21 April 2005	Thursday	11 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1426

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LAHORE, April 20: There is nothing that distinguishes the Mozang Bazaar from others. Shops on both sides sell what any other bazaar in the city would. But somehow on this April afternoon it wears an uncomfortable look. Shopkeepers sit idly waiting for customers who have not turned up to do their regular round of shopping.

“It’s not usual for this bazaar to be so quiet. Everybody here is frightened”, says a shopkeeper keeping details to a minimum. That is the attitude of nearly all the shopkeepers since the brutal murder of three children by their father in Mozang. They all are reluctant to give their opinion on the murder. At the mere mention of that gory incident, their expression suddenly turns grave.

I ask one of them about the father and his instant reaction is a curt reply. “We don’t know anything. Why don’t you go and ask the family? Many reporters have been asking me the same questions and I’ve given them the same reply. Go to Kashif’s house and talk to his family. They’ll be able to tell you what happened”, comes the response.

This is the neighbourhood of Kashif Saleem, a resident of Mohalla Kasaab in Mozang. He was taken into custody after reportedly killing his three children and slashing his own wrists. Muntaha was Kashif’s five-year-old daughter, Abdullah was aged three and the youngest was another daughter Alishba, who was barely one-and-a-half years old.

The four were rushed to the Ganga Ram Hospital where the children were declared dead while Kashif was kept till his condition became stable.

Finding Mohalla Kasaab is not as difficult as eliciting information from the shopkeepers. A narrow alley from Mozang Bazaar leads to Mohalla Kasaab where Kashif and his family live. Standing outside Kashif’s house I hesitate for a moment because the front door is wide open without a doorbell in sight.

I peer inside cautiously and call out loud. A man dressed in shirt-pants comes out and looks blankly at me. I ask him if it is possible to talk to Uzma, Kashif’s wife. The man turns around and goes inside without saying anything. As I decide to call out again he reappears and asks me to follow him.

I enter the house which has recently witnessed the murder of three innocent children and stand uncomfortably inside the dank, dark interior of what can be called a sitting area. A bedsheet is spread out on one part of the floor where a woman is sitting with her back against the wall. A few people, perhaps Kashif’s relatives, occupy the small charpoy close to the staircase leading to an upper storey.

They all go silent and try not to look at me. One of the men gets up and opens a door to a room used as a drawing room. I find myself facing Kashif’s uncle and his cousin Majid, who had led me inside the house.

The sound of silence is more disturbing than the cold expressions of the two men. I break it by asking if it is possible to talk to Kashif’s wife Uzma.

“She’s not well and is resting upstairs”, says the uncle. Majid contradicts him by saying that Uzma has gone to a doctor because she’s not well.

“She can’t talk to anyone right now”, explains Majid. The two fall silent again and I am left with the task of making them talk. That in itself becomes more difficult than I initially contemplated.

“Kashif and Uzma were a happily married couple with no differences between them. We are not allowed to meet Kashif, who is in police custody, so there’s nothing much that I can say to you”, says Majid after an awkward pause, wearing an inscrutable expression.

“Everything appearing in the newspapers is wrong. Kashif was not an addict; neither was he an irresponsible father. We don’t know why he did it. Till we talk to him we can’t say anything”, states Majid, not letting go of that hard and strangely calm appearance.

I realize that I am not going to go past Majid to talk to Kashif’s family. After a few minutes of getting the same unhelpful answers, I get up to leave. Crossing the sitting area I am once again hit by the house’s eerie silence which leaves me only when I reach the main Mozang Road.

I have made no headway and still have many questions unanswered. So, the next day I go to Uzma’s parent’s house, behind the Lahore Hotel, to find out about her whereabouts.

Strangely enough the response that greets me starting from the few shops outside her house is completely opposite to the one at Mozang Bazaar. The shopkeepers are only too willing to express their horror and grief over the unfortunate incident. “That’s Qadeer Aslam’s house, Uzma’s eldest brother,” points out a shopkeeper.

After taking two flights of stairs I find myself looking at a small courtyard where a young girl, Uzma’s younger sister, is peeling vegetables. She, along with Uzma’s younger brother, greets me enthusiastically and takes me to a small room to introduce me to their mother. Even though a great tragedy has struck them, Uzma’s family looks united in distress.

It surprises me when the mother asks her daughter-in-law to call Uzma. “Kashif left her here a few days before the incident. I don’t know why Majid told you that she was at her in-laws. She hasn’t gone back since then,” reveals the mother.

Uzma’s father had died when she was little, leaving the mother to take care of eight children. The mother’s sister asked for Uzma’s hand when she and Kashif were only 19 years old. “In the nine years since she’s been married I don’t think my daughter has been happy,” says the mother.

A few minutes later, a visibly shaken, pale looking woman, Uzma, enters the room and sits quietly on the floor. “I never thought he would do it, kill his own children and try to cut his wrists. The pressure of raising a family made him get into fits of rage and whenever I asked him something for my children he would become angry. But that doesn’t mean you end up killing your own children,” says a visibly shaken Uzma.

She admits that he sometimes beat her up and himself as well. “His three brothers did not work and Kashif had to support them. He was a responsible man but deeply disturbed by his brothers who didn’t work,” explains Uzma.

It was a far from normal marriage, so claims Uzma and her family. Kashif was constantly under pressure from his mother to give more money for his unmarried brothers and sister and to concentrate less on his own children.

“He was brainwashed by his family and made to believe that his children were a burden, which eventually made him take their lives,” says Kamran, Uzma’s younger brother.

The pressure mounted even further when Kashif’s family found out that Uzma was pregnant with his fourth child. “Kashif and his mother both decided to go for an abortion and contacted us to let us know about it,” states Uzma’s sister-in-law. “The mother-in-law told me that Uzma shouldn’t have any more children because Kashif couldn’t afford to pay Rs1,500 each year for an abortion,” continues the sister-in-law.

Uzma and her three children stayed at her mother’s house till the morning of April 13, when Kashif came to pick them up. “He said he wanted to take them to the bazaar to buy things for them. At four in the afternoon I received a phone call from his house to tell me that he had cut his wrists. I wasn’t told that my children were dead,” says a disoriented Uzma.

Later on, she was told by Kashif’s family that he had taken the children upstairs after buying a few CDs and turned on the volume so loud that it was difficult for them to know what was happening. “I don’t believe that he killed them in a fit of anger. You can kill one child in anger but not three. I think he had it all planned. He was convinced that as long as his children lived he would not be able to look after his mother and brothers properly, who were his priority in life,” says Kamran.

Despite fits of rage and uncompromising in-laws, Uzma never thought of leaving Kashif. “He was basically a nice man and a responsible son, but had difficulty in fulfilling the requirements of a father. All he needed to do was divorce me, not kill my children,” Uzma breaks off there. — Shehar Bano Khan