A pall of gloom descended on Machilipatnam on Saturday, as the residents of the port town bid a tearful farewell to the 23-year-old techie who was brutally killed in Mumbai.
Thousands of people lined-up the road from her house to the St. Mary’ Church for the service and then to the cemetery, offering floral tribute as her body put in a coffin moved slowly down the road.
Her highly decomposed and partially-burnt body was found on Thursday at Kanjurmarg, a Mumbai suburban area, after she went missing from January 5. The body after autopsy reached Machilipatnam on Saturday.
As the news of the arrival of the body spread through the town, hundreds of school and college students, especially girls, made a beeline to the residence of the bereaved family located at Noble Colony. Her friends said she was a lively girl with a lot of dreams and it was quashed by the cruel hand of fate untimely.
A JNTU-K alumnus, now working with TCS in Mumbai, she was in Machilipatnam for Christmas holidays. She had boarded the Visakhapatnam-Mumbai LTT Express at Vijayawada railway station on January 4.
She was believed to have alighted at LTT – Kurla complex in the early hours of January 5 and ever since went missing and her parents lost all contact.
Spontaneous bandhThe Noble Missionary Parish and Church had called for a bandh at Machilipatnam, but cutting across religious and political lines, almost everybody participated in the bandh to make it successful. The political party leaders also took out a massive rally condemning the heinous crime and demanded arrest of the culprits.
The techie’s mother who is a heart patient had to be sedated to keep her under control, while her father , a retired professor of Noble College, who had rushed to Mumbai in search of his daughter, and was present when the body was found, mourned in silence.
