May 26, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 09, 1428

LAHORE: Residents of a slum area near Gulberg have been intrigued by sobs and wails coming out of a certain one-room house in their midst. Venture inside, and you will discover the ghost of a young mother, alive and kicking herself for having allowed her children to be separated from her.

“I cry for those who are my flesh and blood. I can’t live without them,” says 25-year-old Sadia, mother of a girl of eight and a boy of six. The two children were admitted to a charity house three months ago under presumed consent from their mother. And where their mother would previously fret over their future, she has since their departure been grappling with sleeplessness and depression. The problem of bread and butter has been partially solved; she says she has no appetite.

“At the charity house, they will have three meals a day, a luxury we could never afford at home. But this is no consolation for a mother who wants to be with her children. My children are also desperate to come back. Without them, this house haunts me,” she says in a voice choked with emotion. “Each time I visit them they plead with me to take them back home.”

The father of the children died five years ago. Sadia, not her real name, married a second time a couple of years back. The man was much older than her and a distant relative, distant enough for Sadia to not know that he happened to be a veteran of six marriages and five divorces. His sixth wife had died leaving behind five sons who are now aged between 14 and five. He is a driver by profession.

“I remarried for the sake my children. My son was only eight months’ old when his father died. I would worry about him and didn’t want to raise him in an incomplete home,” Sadia, who hails from Abbotabad, tells Dawn. She came to Lahore only after her second marriage. Not too long after, she found out about her husband’s past and did what many other women in similar circumstances do: she resigned to fate, accepting her husband and embracing his five sons.

Life trudged along and, with education for children on low priority and food being the main concern, money was not that big a problem in the beginning. She had some savings which, along with whatever her husband would earn from his job, kept the household running for some time and later on she sold her gold jewellery to make ends meet. Until there was nothing left to sell.

“My children would ask for a candy and would in return get slapped in the face by their step-father. ‘This is not what I had bargained for when I married him’, I thought to myself as I searched for a way out.”

Her husband told her he had found one. Five months ago, he came up with the idea of sending all seven children that they had at home to shelter houses. She refused. A month later, he was fired from his job and remained out of work for a month. Sadia stepped out and got a job at a stitching centre for Rs2,200 a month - juxtaposing the demands of time and quality from her employers with the rigours of running a large household. She could not go on like this for long and was sacked only a month into it.

The time for deliberations had run out, the moment of reckoning had arrived. Soon after the household went without food for two days, the man in charge got up and asked his five sons to accompany him to somewhere. He came back with the news that he had got them all admitted to a shelter house for destitute children. A week later, he went again, this time taking her two children with him. He returned after dropping them at another charity home. The two shelter homes tell Dawn the children are being well looked after.

The couple may be keeping the matter to themselves for now, telling visiting relatives that the children have gone to play in the nearby ground, but a disclosure is imminent. The resigned wife cannot be expected to suppress the desperate mother within for long.