ALL Baka Muhammad remembers from the Sunday before last is the heat.

“It was so hot that afternoon. My head was pounding and all I wanted was to be left alone. My daughter… my Rabia…kept asking me to play with her, but I had to sit at my uncle’s showroom and work. So I told her to go home or to her uncle’s and play with his children,” he said.

“I didn’t know that was the last thing I would say to her.”

On April 15, a few hours after six-year-old Rabia went off to play with her cousins, she was kidnapped, gang-raped and murdered.

In the evening when Baka got home, he lay down on a charpoy and asked his wife about the children. She replied that out of their brood of six, five were home. The second to youngest, a five-year-old girl who had been playing with Rabia, had returned a few minutes ago.

“Where is Rabia?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She hasn’t come back yet,” the mother replied.

They waited and waited for her to come home. But there was no sign of her anywhere.

“I went to the neighbourhood mosque and asked them to make an announcement for her to come home,” he said, adding that since there was no response, he took a loudspeaker and attached it to his friend’s rickshaw and went all over MPR Colony’s Baloch quarters to look for her.

With no sign of his child, Baka decided to go to the police and file a report.

The next day, Baka said, he went looking for her again, but no luck.

Baka, who hails from Jacobabad, moved to Kati Pahari, once a no-go area, after the 2010 floods. “I used to drive a donkey cart in the village and deliver water to people. After the floods, there was nothing left there. One by one my family also moved to the city for better work opportunities,” he said, cradling his youngest child in his lap, swatting away flies buzzing above their heads.

Later that day, Baka recalled, his brother called him and asked him what colour were Rabia’s clothes the day she went missing.

“I told him she was wearing a yellow kameez, red shalwar and red chapals,” he said, adding that minutes later his brother said his daughter had been injured and he should hurry to the Manghopir police station.

“He didn’t tell me she was dead. My brother didn’t want me to do something stupid in rage or despair. I found out the truth when I got to the police station,” said the father.

At the police station, Baka said, he learnt that his daughter had been tortured, raped and killed. Her limp body had cigarette burns all over.

Baka’s wife wails as he recounts his daughter’s story sitting in their two-room house. “She’s been like this since we found the body. She cries and cries and passes out because of exhaustion.”

After the post-mortem, Baka said, he went to the Orangi police station, where the initial missing report had been filed, and named a few suspects in an FIR. Four of these men have been arrested.

According to Baka, the main suspect became a part of his extended family when he married a cousin. “He used to hang around the showroom I sit at and give candy to my daughter. I noticed it a few times, but thought it was harmless,” Baka explained.

“I never thought he’d do something like this. When I met him in the lock-up, I asked him to tell me the names of the others. I know he didn’t do this alone. He told me that I had slighted him once and this was his revenge,” said Baka.

The suspect’s son was arrested at the crime scene and while evidence was collected, the room where the incident took place — just 1.5kilometres from where Rabia used to live — had not been sealed.

“Once we had the body in our hands, I wanted to give her a proper burial, but some of my neighbours told me to take the body to Jamshed Pump, a petrol station near Kati Pahari,” Baka said.

He claimed that while he felt quite uncertain, a man named Amanullah encouraged him to protest.

“We took the body and kept it on ice. Amanullah is a good man. He was trying to help, but then some goons came and tried to take over. They ruined everything,” he said, adding that due to riots caused by the protest, Amanullah and his men ended up behind bars with terrorism charges against them.

“I am a day labourer. I am a poor man. I can’t do much alone. The government should take notice of this and make sure that the main suspect and his accomplices are hanged. I just want justice,” he said.

Rocking his youngest child in a makeshift dupatta hammock hanging from the charpoy, Baka said he had heard of other children getting abducted in his neighbourhood and thought he had been lucky, but fate had other plans.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2018