Reverting to Shahaan’s dilemma, society, family laws, and over-arching Fiqh seem to have given a ham-handed treatment to the subject of this kind of ‘infanticide.’ This imperious troika makes a cosmetic effort to retard a monstrous male’s blows and then gift-wraps the hammer for the discarded wife and her child by allowing a measly maintenance allowance for the child until the avaricious father returns to claim him. What a deplorable practice of hiring a bonded mother by an over-privileged male. This reluctant generosity and forced compassion should have come into action when the lunatic smashed his family to pieces. It should also dare to ask him to fully account for what he did and why. No such thing would happen because all three actors are heavily tilted against the woman and her child, whereas the man is free to practise his cruelty. The blast furnace of a household was incinerating the child’s heart and mind, filling him with a nagging insecurity, a lack of father’s affection and vulnerability. Shahaan was growing up in a brittle and steamy home. His snowflake, soft psyche was getting a horrible beating at precisely the time when it was the tenderest. The result was obvious. He was becoming a pitiable picture of a little child with a ripped soul, a ravaged mind and a shrunken heart with a father worse than a beast. In fact, he has begun to show signs of acute emotional stress, as he is becoming loud, temperamental and a bit reclusive, all sure signs of a troubled childhood. He has a wall-size cupboard, full of toys of all descriptions. He talks to them, comforts them and at times, scolds one or the other for imaginary bad behaviour. One did hear him say to a scraggly-looking toy puppy, “You are sick. Please don’t cry, your baba will come to take you to ‘hostipal.’” For Shahaan, a hospital is a ‘hostipal’ and a mosquito a ‘mostiquo.’ These are those priceless parts of his speech that his callous father misses as a cost of his insensitivity. That was just about the only time he was heard talking about a father. There are telltale signs of mounting bitterness. He never talks of his father, not even at school, refuse to write his father’s name in the class diary, skips where his name might appear in the Urdu book, and more significantly, never touches or demands toys or gadgets belatedly brought by Chengez during his fortnightly visits under court orders in the judge’s chamber. Perhaps, he is able to sense his father’s guile and insincerity. There are the usual ugly and humiliating cases going on for custody of the child and maintenance. Chengez never had any interest in his son but his custody case tends to show his psychopathic malice to torment Dr Summan, as if two divorces were not enough. It is impossible that Shahaan would not miss his father despite the latter’s coarse nature. The gradual steeling of his resolve not to show the same is due to a deep, unkind thrust that Chengez delivered to his heart. He recoiled and rose in defiance, which was the most horrific part of this avoidable but an ongoing social tragedy. How one wishes his father had shown enough sense and character. Men too full of themselves commit irreversible mistakes. The lines are being drawn for a lifetime of conflict between the two. While the father might crave for the touch of his son’s loving hand and a kind word, the latter might never know what a father is like. Shahaan craves to learn swimming, play cricket in the lawn, hurl snowballs during snowfall in Murree, go trekking in Margalla hills .He will do all that and much more, but where is the helping hand of his father? Once he was dining at Monal Restaurant at the top of Margalla hills and it was a full moon night. The moon slowly rose over the Monal ridge, appearing so close that Shahaan was besides himself with excitement and wanted to touch it. Who will walk him to the ridge to tell that he can’t touch the moon? Chengez must miss all this too as he appears to be set on a lonely course where he might never be able to take pride in his son’s glories to come, and Shahaan would not wave at his father proudly from the podium after receiving an award. A bitter harvest that Chengez himself sowed, he would have to reap it with an equal distaste in future. On his last birthday, a trick in the magic show captivated Shahaan’s attention. Called ‘Flower in the Stick’, it had a hollow stick concealing a flower on a wire stem with a magnetic bottom. When pulled, the cover would slide off and the flower unfolded, held in place by the magnet. Shahaan went around, impressing his little classmates. He fixed the magnet end to metal, placed his forehead on the other end and pulled up. The flower unfolds as if released by him — the flower of hope, life and a happy future is truly in his forehead, but under a serious threat of destruction by the force of menacing events let loose by Chengez. Destruction of an unsuspecting and defenceless child’s innocence is a crime against humanity more heinous than infanticide. It kills one of God’s greatest gifts to human beings — a child’s unquestioning trust in his father. A child like that dies many deaths daily. Chengez has just committed that most foul murder. Is there any way to return to Shahaan his decimated childhood, the heartlessly denied affection of a father and the priceless innocence that has been scorched? Is there any compassion left for dispossessed children like Shahaan anywhere in the hidebound handbooks of any jurist, mufti, social reformist or a human rights’ campaigner, or for that matter, anyone, anywhere with a living conscience and courage to stand up to this atrocity. (Concluded) The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com