LAHORE, Oct 16: Even the approachable distance to celebrate festivals like Eid with their dear ones is impossible for some living in an abject poverty.

Rukhsana, 10, couldn’t celebrate Eid with her parents and siblings though they live hardly two kilometres away from her. The third among her siblings, she has been employed as a domestic worker in a Garden Town house while her father, mother and three siblings live in the servants quarter of a Model Town bungalow.

“My basic duty is to look after the two children of the family when their mother is busy,” she told this reporter while pushing an empty pram in the parking area of a fast food outlet in Gulberg on Taru, the second day of Eid.

Many relatives came to see the family on Eid, and Rukhsana had been more busy than her ‘baji’ as the children are very naughty. “Hasaan, 4, makes himself dirty as he is fond of playing in the muddy area of the lawn while two-year-old Ayesha has the tendency of eating earth from the plants’ pot and the whitewash from the walls of the bungalow, if left unattended.

Baji remained busy with the guests, and I solely had to keep a vigil on the two children and their four cousins who arrived around noon on Taru, but thanks God! there were no scuffles among them like last year.

“I have not been asked to go out by anyone. I do not like the tasteless food like burger and French fries... I am fond of ‘metha paratha, pakoray, fruit chat, ‘dahy baray’ and that is why I am not inside.

“My father is the watchman and my mother the housemaid of the bungalow, while my elder brother works on a tyre shop and my elder sister, like me, takes care of children in a Faisal Town house... What would I do if go there on the occasions like Eid? Except for my two siblings, who are the age of Hasan and Ayesha, everybody would be on work. —Zaheer Mahmood Siddiqui