspeaker of the Masjid right next to his house: “Gentlemen, please listen to an important announcement. Mr. Shaukat, who lived in 214 C, has died by the will of Allah. His funeral prayers will take place after Isha prayers tonight, in the ground next to the Masjid.” The announcer repeated himself again once more and the loudspeaker was switched off.

Snapping from the scene outside into reality, Raheem realized Mr. Shaukat was the old man who lived next door; they shared a wall. Someone had died next door, maybe in the room on the opposite side of his own bedroom wall. But it didn’t scare him. For some odd reason, it all made sense.

*

April 15th, 1998.

With his two younger brothers growing into teenage boys now, the single storey, two bedroom house that Raheem had spent all his life in, started to look small. It was time to buy a bigger house with separate rooms for all three children. Property near the graveyard had always been cheaper than land elsewhere in the city so Naveed decided to relocate near the city???s famous graveyard.

Raheem’s first night in the new house made him like it immediately. While his youngest brother, pestered him with questions about ghosts haunting graveyards, whether they ‘attacked’ people or not, and what should he do incase he saw one, Raheem was drawn towards the darkness that engulfed the graveyard. He took a room in the upper storey, at the very front of the house, precisely to keep a watch over the dead, right across the street. There was something about that house that clicked with him and gave him a sense of belonging. In the following days, he expected himself to miss his previous house, but was amazed at how quickly he settled in.

The familiar feeling of wholeness started to surface a lot more frequently now. It was love, he was sure about that. What else could make him feel so exhilarated, so hopeful, so expectant of something in the future? What else could give him the energy to go on, push forward, to fight the little fights of his life and succeed? There was expectation, the wait that made him restless to see something he did not know of. He suspected it was something no one could understand but he had his doubts. Surely someone his age would be going through the same thing, why not talk about it?

“You’re in love with that chick who joined the Physics class last month,” stated Ahsan, Raheem”s best friend, quite seriously, after having listened to his vague and poorly articulated explanation of what he felt.
“What!?” Raheem exclaimed, slightly angry at his friend’s stupidity.
“You won’t understand it right now bachay,” Ahsan joked, patting Raheem hard on the back. “The sleeplessness, restlessness, senselessness, that’s exactly how it feels!”
“No it’s not that!” Raheem shouted, frustrated at his own naivety to have believed any one else would understand what he meant by being in love.

That night, Raheem stood at the window of his room, looking down at the graveyard. A small procession of dejected men entered it with a charpoy hoisted on their shoulders. Another resident welcomed to the fertile soil of the graveyard, he thought. These weren’t unusual sights; he would see at least one or sometimes a couple of such processions everyday. Returning to his bed to lie down for the night, Raheem felt the same warm feeling taking over. Tucking both hands under his head, lying straight on his back, gazing at the ceiling of his room in darkness, he prepared himself for long hours of wonderment.

*

September 10th, 2002.

Raheem lay in the hospital bed, unconscious. Sadia sat by his side, silently weeping into her chaddar holding his hand and reciting every prayer that she could remember. Naveed pacing up and down the small private room, slowly, sadly, throwing a furtive glace every now and then at his child, young, graceful, twenty two, and so helpless. Raheem’s younger brothers sat silently on the sofa beside the bed, looking at him breathing heavily through tubes, not knowing what to say or do to make everything better.

Raheem had had an accident three days ago, no bodily injuries, just brain damage. He had been in a coma ever since, showing no improvement. His parents, after the second day, had stopped asking the doctors for any positive sign, their silent responses were unbearable. A miracle, that was what they were hoping for.
“You can’t die this young,” Sadia said in an inaudible whisper, “Abhi tou I have to get you married.” A tear crept down her cheek, as she thought of the day Raheem was born, the moment she looked at his innocent face, feeling so proud of her ‘achievement’.

At 1.15 p.m. Raheem’s breathing became heavier, short spurts of breath started coming in later and later by the minute. For a few seconds Sadia looked at him and then whispered, “Naveed…” Turning his attention towards his son, Naveed only needed a few moments to realize what was going on and rushed out of the room to get a doctor.

Raheem opened his eyes for a few seconds, the first time in three days, and looked at the ceiling. He was here finally…he had come to meet him. All those years of waiting to find out what he was in love with were over; he could sleep in peace now. No more restless nights. He was going to fly, fly and touch the heavens with him. He was here, and it was beautiful. The room was full of light, celestial, warm, comforting, and Raheem saw him.

September 10th, 2002, he smiled, and closed his eyes.

*