December 18, 1979 — Mayo Hospital, Lahore
Outside, Lahore slept beneath a blanket of fog, the kind that dimmed even the sharpest streetlamps and silenced the call of distant rickshaw bells. Winter had come early that year. Coal fires smoldered in alleyways. Families huddled together under quilts, breathing warmth into the bone-deep cold.
But inside Mayo Hospital, Room 6 was anything but quiet.
Machines beeped, nurses moved with practiced speed, and a young woman—Sakeena, 24—lay pale and trembling under the surgical lights. Her breath came in short, strained bursts. Sweat clung to her face despite the chill in the air. Her eyes darted between the ceiling and a figure standing at the foot of the bed.
Her husband, Rashid, stood frozen, hands clenched into fists at his sides. He had been there for hours—restless, praying, pacing. Now, he could do nothing but watch as the woman he loved slipped further away.
"Sir, you have to step back," a nurse said gently, guiding him away as the surgical team gathered.
Rashid didn't argue. He just nodded, lips moving silently in du'a as the doctor began the cesarean.
"She's fading," the anesthesiologist muttered, adjusting the dosage.
"She's strong," the doctor replied. "Give me sixty seconds. That's all I need."
And in those sixty seconds, between life and death, time seemed to fold in on itself.
At 12:04 a.m., a sound cut through the cold air—a sharp, piercing cry. A girl had been born.
The nurses barely had time to clean her before wrapping her in a coarse white blanket. Her eyes were already open, large and dark, blinking against the fluorescent light. She wailed again, louder this time, as if trying to wake someone.
But Sakeena was already gone.
The heart monitor flatlined moments after the baby took her first breath.
"She's not responding," a nurse whispered. "She's gone…"
The doctor stood still, hands stained with the sacred intersection of birth and loss. He turned slowly to Rashid, who had just stepped back into the room.
Rashid stared at the bundle in the nurse's arms. Then he looked at his wife.
For a moment, everything inside him collapsed.
He didn't speak. He didn't cry. He just walked forward, step by step, as if moving through water. He took his newborn daughter into his arms for the first time—still slick, still crying—and held her close to his chest.
"She's beautiful," he said softly, voice cracking. "Just like her mother."
The hospital would remember that night for years. A young woman lost to an overdose of anesthesia. A child born strong and screaming. A husband standing in the middle of it all, trying to be anchor and sail at once.
They gave her the name Aaliya—noble, exalted—because she entered the world like a warrior, crying for her mother before she even knew what she had lost.
And in Room 6, now empty, only the silence remained.
Outside, the fog thinned just enough for a sliver of moonlight to touch the hospital roof. Somewhere in the city, a coal fire burned low. But in Rashid's arms, Aaliya slept, her tiny chest rising and falling against his grief.
No one knew who she would become.
But she had already inherited two powerful things: her father's quiet strength—and her mother's last breath.