Tulika Jain, mother of 19-year-old Tarishi Jain, who was killed in the
Dhaka terror attack was inconsolable at her funeral on Monday, July 4.
“Don’t call her a martyr, she wanted to live” the devastated woman
wailed, her head on her daughter’s casket “I wont be strong. I don’t
want to be strong. Why did they kill my daughter? I need a reason why
she was killed. Is life so cheap?”
At the cremation in Gurgaon, 1,800km from Gulshan in
Bangladeshi’s capital, the mother was beside herself with grief,
speaking mostly to herself, friends and family who gathered around her.
Clutching photographs of the family, Tulika called out to her husband,
Sanjiv, and said:
“She was killed because she was Indian. Tell everyone the truth, the
truth is that she was killed because she was an Indian. Why my Taru? She
was a good girl. What did we do wrong that my Taru had to die like
this?” Tulika asked. “Don’t call her a martyr, she wanted to live. I was
just some distance away when my Taru was being hunted down. Why didn’t I
do something?”
Sanjiv and Tarishi’s brother Sanchit, who performed his sister’s last
rites around 5pm on the cremation ground at Sukhrali village in Gurgaon,
tried to hold back their emotions. But Tulika was inconsolable.
“I don’t know anything, why is she dead, tell me? Should she be dead?
She was just at a bakery doing what teens do. She had gone to Dhaka on a
holiday and she wanted to do so much good for the people there. How was
she an enemy for the terrorists?” she kept asking those who surrounded
her at the Gurgaon community centre where Tarishi’s body was brought
after being flown in from Dhaka.
Tulika, who had accompanied her daughter from Dhaka on the flight to
Delhi, remained firm in the belief till the body was taken away for the
funeral that the 19-year-old could be revived.
“Everything will be all right. Mamaji, you are a doctor, do something. I
know medicines can perform miracles. I know she will get up, mamaji get
her to me. Get her to me please,” she pleaded, holding the hands of an
elderly man who, too, began to cry.
Her voice hoarse from hours of crying, Tulika broke down when the time came to dress up her daughter’s body.
“This is too loose, she won’t like it. Get it off her. It’s unsmart, she won’t wear it,”
Tulika told some of her relatives who held her steady as she put a blue salwar-kurta on her daughter for the last time.
When someone handed her a bindi for Tarishi’s forehead, Tulika
refused, saying her daughter wouldn’t put it on. She did finally relent
Source: Daily Sun Star India/Radio India/The Telegraph India