Waiting for the day Arbab walks in

HARIPUR: Balakot tehsil nazim believes his son may still be alive after Kashmir earthquake

A decade may have passed, but everyone in Balakot tehsil nazim Haji Rustam Khan’s house holds onto the hope that one day his six-year-old son will walk through the door, melting hearts with his winning smile.

Rustam was one of Balakot city’s residents whose life was torn asunder on October 8, 2005. He tells The Express Tribune on that fateful day, his son Arbab went missing, among dozens of other children.

The prankster

Arbab may have been fourth in a line of five siblings, but his elder brother and sisters were often on the receiving end of one of his pranks. The mischievous prankster did not even spare his mother.

On the morning of the earthquake, Arbab, a prep student at Star Public School, wanted to stay home and spend time with his brother who was home on holiday from boarding school at Burn Hall in Abbottabad. “His mother and I forced him to attend school,” Rustam said. Arbab’s elder sister Sajeela, a fourth grader at the same institute, accompanied him, he said.

Read: 10 years on: Zeroing in on Ground Zero

The desperate search

“Before Arbab left for school, I had to run to Abbottabad for some urgent work. Once there, I learnt about the earthquake and rushed back," Rustam said.

All Rustam found was destruction and cries of despair when he reached Balakot. “When I saw my home, the structure was reduced to rubble and my wife was standing with our six-month-old son who suffered minor injuries," he recollected.

His wife’s next few questions revolved around Sajeela and Arbab. The father recalls rushing to the school where the destruction was apparent and it seemed the children had little chance of surviving. He crawled into the damaged building and found Sajeela and some other classmates who were under the fallen column of an arch. She escaped unhurt, but Arbab was nowhere to be found.

“I carried out a rescue operation myself and took bodies out of the rubble, but I could not find the corpse of Arbab," he said.

He later found workers who searched every centimetre of the rubble, yet the boy was nowhere to be seen. Rustam said he and his family still believe Arbab is alive and have not mustered the courage to arrange his funeral prayers in absentia.

Read: For some, the tragedy is never ending

Moving on

With his home destroyed, Rustam moved to Abbottabad after temporarily living in a shelter. With the Rs175,000 compensation he received, Arbab settled with the family in Abbottabad as his wife was completely traumatised. He remembers her desperately looking for her son with no success and believed it was essential to change her surroundings.

Nowhere near forgotten

Arbab may have been naughty, but he was a child filled with love who enjoyed playing host. He would often invite relatives over and loved spending time with them. With that personality, it is little wonder that his mother still hangs a mega-sized portrait of her son, while Arbab’s siblings keep his picture on their phones.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 9^th, 2015.