Useless
written by: Kamran Akhtar Siddiqui
@KamranAkhtarSid
“I am waste. I am useless. Nobody loves me,” Shiza said to herself wiping her tears from her cheeks. As she tried to sneak through the senior section corridor, she tried to control her sobs by putting her right hand on her mouth. “Nobody should hear my voice,” she thought to herself.
Moving briskly she reached the stairs leading to the third floor. There, she thought, she could find peace. None would taunt her and none would make her feel inferior. Silence and her sobs would be her only company.
Once a bright student, Shiza now looked for ways to sneak out of classes. Nothing in her life was meaningful, not even her existence.
“I wish Grandma were alive,” she said sitting against the corridor wall that looked over the assembly ground. “If she were alive, Mama and Papa wouldn’t scold me for not having breakfast; they wouldn’t taunt me for not being like Shahzeen,” she sighed in despair.
This morning when Shiza’s teacher complained to Malik Sahab about her absent-mindedness in the class, he scolded the tender soul in front of everyone. Her confidence shattered into pieces. Her existence became even more meaningless.
“Why don’t Mama and Papa love me anymore? Why?” This was the only question she asked herself again and again and again. This question had taken away her sleep, her peace of mind, and the joys of her childhood.
Shiza thought her parents ignored her ever since Shahzeen, her younger sister, was born. But her Grandma always consoled her against such doubts. Grandma’s love for Shiza was the only solace till Grandma’s last breath.
While Shiza was fighting a battle inside her, the junior section coordinator downstairs was looking for the missing girl. He looked in the classes, he searched in the garden, he combed the corridor but there was no clue about the seven-year-old. Getting frustrated, he called the peon in his office and rebuked him for not finding the girl. “Do you know whose daughter she is? Malik Rehman’s. He would kill all of us if anything happened to her.”
He had barely finished the sentence when a child’s horrific cry came. A bang followed. All those who heard the terrible cry ran out. What they saw from the corridors was unimaginable. There lay in the assembly ground a girl bathed in blood.
“Oh my God! This is Shiza,” cried a female teacher. Teachers ran to the poor child but it was too late. Shiza had gone to her dado in whose arms she would find comfort.
Shiza’s question was answered much later. She was an adopted child of Malik Rehman. Her value decreased when Shahzeen was born. Shiza wasn’t alive to know the reality by then. Maybe that would have even more burdensome for the little soul than the burden of taking her own life.
