Dubai: For over two days, five-year-old Kabir had been anxiously waiting for his younger sister Aamna to return from what he was told was a children’s hospital.
Aamna, 4, fell from their playroom window Monday evening and Kabir hadn’t seen her since. He never will. The plunge from the eighth floor Al Nahda apartment in Sharjah was fatal.
Aamna is believed to have climbed a bed in front of the window before opening it, something that she’s never done before, says her father Fazeel Ahmad, 38, who was at his office when he got the call every parent dreads.
As he anxiously struggled through rush-hour evening traffic from Jebel Ali, he called his friend Manvendra Sharma to check on what had happened. He only knew his daughter had met with an accident and hadn’t heard the full details. He was praying all the way home that his daughter would be fine.
But it was all over by the time he reached the Al Omran building where the family lived.
“The police had arrived and she was being taken to the Kuwaiti Hospital where she was declared dead,” a devastated Ahmad told XPRESS. “Her skull was completely smashed. It was the goriest of sights. We couldn’t believe our eyes,” said Sharma who had rushed to the spot following Ahmad’s call.
Aamna’s death isn’t the only high-rise tragedy this year.
On August 21, a two-year-old Iranian girl fell to her death from a 14th floor apartment in Sharjah’s Al Mamzar area. The girl was playing by the window and was standing on a piece of furniture when she leaned out and lost her balance.
On May 2, two-year-old Indian girl Preethi Prasad fell to her death from the 11th floor balcony of a hotel apartment on Oud Metha Road where her family had been temporarily staying after relocating from Singapore. Preethi’s mother had apparently fallen asleep.
In January there were two similar deaths involving an 18-month-old Indian boy in Sharjah and a five-year-old Palestinian boy in Abu Dhabi.
In Aamna’s case, she fell through the gap in her playroom window that opens outwards about an arm’s length, enough to allow small children wriggle through dangerously — and usually fatally.
Ahmad, who last saw Aamna in the morning while dropping her at the school bus pick-up point, said such windows, widely used in the emirate, are to blame, while calling for increased child safety measures.
“Not only does the window open wide, there’s also a broad landing in front of the window, always attracting young children to sit and play there. The window should have either been higher up or the window ledge shouldn’t have been there,” said Ahmad, a chemical engineer from the north Indian district of Bareily.
When XPRESS visited the family’s two-bedroom apartment it wore a gloomy look. The father was out trying to sort paperwork for Aamna’s last rites, while her mum sat stunned.
“She would play all by herself all day long, sometimes applying make-up on herself or sometimes putting her doll to sleep. She spoke sweetly and always full of energy, spreading joy and cheer all around. Can’t believe she’s left us all and gone forever,” she says.
His wife Sufiya recalled the sequence of events. According to her Aamna was sleeping on the sofa in the living room at around 5.20pm, while her elder brother Kabir was playing in the other room when she [Sufiya] got up to cook dinner. Within minutes she realised there was something amiss and began searching for Aamna. Kabir spotted the window of his sister’s playroom ajar. Fearing the worst, Sufiya hurried to the ground floor only to discover her beloved child’s body lying in a pool of blood.
The family of four, incidentally, had recently been on a month-long holiday in their home town and returned only the previous Friday. Aamna had missed about two weeks of school. She couldn’t attend classes on Sunday as well because they got home late from her aunt’s place in Abu Dhabi the night before.
Teachers at the India Inter-national School in Sharjah where Aamna studied, saw her for the first time only on Monday in the new term and were shocked on hearing the news.
“That was her first day in school after a long time and unfortunately it turned out to be her last, something none of us can believe,” said Naheed Aman, the school’s assistant director.
Headmistress Jisha Jayan who personally oversaw her progress in the second grade at kindergarten said, “She was special, very active and jolly and was a very good student for her age. I saw her walking by me in the corridor even that fateful day.”
Aamna was buried last evening in Sharjah.
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