I Hug Her T-Shirts to be Able to Sleep: Nirbhaya’s Mother

Nirbhaya’s mother talks about life after losing her daughter.

The house seems vacant, even though people live there; the vacuum is evident. A 48-year-old woman is in the house, known to the world as the December 16 rape victim’s mother.

“Who would want this title? Which mother would want to replace her little girl’s trophies with the numerous lauds we have been conferred after her death,” she says in an interview to The Indian Express.

In the two bedroom apartment in Dwarka, into which the family moved months after the brutal incident, there is a shelf dedicated entirely to the fight they had put up to bring justice to their daughter Jyoti, popularly called Nirbhaya.

Jyoti’s mother now works as chairman of a NGO that fights for victims like her daughter. At the time of the incident, Jyoti was a physiotherapy student and had big dreams of supporting her family – her parents and two brothers.

One of her brothers has joined a private medical college in Uttar Pradesh. The elder brother is in his final year at a private engineering college.

My boy will realise his sister’s dream. We could not afford to enroll her in a medical college, so she joined a physiotherapy course. How proud she would be to know her little brother has already completed a month of medical college.

‘I Don’t Talk to Her Friends’

The aggrieved mother has removed all remnants of her daughter – a stuffed teddy bear that was her playmate, her books and a diary she wrote in.

This was my way of dealing with the pain. How do I face a photograph of my girl, knowing that I have been unable to bring to justice the people who brutalised her

But Jyoti mother’s pain persists, so much that she wants to distance herself from people who knew her daughter.

I wanted to distance myself from my daughter’s friends, but I have not succeeded entirely. Her closest friend from our old neighbourhood got married and she is going to be a mother now. I do not talk to her friends anymore, but such news reaches me. I hate it… it hurts. My daughter should not have become a hero… She should have been living this life.  

Jyoti’s family will stage a protest at Jantar Mantar on December 16 to mark the anniversary of the day their daughter left home the last time, and the scheduled release of the juvenile, now an adult, convicted for the crime.

But Jyoti’s mother still seeks peace. She brings out her daughter’s t-shirt or jeans, the only things of Jyoti’s she has still kept, to ease her mind to get some sleep.