Edhi was born in 1928 in Bantva in the Gujarat, British India. When he was eleven, his mother became paralyzed from a stroke and she died when Edhi was 19. His personal experiences and care for his mother during her illness, caused him to develop a system of services for old, mentally ill and challenged people. The partition of India led Edhi and his family to migrate to Pakistan in 1947.
Edhi initially sold cloth in Karachi's wholesale market, but he soon gave up the trade to start a free medical dispensary. The seeds of his devotion to social work were sown in his teenage years, when his mother became paralyzed and mentally ill. Edhi tended to her every need until she died when he was 19. He never completed his high school education.
Content with just two sets of clothes, he slept in a windowless room of white tiles adjoining the office of his charitable foundation. Sparsely equipped, it had just one bed, a sink and a hotplate.
"He never established a home for his own children," his wife Bilquis, who manages the foundation's homes for women and children, told the press recently.
Edhi was laid to rest in the clothes he died in, and buried in a grave he himself dug several years earlier at the Edhi cemetery near Karachi. He was given a state funeral attended by President of Pakistan Mamnoon Hussein and Army Chief General Raheel Shareef among other prominent personalities of Pakistan. It was the first state funeral since the death of military dictator General Zia ul-Haq in 1988.
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