Parwin Farman, 29, wife of the Pakistani hero Farman Ali Khan who drowned after saving the lives of 14 people in the floods that hit east Jeddah last month, said she has never been to Saudi Arabia. “I have always wished to perform Umrah and Haj and pray at the Prophet's Mosque,” she said. The news of her husband's death had struck her like “a bolt of lightning,” she said, especially as he had talked to her on the phone the day before he died. “My oldest daughter Zubaida was profoundly affected by her father's death. Madiha and Jarira are too young to realize what has happened,” Al-Hayat Arabic daily reported Parwin as saying. The girls are aged 7, 6, and 4, respectively. “They will surely be proud when they realize that their father died rescuing people about to be swept away by the floodwaters,” she added. Parwin said that if she were offered Saudi nationality and to be hosted in the Kingdom along with her daughters that she “would be honored to live near the holy sites and Holy Mosques, but not without my and my husband's parents, without whom I can't live anywhere.” She said that representatives of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth visited the family after her husband's death, gave the family financial assistance and assured the mother that the girls would be sponsored. The Pakistani Ministry of Expatriates has provided the family with financial assistance and a plot of land in a residential area in Islamabad, said the mother who lives with her daughters at her husband's parents' house. Parwin and Farman were married in 2000. Her older daughters are in primary school. “I pray that I be successful in bringing up the three girls and have them educated,” she said.
