Between the River and My Father — “Deda”

Twelve years have passed since you left, yet time has learned nothing of mercy. According to the Islamic year, this day returns again, and with it returns everything I have learned to survive without ever truly accepting. I speak to you now not because grief has softened, but because silence has become unbearable. Your absence does not belong to the past. It inhabits every hour, every minute, every breath I take while pretending that life is still intact.

When you were here, the world felt ordered—even when it was cruel. There was a logic to suffering, a direction to endurance. You were not merely a man in our lives; you were the architecture of safety. The ground beneath us felt firm because you stood upon it. After you, the ground did not collapse—it eroded slowly, treacherously, until standing itself became an effort.

Cancer took you from us with a patience that felt sadistic. It did not rush. It taught us helplessness day by day, breath by breath. I was told—and I believe—that every soul departs at its appointed time, written before the first heartbeat. Yet belief did not prepare me to watch you suffer. Destiny may be divine, Deda, but witnessing your pain felt unbearably human. Faith explained nothing to my heart as it broke quietly in front of you.

And yet, even illness could not reduce you. Before disease, before departure, you were labor incarnate. You lived not for yourself, but for the happiness of those bound to you by blood and prayer. You worked through nights that refused to end, through exhaustion that no one applauded. Your sweat was currency. Your sleeplessness was sacrifice. Every rupee you earned was Halal—earned honestly, painfully, with dignity intact.

Only after losing you did I truly understand the difference between Halal and Haram Rizq. Not as words spoken from a pulpit, but as consequences written into life itself. Halal Rizq carries barakah. It feeds not only the body, but the future. What you earned did not merely sustain us—it protected us. No wealth I ever gather will repay even a single drop of your sweat. I am forever indebted, and I know now that this debt was never meant to be cleared.

I remember the summers, Deda. I remember you covering us with mosquito nets, carefully, deliberately, as though you were sealing life itself against harm. I did not understand then that protection looks like vigilance, not spectacle. I remember the winters too—the merciless ones that clawed at bone. I remember how you struggled to keep our home warm, how you absorbed the cold so we would not tremble in the night. You denied yourself comfort with a quietness that never asked for gratitude.

Then came the years of militancy, when fear walked openly and death felt casual. In those days, weapons ruled the visible world. But you ruled the unseen. When chaos claimed the streets, you claimed the prayer mat. Your Duas surrounded us—me, my brothers, my sisters, my mother, our relatives—like an invisible fortress. Many lived because you prayed. Many survived because your faith did not waver when the world lost its mind. You protected us not with force, but with belief.

After you left, Deda, everything loosened. Relationships that once felt safe began to fracture. Your presence had been the moral gravity holding everything together. Without it, misunderstandings hardened, closeness weakened, love learned conditions it never used to demand. I did not only lose you—I lost the version of the world that made sense because you stood in it.

I became strong, yes—but not the kind of strength people admire. I became strong because weakness had no shelter. I learned endurance instead of joy. Silence instead of trust. Smiles became rehearsed. Happiness, when it appeared, felt guilty—as though joy itself were an offense to your absence.

There are days when this grief becomes too heavy to carry indoors. On those days, I walk toward the river. I sit on the banks of the Sindh—of the Jhelum—and let the water witness what the world cannot hold. The river does not interrupt. It does not instruct. It remembers. It has seen you, Deda. It has absorbed your footsteps, your silences, your prayers. I wonder how many of your Duas dissolved into its current, traveling farther than my voice ever could.

I sit there and speak to you without fear of interruption. I tell you how difficult life has become. How fractured relationships have wounded me. How survival has aged me. The river listens without judgment. It carries my words away, as if delivering them somewhere you might still hear.

Sometimes I imagine you beside me, watching the water the way you used to—quiet, thoughtful, as if the river itself were an ayah unfolding. In those moments, I allow myself to be your child again. Not resilient. Not composed. Just yours.

Grief behaves differently by the river. It does not strike—it seeps. It moves like the current, slow and relentless. I realize then that sorrow is not something to defeat. It is something to carry, the way the river carries everything entrusted to it—tears, prayers, memories—without asking which deserve to remain.

When evening falls and the light breaks across the water, grief sharpens. Leaving feels like another abandonment, as though standing up means admitting again that you are not coming back. But I rise, every time, because you taught me that survival is not betrayal. It is continuation.

Deda, you never truly left me. You live in my refusal to compromise with wrong. You live in my discomfort with Haram, even when it appears easy. You live in my restraint, my patience, my endurance. You live in the way I still seek purity in a world that has grown careless.

I know I can never repay you. Not with success. Not with obedience. Not with gratitude. The debt exceeds life itself. All I have left is love—delayed, imperfect, heavy with regret—but real.

If souls can hear, then hear this: I come to the river not to forget you, but to remember myself as your child. I come because grief feels honest in moving water. I come because some losses are not meant to be healed—only honored.

The world continues without you. It functions. It breathes. But it is no longer fully inhabited. You were not just my father. You were warmth in winter, protection in chaos, purity in provision, prayer in fear.

I cannot repay you, Deda.

I only love you.