Mr. Hamid Rumsfield, Managing Director, Gresham Intelligence & Co., 213-4210

I kept looking at my newly printed visiting cards again and again and also the big glass memento which declared CNN IBN Best employee of the year for outstanding contribution to Gresham Intelligence systems for the year 2004. This award is not just as special to me and my family as it would be to any other individual, but perhaps there are no words in this universe which can describe the amount of happiness which had slinked through my parent’s faces on watching me rise to receive this award.

10 years back who could have ever imagined in the wildest of their dreams that Jr. Aarav Rumsfield would ever on the face of this earth be able to walk in the correct direction, let alone receive an award of merit.

It has been 2 months now that I have been moved home. Although my faintest reminiscences in California Mental Facility are only about my lamenting parents and Mrs. Rushal Sheikh, I still feel an unusual attachment to the place accounting to the 20 years of my being I spent there. Life always has its mad little choices and so do I.

My parents had left hope long back, but still my dad left no stone unturned to see that I survive. Dyslexia and hyperactivity in its 3^rd degree can wreck the toughest minds, feeble Hamid had no exemption. Best doctors, rehabs, medicines, love, affection, everything tried on its ample but nothing seemed to lend a hand any more. Hope was shredded into pieces like a tree resigning it to storms. Rest of them had of course quit. But then... something happened.

Mrs. Rushal Sheikh, Senior Medical Officer, a beautiful old lady in her mid fifties walks into California metal facility as the new senior doctor. Her bright smile and enigma has the ability to heal by sheer glance. Practiced for nearly 30 years in US, this woman from Afghanistan has not just provided her duties with honour and dignity but has rendered love and a normal life to thousands of mental victims from US on who even Gods had given up. Her patients claim she was an angel in their murky lives otherwise ruined by fate. And yes this was that point in my life, when my life started to change.

Rushal reaffirmed to my parents not to give up on me and that I will be fine soon. My parents saw in her eyes a new hope and faith. My mother who had been sodden of all emotions cried that night near my bed. Within a year and half Rushal had blustered inside me a man my parents never supposed I could become in life.

Outside the facility there was a complete silence. We moved close and saw a deceased body lying on the floor. Near the corpse a board read: ”35 years of her unselfish, devoted services and rendering lives to people have only landed her to where she is now today. Mrs. Rushal Sheikh has been victorious in her third attempt to suicide. May God grant her peace.”

And the whole world disintegrated in front of me like a sand castle. Mrs. Rushal Sheikh, facilitator to 1068 lives distressed by mental illness succumbed to the most vulnerable, the most defenceless and the most weak forms of death...suicide for the only crime she might have committed in her lifetime: “Being an Islam at the wrong place at the wrong time.”