The Muslim Times Editor for Pakistan

Credit: Xpress Tribune

By Rabia Ahmed Published: September 2, 2013

Pakistan’s fertility rate is likely to drop if women marry at an older age: that argument stands on its own considerable merit, because a young woman is likely to conceive more easily and often at this most fertile time of her life, but other factors also contribute to the high fertility rate.

In Pakistan, children are not just a source of joy, but necessary pillars that support parents in the parents’ old age. This is true of all cultures, but it acquires an imperative urgency in societies like ours.

Insaan Masih is a young man of no education but an innate sense of what should be. He has taught himself to read and write to a rudimentary level. His wife, given child bearing and rearing, housework and a job, remains illiterate. They have two children in school. Both parents have made their children’s education their priority in a way that I have rarely witnessed amongst more educated persons, where I have also rarely witnessed Masih’s attention to hygiene and other things, such as punctuality. He rarely takes a day off, always working an alternate day if he cannot make it once.

In spite of these qualities, Masih, at 28, remains where he started out, a full time cleaner. In the charming words of our brethren, Masih, is a ‘choora’, a dreadful term. More