Tarishi Jain

heavily armed terrorists

Terrorists

Tarishi

AGRA/FIROZABAD: Sometime before 6 am on Saturday when 19-year-old's phone went dead, her father Sanjiv Jain, who had been waiting outside Gulshan Cafe through most of the night after he got to know thathad stormed the restaurant in upscale Dhaka and were butchering guests, got a call.It was from his daughter, cowering inside a toilet with two of her friends, Faraaz Ayaz Hossain and Abinta Kabir, hiding from the rat-tat-tat of gunfire outside the washroom's door. “have entered the restaurant,“ she told her father, who was planning just a day earlier to bring his wife and two children to Firozabad in UP for a short holiday before Tarishi headed back to the US where she was an Economics undergraduate at the University of California. “I am very afraid and not sure whether I will be able to come out alive. They are killing everyone here.“It had been a long and harrowing night for Sanjiv as he gathered with dozens of anxious family and friends of those huddled in the cafe to know how the bloody strike on innocent and unarmed men and women would end. By the time the terrorists were neutralised, 20 people, mostly foreigners and among them­ the only Indian among the casualties ­ had died.Tarishi was a recipient of an internship with a Bangladesh bank through the Institute for South Asia Studies at her university in California."After coming to know that Tarishi is among the hostages, we remained glued to our TV set the entire night and remained in touch with Sanjiv (her father) Rakesh Mohan Jain, Tarishi Jain's uncle. "She said, `I'm hiding in the toilet with friends, I think we will be killed one by one'. He was standing outside the cafe the whole time. We were in touch with him throughout,“ he said.Her brother Sanchit, who has done his engineering from Canada, had landed in Delhi a day earlier so that the family of four, along with mother Tulika, could all head to Firozabad — where Sanjiv's three brothers Rakesh, Rajiv and Ajit have a flourishing trade in glass — on Saturday. That family reunion was never to be. At the Jains' Suhag Nagar home in Firozabad, there is both anger and deep grief. “We don't want her to be cremated in the land where she was brutally murdered. Terrorists killed her for being a Hindu,“ Sanjiv's younger brother Rakesh Mohan Jain told TOI.