Kochi: Three days after witnessing her father N Ramachandran being gunned down before her eyes, Arathi Menon is back home, still grappling with the trauma that unfolded in one of the most serene corners of the Kashmir Valley.
The idyllic greens of Baisaran in Pahalgam turned into a haunting memory for Menon, a native of Kochi, whose father was killed along with 25 others in the terror attack there.
“We thought it was fireworks at first,” she recalls, her voice trembling. “But with the next shot, I knew... it was a terror attack,” she told reporters here on Thursday.
Menon, her 65-year-old father, and her six-year-old twin sons were walking through a fenced grassland in Baisaran when the unimaginable happened. Her mother Sheela had stayed back in the car.
The tranquil family outing shattered in seconds. “We crawled under the fence to escape. People scattered in all directions. As we were moving, a man emerged from the woods. He looked straight at us,” she said.
The stranger spoke words they couldn’t understand. “We replied, we don’t know. The next moment, he opened fire. My father collapsed beside us.”
“I saw two men, but they weren’t wearing any soldier’s uniform,” she recalled.
“My sons started screaming, and the man walked off. I knew my father was gone. I grabbed the boys and just ran--into the forest, with no idea where I was going,” she said, recounting how they wandered for nearly an hour through the wilderness.