Families embarrassed to admit they lost loved ones to liquor

29 families lost their loved ones to home-made liquor during Eid

KARACHI:

Coping with the loss of their loved ones is hard. But telling everyone exactly how the deaths occurred is the hardest for the 29 families who lost their loved ones to homemade liquor during Eid.

In Landhi’s Future Colony, the families are embarrassed to admit their men died from drinking toxic liquor. With broken hearts, their faces turned red from embarrassment and they evaded any questions that could lead to the word ‘sharaab’.

“My son was fit and strong. He just died,” cried out Dilshad, mother of Mohammad Iqbal. Weeping inside a small two-room house, she said that her son, whom they called ‘Bhala’, complained that he was feeling unwell on the third day of Eid. “First his eyesight disappeared,” said Dilshad. “He kept on saying ‘Ammi Ammi, hold me. I can’t see’.” Then he started throwing up everything he ate and drank, even water, she added. “He complained of a stomach ache and said that it was burning.”

Iqbal’s friend took him to the doctor who gave him a few injections but that did not help. Unlike other men who immediately went to Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre after the symptoms from drinking the poisonous liquor began to show, Iqbal refused to go to the hospital. He told his mother that doctors won’t do him any good.

At some point during the night, Iqbal stopped moaning and his parents thought that he was relieved of the pain and that he was feeling better. “We didn’t know he had died,” said his elder brother, Bilal. “When we woke up, we saw that he had died.”

The victim’s devastated mother said that her son was leaving on Friday for Mansehra to fix his wedding date with his cousin. “He went to the grave instead,” she said.

The family held his funeral on Thursday afternoon, along with his friend’s, whose name they refused to share. “He just had to die. His time had come,” said an uncle.

In the same colony, women wailed after seeing the body of another man, Mustafa, who had come from Peshawar to attend a wedding. He had left his wife and two children back home.

This family had lost two men to poisonous liquor. As they stood next to Mustafa’s body, the men said that a day earlier they had buried the body of Ayaz Hussain aka Guddo. “He was getting married on Saturday. He was such a good man,” said his friend, Salman, admitting that Ayaz and his relative had gulped down toxic liquor, which claimed their lives.

According to the Sharafi Goth police, a total of four men from this neighbourhood died from drinking homemade liquor.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 10^th, 2014.