It’s an horrific memory Ruby Angela Saleh will never be able to shake.
The sister of Fahim Saleh recalled the moment she heard her brother had been killed, his body dismembered one month ago.
“My shoulders stiffened while the rest of my body went limp,” she said as she braced herself for the bad news her Aunt warned her was about to come. Then the news came.
“I dropped the phone and crawled onto the wooden floor, touching its cold, hard surface with the palms of my hands. I shook my head. “No, no,” I said, my hair falling over my face.”
Saleh shared her memories in a moving tribute to her brother posted on Medium.
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“Fahim was born in 1986. He was a precocious, curious, active, and happy child,” she wrote. “His love of technology began early. Any time he received a toy, he would take it apart to see how it was built. As I got older, our father began to worry about my education, so in 1991 when I was 12, Fahim was four, and my sister was a baby, we moved to the US.”
She recalled the early years of their childhood as the family lived on the small stipend her father received while working towards a PhD and the minimum wage her mother earned folding clothes. The family had just moved to the United States from Bangladesh a year before Fahim’s birth.
“He was 12 when he built his first website, “The Saleh Family”. I wish I could remember the exact description he wrote next to my photo, but it was something to the effect of, “This is my big sis. She’s cool but I don’t like when she steals the remote from me.”
By 2003, Fahim would become financially independent launching a start up venture called Wizteen, designing avatars for messenger services.
“Fahim’s brain was a bottomless magic hat of ideas big and small, wacky and serious, local and global. You never knew what he was going to pull out next, but he got to work on every idea immediately. He couldn’t let one sit; he was too excited to usher the vision in his head into the world for the rest of us to enjoy.”
“Having come from so little, Fahim had zero interest in being a rich entrepreneur who only hung out with other rich entrepreneurs. His heart was most open to those in need. “These drivers depend on me,” he would say when talking about Gokada, the motorbike-hailing app he developed in Nigeria. Just as he had once been determined to ease our father’s hardships, he later dedicated himself to easing the hardships of countless others.”
Before the funeral, Ruby pleaded with the funeral home to put Fahim’s body back together. The family said their goodbyes in a small Covid-era funeral.
“Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real that Fahim is gone,” Ruby concludes. “And sometimes it feels too precisely like the cruel, heinous, and unbearable reality that it is, letting me see nothing but darkness and feel nothing but piercing pain in every quadrant of my heart. As I reminisce about Fahim, I know that he was the most special gift given to us, and then taken away. Now, our father spends his days sitting next to Fahim’s dog, Laila, speaking to her in the same affectionate tone he reserved for my brother, watching videos of or reading about the accomplishments of his deceased son. My mother spends her days crying. At night, she cannot sleep.”
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