A Good Wife by Samra Zafar

Author:Samra Zafar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2019-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

DARK DAYS

My sisters, my mom, Aisha and I were crowded into a hotel room in Abu Dhabi. We had spent a wonderful week together in Ruwais and were staying overnight before leaving for Karachi the following day. There was so much to talk about. But unlike the previous spring, this was an unbroken outpouring of upbeat news—my sisters filling me in on the details of Warda’s engagement and their plans for the big celebration in Karachi. We had decided to stay in Abu Dhabi for a day so that my father could visit his doctor and we would be closer to the airport the following morning.

When Papa came through the hotel room door after his appointment, he was gripping a manila envelope, a sober look on his face.

“My results,” he said, lifting up the envelope. My father had been suffering from kidney disease for years. About six months previously, frustrated that his treatment was not improving his kidney function, he’d opted for a holistic treatment plan. Recently, he had visited his doctor in Abu Dhabi to follow up. Now he had received the results of his tests.

The room grew quiet. Papa moved to the sofa while the rest of us gathered around him. He tore open the end of the envelope and pulled out a sheet of light-blue paper.

I didn’t read the words on the left side of the page. My eyes were instead drawn to the column on the right. It was simply a long string of one word repeated—“critical.” For each and every function tested, the result was critical. My eyes turned to my father. The expression on his face gave me another shock. He looked truly terrified.

My mother gasped. Saira stood up and ran over to the closet. She closed herself in, but we could still hear her sobs. I looked over to my mother. She was trying to maintain her composure. I knew I couldn’t manage that. Instead, I excused myself and went to the bathroom to cry.

It didn’t take long before it was clear we had all given ourselves over to tears. I returned to the room and joined my sisters and my parents. Squeezing together in a circle that spilled from the couch to the floor, we wrapped our arms around each other and wept over the bitter truth: my father was gravely ill.

* * *

The weeks that followed were a frenzy of preparations, the wedding activities unfolding under a cloud brought by the unexpected and sad business of my father’s medical care.

Papa needed to start dialysis, but Ruwais had no facilities, so several trips to Abu Dhabi would be required every week. That would leave him exhausted—it was hard to imagine that he would be able to keep working or living his life the way he wanted. The other option was to start dialysis but follow it with a transplant. That surgery would be exorbitantly expensive in the UAE and my father’s sister Nasreen, who had offered to be his organ donor, was in Pakistan.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.