Victim of Peshawar blast: Inmate gets last glimpse of daughter who died in Peshawar blast

16-year-old Mishal Nadeem had gone there to visit her aunts.

KARACHI:

A father, who is serving his time at Karachi Central Jail, went through a worse punishment on Tuesday when he had to take one last look at his daughter’s body.

His 16-year-old daughter, Mishal Nadeem, was one of the victims of the Peshawar church blasts on Sunday noon. The tall, attractive and confident girl was determined to become a nurse or an air hostess, her mother, Fozia, recalled. “She was the prettiest girl in my family,” a proud Fozia said. “Doesn’t she look like a fairy?” she said, kissing the picture of her teenage daughter.



The young girl, who had gone to visit her maternal aunts in Peshawar, was flown back to Karachi on Tuesday night. Her funeral prayers were held at St John’s Church in Drigh Road, after which the body was taken to the jail so her father could have one last look. She was buried later in Gora Qabristan.

At her barely furnished house in Drigh Road, Fozia’s pain of losing daughters is shared by her two sisters in Peshawar - each of them have lost a daughter. In all, their family has lost five girls, most of them were teenagers.

Fozia reached Peshawar on Sunday night, just in time to stop the authorities from burying her daughter. “I fought with them because Mishal had to be buried in Karachi. She belongs here.”

For most of her married life, Fozia has been supporting her three children, her husband, who is an addict, and a paralysed mother-in-law, by working as a private attendant at a hospital. Her husband currently in the jail, is facing charges of drugs possession.

“I wanted Mishal to get admission in a college after her Matric result came out but she wanted to work and pay off my loans.” Eager to help her mother out with finances, Mishal worked all of chand raat applying mehndi and then handed over all her earnings to her mother.

Mishal was even interested in working for a beauty parlour. “She would always have makeup on,” Fozia remembered. “In fact when I saw her dead body, her face still bore traces of makeup. She only had a scratch on her lip.”

Neighbours feel torn by the death of the young girl and question why the Christian community was targeted. Shama, who said that the girl would be remembered in the neighborhood because of her good manners, said she does not understand the reason for the attack. “We have never harmed anyone. Why were we brutally killed?”

The devastated Fozia wished that the terrorists behind the attack also end up losing their children so they feel her pain. “The first thing I did today was to visit my daughter. It was her first morning in the earth.”

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th, 2013.