DUBAI: Fate couldn’t have dealt a more cruel blow to Zainab Fawad. Abused, rendered homeless, jailed, divorced and separated from her four-year-old twin boys following a catastrophic turn of events, the 44-year-old Indian woman is now on the edge of a precipice.
Twice she has contemplated ending her life, but each time the possibility of being reunited with her children stopped her from taking the extreme step.
“I am going insane and don’t know if I will be able to overcome these negative thoughts the third time as I have the lost will to live,” she says fighting back tears.
Originally from Gujarat, India, the bachelor of arts graduate first came to the UAE in 2003 and soon found an admin job with a Jebel Ali company that manufactured clothes hangers. It was here she met her would-be husband who was from Pakistan and worked there as production manager.
“We struck instant rapport and, after a few years of courtship, got married in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2007,” she recalls.
On November 2, 2012, Zainab delivered twins Mustafa and Muzammil in India. A few months later she returned to the UAE with the newborns and started living with her husband in Sharjah.
Short-lived bliss
But the bliss didn’t last long. Shortly after her husband set up an event management firm in her name and the family moved to an apartment in Al Muhaisnah, Dubai, differences started cropping up.
“Business was good, but not our relationship. It hit a rough patch and we started having fights. Things came to a head when my husband took the kids, (both Indian passport holders), to Pakistan. Any hope of reconciliation was lost in late 2014 when I went to a police station in Dubai to report a missing wallet but was put behind bars as the event management company had several bounced cheque cases. I spent nearly one month in prison and that too for no fault of mine.”
After being released from jail, Zainab claims she roughed it out in airport waiting areas for two months before taking a sharing accommodation in Al Rigga.
Between July and September 2015, she was arrested two more times for unpaid court fines and a case filed against her by the landlord of their Al Muhaisnah home.
“As it turned out I had not cancelled or renewed the tenancy contract which was also in my name. I wasn’t released until my father mortgaged his house in India and paid the real estate firm Dh14,000. I still owe them Dh26,000 and I don’t know where that money is going to come from.”
Zainab, whose visa expired in April 2016, says she can’t find a job as her passport has been stuck in a Sharjah Court since 2013 when she pledged it to secure the release of her husband in a defamation case.
In the welter of all this, her husband has divorced her and reportedly re-married.
“My whole world has come crashing down around me. Taking advantage of my vulnerability people have cheated and abused me physically,” says Zainab who is surviving on handouts and living in a shared accommodation arranged by a Good Samaritan.
“All I want are my kids who are living illegally in Pakistan. My heart aches for them as I haven’t seen them for three years.”
Given the thorny relations between the nuclear neighbours, the likelihood of a helpless and broke Indian woman going to Pakistan and wrestling custody of her children is remote.
Minuscule as it might be, Zainab is still clingling to threads of hope.
“Miracles happen, don’t they?” she asks.
If you want to reach out to Zainab
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