My Younger Sister Has Died...

Death is reality of life, but sometimes it has devastating affects not for the near and dear ones of departed; but even for the ideas which prop and sustain our lives. May be this is one of the moments in my life, I am thousands of miles away from my homeland and my younger sister has departed from this world leaving two kids in this mortal world.

Naseem was my sister, and till yesterday she was alive I talked to her days ago on phone she was admitted in hospital may be a month ago , but she was suffering silently and was victim of neglect of whom? I know, but I also don’t know.
Life has painful realities and at the moment my reality is fluid and I am finding it very hard to accept my life’s decision of living away from my family. It is painful and I cannot hold my tears and I want to be stoic and there is no issue in denying that process of death is the transformation which liberates us from evils and sins of this world. Naseem is no more, now she cannot face more neglect and she died in silence as she was in her real life -- Silent.

I remember years ago , when she was sent away from our home to one of my Nanni (grand mother) as she was born very weak. For years we did not know of her and after many years she returned to our house -- Her mother’s home. She was always homeless. She was homeless not in practical sense but in a spiritual and psychological sense. She was married and she was still homeless. Now she has reached to her eternal abode; perhaps she was lost after death of Nanni…her mother… and searched her in the years she spent alone. My mother told me often she was silent and did not mix with others in our family, with other 10 siblings. Yes she lived in her own world and I will never be able to know secrets of that world…we die in ignorance and live in ignorance.

My heart weeps, I weep as I try to write these lines, I cannot fathom this fact that she died so early, perhaps she endured enough. She was barely in her twenties. Daughters have to suffer, women have to suffer and this suffering wrenches my heart and it will keep on wrenching our hearts, death is a fact and we can never run from it and no one can run from death … but searching for love and belonging and then dying in the process is a death which has pain painted over again and again with all the landscape colors of heart and soul.

Pain and grief has overtaken me and also anger at human indifference and blaming cannot remove the signs of blood. Blood at invisible hands and blood spewed out of lungs, she died from lung disease and still I don’t know the real cause. Tuberculosis or what else? Perhaps there is no need to know as passed away souls cannot come back and let her rest in peace! May be her search has entered another phase.

Life, death and pain… the eternal symphony sung in the march of human beings from cradle to grave. But these rhythms of life take a heavy toll. Willingly or unwillingly we have to suffer their brunt. She has left a daughter in cradle barely some months old and herself gone to sleep in the lap of earth…the ultimate cradle of human souls!

I remember her son Junaid, may Allah bestow Junaid with wisdom and courage of Junaid Baghdadi (RA), her mother is no more to look after him, to take care of him. The pictures; when Naseem lost her path while going away from home to meet her Mausi (aunt) is in front of my eyes and I can relive the anxiety which I faced , that my sister is lost and how frantically my mind was racing to determine where she was gone. Now she is lost till the final day! Her silence had an ocean of ideas in herself. Memories have remained and they have become eternal by her untimely departure.

Spring of her age has been taken by autumn so early so suddenly and there is winter… a long long winter… when will spring come again? We mortals don't know… we can never know depths of human heart and human limits.

She longed for company and her pleasures of company with her children have been cut short by delicate balance of life and death. She yearned and thought of her kids on her death bed, her body was frail and she could no more cope with loneliness and mountain of pain surrounding her.

Vivid memories are casting shadows of reminiscence over my heart; perhaps they were so few and so personal. Many memories; will never lose their factual contours and anguish ingrained in them. May Allah rest her soul in peace, eternal peace!


24th March 2009