Sometimes it is a choice made instinctively, at the edge of a precipice, that defines a person's character. Faraaz's ultimate test came in the midst of numbing terror. When the Holey Artisan attackers on July 1, 2016 gave him the option to escape, there was no question of leaving behind his two childhood friends—Abinta and Tarishi, both young women, both representing to the deranged terrorists what they had been brainwashed to despise. For Faraaz, when it became evident that there was no hope for his friends, the choice was clear: he chose to stay and embrace whatever fate lay before him. He was not one to abandon his core values of friendship, loyalty, and protectiveness. No one would have thought that this shy, lanky 20-year-old—the baby of the family who obsessively supported Manchester United and was an incorrigible prankster to his friends, who was brought up in comfort and luxury, and still a teenager at heart—would be the hero of the hour. No one except his mother Simeen Rahman, whose heart froze when she heard that Bangladeshis were being freed, but foreigners were not. Abinta was a Bangladeshi-born American citizen and Tarishi was Indian. There was no way he would leave them to save himself—this is what she told her elder son Zaraif during the agonising wait that night, words that proved prophetic.
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