MURDER SELF-ESTEEM or DREAMS?

MURDER SELF-ESTEEM or DREAMS?

Can growing wrinkles take away dreams from the eyes?
Can graying hair make a heart to cease beating?

Can a trembling hand make somebody give up the urge to be cuddled??

Can a cooped-back murder the vigor inside the chest?

NO !!

Razia Bibi, 73; eats, sleeps, walks and talks her dire desire of paying a pilgrimage to the home of her Lord. After the death of her husband, her sons took away her property. And on her wish to visit Mecca, her son paid her a heavy thrashing and threw her out of his (formerly her’s) home.

 “He broke my arm and beat me with a bat,” she told, while showing her still useless arm.

As she reached her daughter’s place, she interrogated her brother about his behavior with their mother and he responded “now she has come to you? Keep her there with you; I am coming to rip her legs apart. She says she wants to visit Mecca” poor Razia Bibi cried while repeating his son’s words.

Eight years ago, her daughter left her in this old age home in Lahore , where she is provided with basic necessities of life, but nothing equivalent to warmth and love. May be her children do not remember that they were seeded from the same womb which they have now deceived. She has been deprived of everything in life but her dream… her heart that still beats for the fulfillment of that dream…

The duty boy at the old age home says that in his 5 years of work, “none of her children or relatives has come to visit this lady, who speaks about going to Mecca to everybody who comes from any NGO or college to visit people here”.

She has now started losing her senses; she has started hallucinating that she has already visited Mecca. “I was standing in front of the kaa’ba, on my right side was Hazrat Ali and on the other was Hazrat Fatima and she gave me a golden goblet and I performed Hajj with them” she narrates her dream as if it were reality.

“My husband was really tall and handsome and he loved me very much,” razia boasts. But minutes after this memory escapes her lips, she lapses into silence.

Her husband, with his death has brought her to the verge of deciding between either to give up her self-esteem and remain isolated in her room in the old-age-home, or to give up her dreams and become a part of her son’s home as an old piece of furniture, which won’t speak or express its opinion.

Razia bibi has chosen to give up on her self-esteem, the pride of being owned. Or maybe this was the only option her children left to her.

“Write so provoking, that they may  feel sorry and shameful for what they have done to me” Razia requested us about her children.

*Based on the experience of personal visit to government old age complex in Lahore.