My Beautiful Rizwan

Thanks for sharing this very moving writing with us Samina Rizwan.

Reminds me of another Air Force member that my family lost in

another ``air crash``.

It is people like Rizwan that make us believe that the dream of Pakistan

is still alive (although it may not always be well).

Welcome to CHOWK. I hope that you will write and visit here often.


Ras

An excellent triubute of a wife!

Dear Samina:
I will not comment about the writing because that is not what engages me when someone bares their soul as you have done. I won`t say you are brave, I won`t say you are getting nostalgic, I won`t say you are just expressing something painful that has happened to you.

We have all experienced loss, either through death (do you know you did not use that word?) or destruction or a vacuum...which is why your feelings are so expansive. Your Rizwan is a cloud floating in the sky, far no doubt but with several images you can recall...you see them everyday.

Thank you for sharing them.

Inna lillah-e wa inna ilaih-e rajaoon. May his soul rest in peace. Amen.

The fact that you have written such a loving and beautiful tribute to your late husband demonstrates that he must have been quite a man. I almost cried (and I am a grown up man myself) when I read some parts of your article. You seem like a self-assured and competent person, and I hope that God gives you the strength to live the rest of your life the way I am sure your late husband would have wanted: in happiness and in contentment, living life to the fullest and always looking towards the future. May your children grow up to be fine adults, and may God bless every step that you and your children take.

PS: My wife studied at American University too, incidentally.

inna lillaha wa inna ilayhi raji`oon. I must confess that I skim-read your excellent article after the first third as I found it too powerful, and too emotional, too personal--I didn`t want to intrude.

But as others have said your former husband is a shaheed--the highest possible honour for a human-being (after nabi and siddiq), eternally alive, guaranteed jannat, enjoying a life we can not even imagine. It is something you should be proud of.
I salute him as I salute all the shuhada of Islam.

:-)

Inna lillah-e wa inna ilaih-e rajaoon

My condolences on your loss, and that tribute was very moving. Welcome to Chowk, I hope you and your family can weather this difficult time.

This is a lovely piece. Thanks for sharing your deep emotions with us. Not everyone gets an oppurtunity to experience this unconditional love in their lifes, you are one lucky person who was given a chance by god to share some wonderful moments of your life with an equally beautiful person. Condolences to you and your family.
Sincerly
-Sarah

inna lillaha wa inna ilayhi raji`oon. Thank u for sharing this Samina...Allah has truly blessed u....not only did u get to share your life with such a wonderful man, you also have a lifetime of memories to keep you going....

take care...

your namesake,

Samina :)

Samina Rizwan

Very touching and may God rest his soul in peace. I deeply feel. He was also lucky to have a wife like you.

I can closely relate to all the environt you have depicted. Razzaq, another officer who died there, was my student when he came to the Migs. He was so innocent, honest, boyish and a good pilot. I used to give him a lower assessment so that it does not go into his head like all pilots. But my low assessment did not prevent him from going places.

AC Rizwan’s sad and untimely demise is not only a great tragedy for his family but also a huge loss for PAF and Pakistan. AC Rizwan was no doubt one of the most competent officers PAF has ever produced. One of the very few fighter pilots of PAF with a degree in engineering as well.
It will take decades, if not centuries, for his institution and the country to fill the gap he left behind him. For his family, life will never be the same again.
May Allah Almighty rest his soul in peace (amen).
Samina, May Allah Almighty bless you and your children with the strength to cope up with this mighty dukh. I pray from the bottom of my heart for you.

Coincidently, I read this piece the moment it came up at the chowk. Since then I have been contemplating about a lot of things. And it was very difficult for me to decide that whether I should write what I am going to scribe underneath or not.

Finally, I came to a conclusion that not writing would be an offence to a great son of the soil who refused to emigrate by flatly saying “Ghar nahin chor saktay”.

Samina, ABSOLUTELY NOT to belittle your misfortune, but to pay my heartfelt homage for a person who knew many driver hotel wallas by name and was welcomed as a VIP at “Chakkiyan” whenever you visited there to sample Rizwan’s favourite daal roti, truck shairi was the highest form of ethnic art; I would like to add as follows for conveying to those it may concern:

As Rizwan would have agreed with me, free flowing booze, designer labels, in a poor country like ours, etc., in short, the life-style our star officers have adopted is “un-human like” what to talk about “un-Pakistani like”.

A country with a per-capita income of US$ 420 and going down, and the top echelon of the “defenders” of the nation leading a life many American generals must be envious of. The mindset of our top brass, totally devoid of morality is deplorable to say the least. Islam and religion, nothing more than tools of manipulation for them, aside, they don’t have respect for basic most human values either.

Samina, presumably, a lot of senior officers would visit chowk to read your tributes to Rizwan, I am using this forum on the behalf of at least 35 % Pakistanis living under the poverty line, to convey my utmost disgust for the higher ranks of the armed forces.

It should be clear to them that we poor Pakistanis really hate them, curse them and have lost the last traces of respect for them. We smell blood of innocent Pakistani children from the walls of their palatial houses.

As they have no, literally no knowledge of the hell most of their countrymen go through everyday, we too have no soft corner for them. It is only our powerlessness that we don’t burn their houses down. Neither respect not cowardice.

They are filthy parasites -- nothing more.

my condolences... I hope your husband didn`t become an unwitting victim of some anti-shia conspiracy brewing the ranks of a bitterly divided pak Army!