Ten days after Iman’s funeral, the village gathered again to grieve.
Earlier that week, Akbar’s mother, Sahti, was diagnosed with malaria, given medication and sent home from a hospital in Hyderabad, one of the largest cities in Sindh province, to recover. Then, late one night, it was her turn for the worse. There was no boat nearby to take her to the hospital, so Mr Akbar and his family gathered around her bed and prayed for her to live. She died within hours.
As the men mourned, they sat on the embankment under the shade of a thatched porch – a small respite from the sweltering heat of the day. Relatives came one after another to pay their respects, and the men stopped, touched the newcomers, raised their palms to the sky, and prayed.
With a cup of warm milk tea in hand, Mr. Akbar tells stories of the polite, strong woman who raised him to be a man. For most of his life, he said, she was often the first person he saw when he returned home from the fields, waiting at the gate – no matter how late – to make sure he got home safely. Even when he told her that he was an adult, a father of two, she refused to give up the habit.
“She told me, ‘You are still my child, you will always be a child to me,’” he said.
He paused for a moment, then added: “There is no greater relationship than that between a mother and her child.”
Before she died, his mother asked him to bury her next to her father who had died a year earlier. But his father’s grave was still completely submerged. So Mr. Akbar laid her to rest on a nearby hilltop. She was alone.
