Fourteen years is a long time waiting for justice in the abominable crime that Dhananjoy Chatterjee committed on 16-year-old Hetal Parekh, but too short a time to forget the agony and shock the teenaged girl's neighbours felt.
Voices get choked and words struggled to come out as the neighbours recalled the horrors of the incident of the rape and murder of the girl at Anand Apartment in Kolkata's Bhowanipur area 14 years ago.
"I, Kajol, Sekhar, Joy - we broke open the door and entered. We saw the girl lying there...I have a girl now of that age...Sorry, I can't speak anymore," Utpal Roy faltered and left the microphone at the rememberance meeting on Monday.
"She was a very sweet girl, so innocent and good mannered. I used to talk to her everyday. But then what we saw, I can't express. Excuse me," Kajol Bagchi, a neighbourly aunt of late Hetal, stopped.
"The intellectuals, raising voice for the beast, could not have uttered a word if they saw the scene themselves," Mahindra Bhai, a resident of the Anand Apartment, says.
And what did they see on the eventful day on March 5, 1990? None would speak about, barring that the girl's throat was slit and she lay in a pool of blood.
{{/usCountry}}And what did they see on the eventful day on March 5, 1990? None would speak about, barring that the girl's throat was slit and she lay in a pool of blood.
{{/usCountry}}And they waited for 14 long years to see Dhananjay's execution. On Monday afternoon they were on a signature campaign and later in the night they would fax an appeal to President A P J Abdul Kalam seeking rejection of his mercy petition "to save the other Hetals of our civil society".