The 7th Dec 2021.

Aqseer was barely two months away from turning 32. But she will remain 31 forever now. You see, she took her own life at about 12 noon that day. Her last conversation was with me on the terrace of our home she called “beautiful” in Hyderabad.

It has been five months since. I relive that last day over and over in my mind. There are a dozen different ways the events could have gone. But Aqseer’s soul was following its own marching tune.

I sit today, looking at a family portrait in which she is a toddler. There is not a hint of the rejection, confusion and humiliation that lay ahead for her. She was a very sociable baby, a high achiever in school and she graduated from India’s top ranking law school. A stint with Google Hong Kong followed and at the age of 23 years, she joined the Centre for Social Justice at Ahmedabad. Unknown to us, it was to be the start of her end.

You know what they say about the maternal antenna? It quivers in anticipation of danger and threat. I was often uneasy about Aqseer’s tenure at the Law School, wondering if I was imagining her challenges living alone. The same ambivalence persisted while she was at Ahmedabad. It was around the month of August 2013 that she began telling me on phone of her difficulty concentrating. I responded with a pep talk, telling her about our biorhythms and how it was alright to go with the flow. I had no clue of the enormity of the darkness engulfing her.

One day Aqseer called me up and to my question on what she was doing, her response was, “I am on the top floor of my office building. I am lying on the ground; all the others have left. And Ma, I feel like jumping off the terrace!” I froze and talked her down to the main gate right until she was inside her rented accommodation. Some hectic huddles happened and at the end of several phone calls back and forth, we decided she should come home for a break. My husband still recalls with sharp clarity the first thing she said when she was getting into the car at the Delhi Cantonment railway station where he had gone to pick her up, “Pa, I don’t want to go back!” I was waiting for them at home. The passageway light was turned off and it was only when Aqseer emerged from the shadows into the dining room light that I noted with alarm how loosely her green trousers hung on her body. She had lost 8 kgs of weight. The eyes were desolate and her pallor strangely cloudy. There was an air of resignation around her, as though her vitality regulator had been turned down to zero. I felt frightened……