That's life

1. A few official documents I found in the Archives had shown that my father was drawing a reduced pension of $222.86 rial per month after he retired in 1937. When he passed away in 1956, my mother was not entitled to his pension on account of the pension rules that existed at that time.
2. Incidentally, revised pension rules of 1981 stipulate that a wife of subsequent marriage is entitled for derivative pension. However, no one in the family ever thought about it. It seemed to have been a forgotten question.
3. As for me, the early 80s was somewhat a new beginning. I got married in March 1981 while I was in my final year at the university. Early the following year it was back to teaching again after finishing my studies coinciding with the birth of my first child.
4. So, my life was occupied with starting afresh at a rural school and beginning to raise a family. We lived in a small rented kampong house less than two kilometers away from the school.
5. After two years I bought a house in the city about 16 kilometers from the school and later moved house. About eight months later towards mid-80s I was offered to work at the state educational resource centre in the state capital 64 kilometers away. So, it was moving house again.
6. Coming back to the question of the pension. I'm ashamed to admit that I knew nothing of the revised pension rules until the day my niece told me that "grandma is entitled to grandpa's pension." A close family friend had told her about it. As far as I recall that was many years ago when my mother was still alive.
7. So, for her sake we tried to pursue a claim for the pension money against obstacles that seemed impossible to overcome. The main obstacle was proof of identity. It was vital to establish that my parents were legally married. A marriage certificate would have sufficed, but the document was lost and forgotten a long time ago.
8. Attempt to search for a duplicate at the Islamic department was futile because we failed to give the exact date of the marriage. A clerk at the department told us that there was no record of the marriage, but I could swear that I once laid eyes on the record of my parents' marriage in a large, fat book many years ago.
9. In those days the imam kept such books to record marriages of people in a mukim (small district). During my teens one of my close friends was working as a clerk at a primary school in our village. As it happened, the imam of our mukim at the time was also a teacher teaching at the school.
10. On one occasion I dropped by the school office on a Saturday to say hello to that clerk friend of mine. It was simply by chance that I spotted the aforementioned book lying on one of the tables. It looked quite old and battered. My friend told me what it was and out of curiousity I flipped through the pages. Eureka! There it was among rows of dates and names etc - particulars of my parents' marriage. It was unfortunate that I did not bother to jot them down for safekeeping.
11. The book might have changed hands through the years, but the incumbent during the course of our inquiry admitted that no such book was handed over to him. It might have gone missing indefinitely and with it the hard evidence that we badly needed was lost.
12. However, the department could issue a marriage document if next of kin were to sign a statutory declaration that the marriage had taken place and testified by two male witnesses. By then more than 60 years had passed since my parents got married and we could not find any surviving close relatives or friends to ask for help.
13. Moreover, at that time attempt to obtain a duplicate of our father's death certificate was futile for want of his exact date of death. It seemed that we had reached a dead end. So, finally we decided to give up the wild-goose chase.
14. Ironically, it was not until 2016 that we found the date in a newspaper story and subsequently were able to obtain a duplicate of his death document from the registration office. That was about three years after my mother passed away.