KARACHI: “It has been a week now since he was brought to us and he still remains restless,” said Humaira Faiz Mohammad, a volunteer at the Edhi Home at Mithadar, about toddler Abdullah on Thursday. “God knows what he has been through, what he has witnessed that gives him nightmares,” she added, shaking her head while gesturing to keep our voices down as young Laiba, one of the other children there, gently passes her little fingers through Abdullah’s hair as he rests on a couch in the TV room where sleep engulfs him once again.

“I have spent 13 years here and I can see that he is not like the other children who come here. They forget their past very quickly. He doesn’t. He cries for his mother. ‘Mamma, Mamma’, he calls out as he looks for her here, upstairs and downstairs. In his eyes I see the same query about his mother. What can one say to him?” the volunteer wondered aloud with a sigh.

“Still, Abdullah seems to have developed an attachment to Saad, Edhi sahib’s grandson here. Saad can pacify him. He likes watching cartoons on Saad’s mobile phone,” she said.

To recap, Saad Edhi at the Edhi Centre said that the little boy was brought to their Clifton Centre at around 11:35pm on May 25. “Rizwan Ayaz, the man who left him, said that the child was lost apparently and that he had been searching for his family at Do Darya, where he found him, for a couple of hours before giving up and bringing him to us,” shared Edhi’s grandson.

Read: Suspect held over mysterious death of woman

“But if this man found him at Do Darya, why did he not take him to the police station there or to the Rangers post? It doesn’t add up. Then, we hear that the corpse of a woman, Haleema, also said to be the child’s mother, is discovered in a flat in Delhi Colony, where she had been living for some three months, and the rent agreement of the flat she lived in was in this man Rizwan’s name,” Saad Edhi said.

“The police traced Rizwan’s wife, Sonia, and during questioning she contacted her husband, asking him to come back, but he has flatly refused. He has fled the country, we hear,” he said.

“Now another man, claiming to be this child’s maternal uncle, shows up with his mother from Mansehra asking us to hand over the child to them. They have a picture of the child to prove that they are his relatives. Still, tell me, how can we readily trust them and hand over this innocent soul to them under such circumstances and with so much mystery still surrounding the case,” the social worker said. “We have decided to only hand over Abdullah to them on court orders,” he said.

Earlier, on Thursday Haleema’s brother and mother gave their consent to the Edhi Foundation for the burial as they said they didn’t know what else to do or whom to go to in a big city like Karachi, which they are not very familiar with.

Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2016