Wasted.

He was recruited because he was the first one that came for her. Also, they figured he would be the perfect, paid and perfectly obedient “partner”, for want of a better word, for their less than good looking, aging, all of 23 years of age, daughter. He was ten years her senior, but that was not out of the norm for those days. He was illiterate, from a lower class family and prone to swearing bouts. All the better. She was bitter and rude. Her mother needed someone to stick around the house; he was the perfect ghar-damaad. She was inconsequential.

They hated each other, they hated everyone else. They never did anything to help themselves, nor anyone else. They separated, lived together, lived on her extended families earnings, they lived on nothing. They barely lived, with an existence that one wouldn’t wish upon an enemy. Many tried to help and gave up. No children and the social stigma of adoption, relatives who had given up on them, and with only each other to gnaw at, every day was like the other, with the same expletives and even violence.

We went there often when our great grandmother, her mother, was alive. It was depressing, despite the free cheap candy. The place smelled, inexcusably so, even to our accustomed noses. There was a new servant every time, each one leaving rather quickly either due to the master or the mistress’ uninhibited anger and fussiness.

Her brothers, one was my grandfather who had been in a vegetable state for 5 years before his death two years ago, for the longest time ever had considered themselves absolved of her responsibility, mostly due to their own mother’s orders, but maybe just because it was easier than fixing things. His family never interfered either, beyond providing him a meal once in a while, and a reprise from his “home”. They were both alike in so many ways, and couldn’t stand the sight of each other. My great-uncle, another of her brothers, God bless him, though somewhat ostracized from his family for “turning Christian” turned out to have the most humanity, spent time, money and health in trying to improve their existence. Within a month of his first visit, things went back to their dreary normal. His second visit had her operated for gangrene, lodged in an attentive relatives’ house with a nurse and physiotherapist. She spent six months there. It was a blessed estrangement for the husband and wife. However tongues started wagging, and “concerned” relatives staged a reunion, they went back to living together in their small apartment. Within a month, the house became the sty it always had been, and they went back to being at each other’s throats.

He started having health complications. The lack of hygiene, routine and any care in his life took its toll on him too. His family was not affluent enough to offer him permanent residence in a care facility. Her family paid for his hospital stints, did all they could, but could not give him an extended reprieve. He spent some days in the hospital, his condition deterioting enough to require a ventilator and then made a miraculous recovery. Carelessness, addiction to ghutka and general negligence had him back in the ER.

He died last night.  

I have never seen either of them with a zest for anything except each other’s throats. They were never happy. They weren’t evil, but they were both inhuman in some ways. Life hadn’t been good to them. They weren’t good to themselves.

She’s alive. Alone. I wonder what it’d be like to be her. When everyone was doing all they could to save his life, she was the one who wanted the ventilator removed as soon as possible.  Maybe she didn’t want him to go through pain, or maybe she just didn’t want him. His initial recovery changed nothing, and now after his demise I have yet to see how life changes for her.

This is a waste of existence. God save us from this. They weren’t evil. Maybe just really, really unlucky. 

Please recite Fatiha, may he have a peaceful afterlife.

And dua, so that she has peace the remaining days of her life.