“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens, A Tale Of Two Cities.
When was the last time that sentence accurately described your life?
We were a happy family, Mom and Dad and us the brothers and sisters. We went to the best school in the city, we lived in a twelve room house, it was rented we didn’t own it. Our kitchen was not in the main house.
We had a beautiful garden in front of our house, there were three Eucalyptus trees right in front.
Life was good we ate delicious food cooked by our mom, we played, we roamed around near our house to find out who were our neighbors.
My mom loved pets we had pigeons, roosters, hens, ducks, rabbits and two cows, the cows were there for milk.
We had nothing to complain everything was running smooth.
Then it happened what we never dreamed of, our Dad died, I was only twelve. Things went from bad to worse, mom announced we’ll have to leave our favorite city and move to her home in Bangladesh.
At my age at that time I did not understand what all this meant. Within six months our things were packed what we couldn’t take were left behind.
We took a flight from Lahore to Dhaka, then from the airport we went to our uncle’s house and stayed there for a few days.
After a few days we went to our grandpa’s village home, our grandparents were not alive but our uncle and aunt lived in the house.
A year later we moved to a house my elder brother bought in Comilla, Bangladesh. It was a small house compared to the one we left in Rawalpindi.
We all felt the absence of our Dad, we realized there will be no one buying pastries from the vendor for us, besides in this town there were no vendors selling pastries, there were vendors who sold vegetables, meat and fish only.
I could not take admission in a school, because the medium of instruction was Bengali, I had always studied in an English school, they had one school where the medium of instruction was English it only had up to grade six. I was in a higher grade therefore I studied home and decided to prepare for high school exam privately.
My Dad left a fair amount of money, it was sufficient for us, my eldest brother convinced my mother to let him start a business. He had no experience, yet my mom thought he’d do well.
In one year my brother lost all the money my Dad saved for us, we were in a dire situation, fortunately two of my older brothers were working they helped us through this hardship.
My mother was heartbroken she never faced such a terrible situation in her life. She was a very pious lady which must have helped our family.
It took us a long time to change our fate, we did not give up. It taught us one thing, that life has its ups and downs, only the braves survive,we accomplished our goals each one of us, now we look back and tell ourselves we survived because of our mother, she reminded us daily, we must be strong willed or else we won’t make it.
Here I am narrating about our pleasures,pain, struggles and how we stuck to each other till we were self-sufficient!
https://sabethville.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/dp-daily-promp…n-extreme-tale
Sabethville 