Panic! Where is my son?

It was early in the morning, I went to the Giant Hypermarket to buy some groceries together with my son Iman Mustaqim, while my wife Jannah busy herself with the daily house chores.

Iman likes to play with the indoor playground setup by the Giant management inside the hypermarket. Beside the playground there is a small bookshop. Myself being a bookworm couldn't resist the temptation of just browsing trough some of the titles there. Actually it's not the first time I went to the bookshop, nearly every time I shop there I will take the time to drop by the small bookshop.

After leaving Iman for a few minutes I entered the bookshop and start browsing trough some titles on the self-help section. Now this is where I made my big mistake. You see, usually I had my wife to watch over my son while I was browsing. This time, being wifeless I just don't know where did I got my confidence to just leave a 4 year old boy to play by himself without his parents watching over him!

So after about 5 minutes inside the bookshop, I walkout so confident thinking that my son would still be there playing with the other kids (after all it was only for 5 minutes!). Boy how I thought wrong!

Since the indoor playground is quite huge, so the first thing I seek is my son's slipper. To my horror, it wasn't there. I didn't believe it at first, so I tried to find him on the busy and noise play ground. Confident that he wasn't there I started to shout his name a few times, but there was no reply (of course he didn't know how to reply yet, but he usually come running back to me when I call out his name)

The first thing I thought was that he could be in the toilet, since the toilet is very near to the play ground, and I once brought him there for him take a pee. Unfortunately he wasn't there, so I ran to the parking lot. I thought since I parked very near to the entrance, he might tried to find me there (he's such a smart ass you know - may Allah save him from being hit by a car).

I start to panic when he's nowhere to be found, I ran around the Shopping Mall like crazy while my eyes scanning trough every shop lot hoping he's inside in one of them. However my effort was futile, I started to praying to God that my son could be found. I could imagine a headline on the newspaper about my son missing in a shopping mall while his father busy browsing trough some books!

Finally I decided to start finding him inside the Giant supermarket. I knew it's gonna be tough since the supermarket is very huge. So I start running trough every section but he's still now where on sight. Suddenly I remembered, my son likes to visit the toys section - so I quickly went there. Alhamdulillah, there he was happily browsing trough the toys. I took him and kissed him and praised to Allah many times. I realized that he was interested on the Bugs Bunny jigsaw puzzle, so without hesitation I picked it up for him.

I will definitely remembered this lesson to never let my son out of my sight anymore. All praise to Allah for His blessing and love.