By Irfan Mohammed
Jeddah: When hundreds of Hyderabadis emigrate each year for higher education, lucrative jobs or a better lifestyle, they leave behind, either knowingly or unknowingly, their biggest treasure – their elderly parents, who hide behind their moist eyes and untold stories of loneliness, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. It was emotional when there is a single parent left whether mother or father.
As families shrink, the support system vanishes, and children are busy with careers in faraway lands. The migration still dominates the socio-economic pattern of many Muslim NRIs in Hyderabad.
However, some NRI children invite their parents overseas when none of the siblings live in India and all settled in a single foreign country. The children’s aim is to provide companionship, a sense of comfort, and security.
When old-aged parents die abroad in their last days of life it is something they miss their motherland where they had spent most of their life.
85-year-old Jeelani Begum, who was born and spent most of her life in Warangal, died in Saudi Arabia on Friday where she spent her last years along with her sons, her immediate family with her but she had missed her mother land, friends, and relatives.
Her three sons live and work in Saudi Arabia and they brought their mother to live with them. She was with them for many years now and traveled occasionally to Hyderabad, Warangal.
Jeelani Begum was buried in Al Khobar on the same day of death with the help of Indian community worker Nass Shoukat.
The old-aged people who had enjoyed their life in their native places were moved abroad in compulsion. Nostalgic, they often miss their place and people.
It was not only once a household woman like Jeelani Begum, people such as MM Hashim, who was once the tallest leader of Hyderabad, moved to the USA to join his children and passed away there.