My Qadr

Introduction✅

"Bye, Maher" Farrah yelled, waving to her younger brother as he smiled largely at her in his pyjamas. His eyes were still crusty from sleep, hair a mess. Returning his smile, Farrah shooed him back inside, before he'd catch a cold. Turning away from him and to the muddy trail that led to their shack of a house, her smile thinned as her hands tightened around the weight of her resumé. All five pages of it.

Her legs ached as trudged down the path that would lead her to the bus stop, ignoring the blisters on her foot and the way her shoes fit tightly around her big toe.

This was Farrah's new life; everyday since graduating two weeks ago, she'd set out everyday, C.V in hand and determination at heart, only to return home with neither. The only thing she'd managed to bring home unfailingly, were as her shoes would testify to, bruises.

It was another day in her sad, painful, post-grad life. She'd sent the same old fake smile to her brother who watched on in pride as his big sister went to look for a job, hopeful that she'd finally have enough money to pay for the bus to come get him everyday, like the rest of his classmates. Everytime she came home, Farrah would avoid him dutily; she couldn't bear to see the mud that coated his shoes from the walk down to their house, or how his shorts were inches too short. Mostly, she couldn't bear to see the realization in his eyes that she'd once again come home empty.

The reality of their life was cruel, achingly so, but giving up on it wasn't an option. It was do or die, literally.

Farrah didn't like to dwell on the events of her past that lead to where she was today, calculating the best angle to jump over the patch of liquid mud, but on the depressing trail that led to the bus-stop, it was hard not too. When she'd been told two years ago that her mother, agile, carefree, almost-too-cheerful Mrs Aysha Ahmad had been diagnosed with cancer after a trip to get medication for her headache, she'd laughed.

She'd laughed, laughed and laughed because it was the only thing she could do, the only thing that made sense. It was a joke, she was sure it had to be, but getting home a few months later, on her way home from college to see an ambulance parked outside her house, and the sight of her mother being wheeled into it was enough as a wake-up call.

Life didn't wait for them to catch up. The sun continued to rise, the moon continued to glow radiantly, teasingly, and the bills...they continued to do what bills do. Wreck families and destroy lives. The first things to go were the cars, and then the jewellery, and then their house. Finally, Mrs Aysha followed, leaving behind a homeless family, and bills they couldn't afford to pay.

Her dad lost his job sometime into her sickness; something about him taking too many days off and asking too often for an advance on his salary. He'd only recently gotten a teaching job as a highschool math teacher, PhD in Accounting be damned. Even with his job, he was barely able to meet up with mum's monthly hospital bills. But for him, that was the most important. He hated owing people.

Their family had squatted with one of her mum's distant cousins for a few weeks, after the bank seized their house, but the minute the shack down the muddy path was confirmed to not have any wild animals living in it...anymore, her father had made sure they moved in without a minute to spare. He'd given an envelope to her uncle, an act Farrah recognized as his way of telling the man he'd owed him nothing, and then, he'd shoved them all into the moving truck and to their new...well, abode?

Amidst prioritizing repaying her mother's bills, and shuffling from town to town every week, Farrah's dad found no time to relax. He'd stretched himself thin, and was still too stubborn to admit to himself and their family that he was grieving his wife. He was that way most of the time: stubborn, and convinced he should, and could provide for them no matter what happened. He'd certainly been attracted to her mother not because they were similar, but because she was most of the things he wasn't. Soft where he was hard. Smiley, where his teeth rarely ever showed. Still, he loved his family immensely, and made sure he always gave them everything they needed.