Woman who lost husband in 26/11 set to complete HSC

November 26, 2008 is a day Mumbai never forgets. The terrorist attack resulted in hundreds of deaths and left citizens on edge. While the day affected everyone, several individuals have shared inspiring stories of how they picked themselves up after losing a loved one. An anonymous woman, who was profiled on Humans of Bombay on Sunday, shared her story of how she completed her education after she lost her husband at Mumbai CST.

“I’ve always been a homemaker while my husband worked at the railway station. We were very content with our lives,” she said.

The woman spent most of her time raising her two daughters, while her husband would work. One day, she fell ill and the family faced difficulties. It was at this time when her husband requested his mother to come from their native place in Bihar to take care of his wife.  

“After a few months when I recovered and my mother-in-law was leaving to return to Patna, my husband went alone to drop her off at the station, sometime around 9 pm. I was sleeping when my sister-in-law called me around 10 pm, told me about the attacks and said my husband wasn’t answering his phone. I rushed down to the phone booth to call him and after trying many times someone finally picked up and said, ‘the person who’s phone this is, is dead; come claim the body’.

It took the woman a few months to recover, but as time went by she began pulling herself together. “I had two daughters who had their whole lives in front of them and I had to make sure that I did everything I could to educate them better. I received compensation from the government which I used for their education and to take care of the house and my mother. I was also offered a job by the Railways, but since I had only studied till Class VIII, I couldn’t get a job that paid me half as well, but I took it anyway. I wanted to set a better example for my daughters, so after a few months I decided to join school again,” 
she recalls.

During that period, she would prepare food for her children, drop them to school, go to work, return to make dinner, do her homework and then attend night school. “I have no idea where the strength came from. I just loved that I was educating myself to never feel helpless again—I finally passed my SSC and I am on my way to clearing my HSC and through this time I got my promotion as well.”

While remembering her husband, the woman says she knows that he would be proud. “Sometimes life takes people away. I still sometimes question why 26/11 had to ever happen, but the only way to fight back is to not give up. Every year, that day marks the death anniversary of my partner, but it also remains the day I became independent, where I didn’t succumb to the terror but used the pain to make my girls and me stronger.”