The question caught Ambreen Naeem off-guard.
“At 2pm, my sister called and asked where my son Talah and husband Naeem were,” Ambreen says quietly.
“I remember thinking, ‘why is she asking me?’, because it’s normal they would be at Friday prayers at this time’,” she adds, nervously pressing her fingers against one another.
Unknown to Ambreen, 21-year old Talah and Naeem, 51, were trapped in the middle of a deadly onslaught on Al Noor mosque by a white-supremacist suspect armed with semi-automatic rifles and other assault weapons.
Neither made it out of alive.
They were among 50 Muslims killed on Friday at the now shuttered Al Noor and Linwood mosques in New Zealand’s southeasterly city of Christchurch in an act Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has branded a terrorist attack.
Many of those who are believed to have died in the attack had emigrated to New Zealand, leaving country’s from Fiji to Malaysia for a multiplicity of reasons.
Some fled conflict, such as 16-year-old Syrian refugee Hamza Mustafa and his father, Khalid.
Others, like Pakistani-born Naeem, left home in Lahore to chase a dream.
Sat in a downstairs bedroom in her big sister Naeema’s home in Christchurch, Ambreen recalls the journey her deceased husband undertook a decade ago.
“He was a banker [in Pakistan] and wanted to change to teaching, so he came New Zealand to do a PhD,” she says, flanked by Abdullah, her now-oldest son, and Naeema.
“He started [the PhD] but never finished,” she adds, glancing across the room at her youngest boy, six-year-old Aayan, who’s busy trying to win her attention.
“We had a son, instead.”
There was no doubt, she says, where the baby would be raised. The family stayed on in New Zealand because Naeem had fallen in “love” with the natural beauty of its piercing blue skies and rolling green meadows.
He worked hard, balancing life as a business tutor with being a caring and devoted family man with time to teach his children, too.
“He would help me through everything, and would always put me and others first,” Abdullah, an engineering student, says.
“When I used to get stuck doing scholarship calculus, Dad would take the time to explain to me how to think about it… he was always so keen,” he adds.
“It was so fun talking to him, if I had any worries he would always make me feeal so much better. But this life is temporary, you know.”
