Year after hit-run horror, family picking up pieces

An uneasy quiet, punctuated by silent sobs, gripped Rekha’s house on a January afternoon this year. It had been a few days since the death of her 20-year-old daughter Anjalion January 1 morning on the streets of Delhi.

- Hemani Bhandari

Grainy footage of her daughter’s body caught between the wheels of a grey Baleno car occupied by four inebriated men that drove 14 kilometres in Sultanpuri, Rohini and and Kanjhawala, had been televised repeatedly.

Days after the incident, the cacophony of mediapersons who had camped outside her house for days had finally died down; visits by neighbours and strangers had come to a stop; and it was finally just Rekha with her six children in her mother’s oneroom house in outer Delhi’s Sultanpuri.

“Don’t go out without telling me, don’t ever leave home at night, don’t leave me...,” Rekha told her children, as the family came to terms with Anjali’s death.

A year on, the diktat is the same.

Mother plagued by fear for other children

Fear of losing her children has a chokehold on Rekha. Whether they go to school or a neighbour’s, whether they walk or cycle, Iam not at peace till they are back home. I even hoped my sisters would escort my son Varun and daughter Ashika to school, soon after we lost Anjali,” said Rekha, seated inside a oneroom rented house in Sultanpuri.

Days after the Anjali’s death, Rekha and her children moved to her mother’s house from their Karan Vihar home. In July this year, Rekha rented a house close to her mother’s.

Ashika, who is in class 9, is upset by the restrictions imposed on her by her mother. She doesn’t let me step out after 8pm anymore,” she complained.

Rekha has her reasons.

Family lost its sole breadwinner