For the past one year, his mornings have begun with the same thought, and the accompanying pain, he says, is now a familiar ache.
Struggling to come to terms with the loss of his 23-year-old daughter, the Delhi gang-rape victim’s father told The Hindu: “She fought till the last breath, all the while assuring her terrified mother that death will not win.”
“Mornings,” he says, are especially dreadful. “I wake up thinking of her every morning and words cannot explain the heartache that her death has left behind. Every day I tell God to take away the December 16 [2012] night, which changed our lives forever. Some days I don’t even feel like getting up.”
Both he and his wife oscillate between despair and helplessness and the desire to provide a normal life for their sons, he says. “Our daughter is never far from our thoughts.”
The family has now moved into a flat in Dwarka and the brothers are studying in good institutions. The compensation provided by the government has been used to start a trust fund and the family will hold a memorial service at the Constitutional Club on Monday at 4 p.m., where it will also announce details of how it plans to use the compensation money.
“One thing that I would like to do is to ensure that every girl and woman in India feel empowered enough to come out and protest against any wrongdoing. We hope to use this money to send the message to girls and women that they should never be afraid to report and raise their voice against violence.
To keep quiet and suffer is a bigger crime. Today society has found the courage to stand up for its daughters; it’s time then that you too stand up for your rights and demand what is rightfully yours,’’ he says.
Going back to their daughter, the couple say that the family is trying to move on. “Life, of course, goes on,” says the father.
He remembers the last time he saw his daughter alive. “When it was decided that she should be transferred to a hospital in Singapore, my daughter’s condition had already taken a beating. On December 25 night, she suffered a massive cardiac arrest and things rapidly went downhill after that. The doctors never once let us feel that she may not be able to make it. They remained hopeful till the very end.”
The family, he says, hasn’t quite recovered from the tragedy. “Yes, we tell each other that we are fine. But each of us is fighting our private battle. As parents, we have lost our child [only daughter] and my sons have lost their sister. What in the world can compensate that?
Has justice been done? Do we feel that the perpetrators have been adequately punished? “Yes, as parents we want those who committed this ghastly crime to suffer. I personally feel that had it not been for all the public and political support, we may not have been able to carry this fight for justice this far. The sheer magnitude of the cruelty with which my daughter was treated made society come out and demand justice. We, as a family, will remain grateful for all the support we got at the time. We, however, still maintain that the juvenile in the case should have been dealt with more severely,” he said.
“My daughter’s case, we believe, forced society to take revisit the issue of violence against women. She forced us to rethink and that is the positive change that her death brought about.”
