Bekarar karke hame yun na jaiye. Aap ko humari kasam laut aiye (Don’t leave us bereft. Please come back).” These tunes once strummed on her guitar by a teenage girl from Kolkata who committed suicide allegedly after being tortured mentally by her schoolteacher and principal has jolted the feelings of many in the Capital even as the Centre has taken note of a fervent appeal for intervention by her bereaved father who has fled his house just because he cannot bear the memories of his daughter.
“She once said that she did not need anyone’s help to protect her so long as her father was there. But I failed to live up to her expectations,” Kisholoy Das, the bereaved parent says. A moved Union Minister Smriti Irani has decided to call up the family, sources said. Das has appealed for justice as no worthwhile action has been taken by the local police despite an FIR being filed by the family against the school authorities.
The Class XI student was taken to the principal by the Hindi teacher for fabricating her homework the girl’s father Kisholoy Das has alleged saying the principal then summoned the girl’s mother and threatened her with expulsion curiously not for misrepresenting the homework but for lodging a complaint of sexual harassment against a school student with the authorities a few years ago.
She was told in front of her mother that she was characterless and arrogant and would be expelled. Kamalika, the girl was a topper in the class. The same evening she left her home leaving behind a diary in which she wrote a farewell letter for the principal. Sometimes later the only child of her parents jumped to her death off a seven-storey building.
“Today we are in such a condition that her mother has fled to her parent’s place and I cannot enter the house because there are memories strewn everywhere,” the father said adding no action had yet been taken against the school administration despite two weeks after the incident took place.
“The HRD Minister will be speaking to the parents shortly,” Ministry officials said in New Delhi. The Ministry has received the letter and has apprised the Minister, they said. A similar case of suicide by Rouvanjit Rawla, a top Kolkata school student, had hit national headlines in February 2011.