Ten days after Iman’s funeral, the village mourned again.
Earlier in the week, Akbar’s mother, Saati, was diagnosed with malaria, prescribed medication, and sent home to recover from a hospital in Hyderabad, one of Sindh’s largest cities. And then late one night she got worse. With no boat nearby to take her to the hospital, Akbar and her family gathered around her bed and prayed for her life. She died within hours.
While the men mourned, they sat on the banks and under the thatched awnings. Relatives arrived one by one and paid their respects, and the men stood up, touched the newcomers and prayed with their palms raised to the sky.
Over a cup of warm milk tea, Akbar told the story of the polite, strong-willed woman who raised him. For most of his life, when he returned home from the fields, she usually waited by the gate to make sure he got home safely. , she refused to give up the habit, even when she told her that he was the father of two children.
“She said to me, ‘You are still my child, you will always be my child,'” he said.
He paused, then added, “There’s nothing like the relationship between mother and child.”
Before she died, her mother asked him to bury her next to her father, who had died a year earlier. Akbar then laid her down on a nearby hill. she was alone