MUZAFFARGARH, April 28: A skin cancer patient abandoned by his poverty-stricken family sits on Muzaffargarh-Mahmoodkot Road and appeals to passers-by to pray for his early death because he has left with no reason to live on after finding every avenue of treatment closed.

Ironically, the frustrated man does not beg coins of money for which his family members threw him on the road, as they don’t have enough money to get him treated properly. He himself as well as his family also failed to find any philanthropist or donor who could have sponsored his otherwise very expensive treatment.

Shouting his name as Allah Dewaiya, the hapless man keeps his face covered with his hands as both of his eyes have fallen prey to the disease, presenting a very disgusting and frightening look.

In his youth in 1970s, Dewaiya was a cattle trader and a well-off man of his locality, but misfortunes came in battalions in latter part of his life, as he grew older and older.

Resident of Ghulam Aliwala on Mahmoodkot Road, the ill-fated father of three sons bemoaned the indifference of his family members and said they threw him on the road in a derelict state asking him to start begging not for his person alone but for them as well.

Sharing his sordid story, he said he felt pain near his eyes for the first time in 1999 and took medicine from a hakeem (oriental medical practitioner). Later, he said, he developed scabies in his eyes on which he contacted eye-specialists, but this effort too did not bear fruit. The disease engulfed his eyelids and retinas of both of his eyes, depriving him of his eyesight entirely and leaving just two holes on his face.

He said he heard about Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and others such facilities for free treatment but neither his family nor any donor agency or non-government organisation (NGO) took him there.

While making appeals to pray for his “death”, he wept bitterly, but no tears rolled on his face as tear glands had perhaps dried up due to the magnitude of his miseries.

Whenever he hears someone’s footsteps close behind him, he murmurs: “Please listen to me. I am Allah Dewaiya and I was the best cattle trader in my times. I lived a happy life, earned wealth, built a house and got married, but now I am homeless. My family members threw me here to wait for death….. Now they come here and check my pockets….”

His son Nazar Husain told Dawn that he was so poor that he could not arrange the treatment of his father because cancer had spread all over his body. He said no donor or NGO contacted him to get his father treated at any available facility.

He said he called on former district coordination officers, Tariq Najmi as well as Dr Akhtar Nazeer Warraich, a number of times, but to no avail. Nazar confessed that he had got tired of getting his father treated so he left him to die and rest in eternal peace after getting rid of pains of miserable life.

During the electioneering, he said, many candidates had promised him that they would arrange free treatment for his father but nobody turned up afterwards.

He appealed to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Punjab Chief Minister Dost Muhammad Khosa, and PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif as well as humanity at large to sponsor the treatment of his ailing father.