(By a child who waited four seasons to be born, and one morning to die)
I am Junaid. I was born on August 25, 2026, and died in a fire at PIMS the very next day. Let me narrate my story. I want to tell you about my mother first, because she loved me before I existed.
She was a housewife who wanted only one thing in this world: a child of her own. Every day, she prayed for me. She visited shrines, made offerings and whispered my name into a future she could not yet touch. At night, she dreamed of me, a child she would feed with her own hands, a child she would watch play in the courtyard, the way she watched the neighbours’ children and felt her heart ache with longing. My father never let her hope die. He told her, again and again, that one day she would hold her own baby. He had a dream too: that I would grow up to be a doctor, that I would heal the sick, serve our family, bring honour to our name and make people in our town say his name with pride.
When my mother finally learned I was on my way, she wept with joy. My father said that evening that he was the happiest man alive. They celebrated with sweets and a dinner at a restaurant they still talk about. From that day, my father changed. He brought her fruit, vegetables, sweets, anything that might keep me safe inside her. She began visiting a lady doctor and going for her tests, coming home each time with a new photograph of me tucked inside her clothes, a new certainty that I was real. She sewed my clothes herself, imagining the exact size of the hands that would wear them.
Then I arrived, early, too early, the doctors said. Premature. I needed an incubator, they told my mother, just for a few days. Just until I was strong enough to come home to the life she had spent years imagining for me.
I remember the ward. A nurse fed me every few hours. Someone changed me, checked on me and spoke softly above my head. I did not know fear yet. I did not know I was supposed to.
Then, one morning, I saw the wires above the air conditioner spark. I watched the fire begin to climb, small at first, then faster than anything I had ever seen. I looked around for someone, anyone, to lift me the way they always did. No nurse came. No one came. I saw a mother rush in through the smoke and take the baby beside me. I saw a nurse run in from somewhere and take another child away. I remember the relief I felt. Someone will come for me too, I thought. Someone always comes.
No one came.
The smoke thickened until I could not see the ceiling anymore. I tried to cry out, the way I always did when I was hungry or frightened, but my voice would not carry the way it needed to. I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything, to live, to see the colours of this world properly, to be placed in my mother’s arms, to feel my father’s hand curl around my small fist, the way I am told fathers do. I wanted to live. I wanted to go home. I wanted to feel my mother’s arms around me. I wanted to see my father smile. I wanted to grow up and become the doctor he dreamed I would be. But my life ended before it had even begun.
The smoke took my breath before it took anything else. Then came the heat. Then everything went quiet, and the next thing I knew, I was somewhere else, somewhere very beautiful, somewhere without pain, without fire, without fear. They tell me it is heaven, and perhaps it is. But even heaven has not answered the questions I carry with me from that life to this.
Who left that ward empty? Who saw the wiring above my incubator and decided it could wait? Who locked the doors that should have opened for the people trying to save us? And now that I am gone, now that fourteen of us are gone, what have you done with the answers?
I was not born to be a headline. I was born because a mother prayed for me for years and a father dreamed I would heal others. I ask my countrymen only this: find out who let the fire reach me, and do not let my name, or the names of the thirteen who burned beside me, be the last ones to whom this happens.
(The writer is Dr Quaid Saeed Akhunzada, former CEO of the Islamabad Healthcare Regulatory Authority)