Bhakta Bahadur Rumba, 30, is said to have killed his daughters Laxmi, 11, Sunita, 6, and Anita, 4, while they were asleep Thursday night. Rumba´s wife Aashmaya and eldest son were away from home to take part in a wedding in the neighborhood. His father Sanokanchha, too, was not at home when the incident took place. [break]
While villagers are dumbfounded by the sheer incredulity of the incident, the brutality with which it was committed has left mental scar on their children.
“My son wakes up from his sleep suddenly in the night and starts crying, saying that his friends have died,” said Manmaya Ghale, a local. “Everybody breaks into tears on remembering the incident.” Sunita used to be a classmate of Ghale´s son, a first grader at Balbikash Primary School.
Aashmaya has left her house after the incident and is staying with her parents two kilometers away. “How can I return to that house after what happened?” she said, struggling to hold back tears. “The daughters I left after putting them to sleep will never wake up now,” she adds. She had prepared supper for her daughters and husband early that evening so that she could attend the wedding about a kilometer away from their home.
“The second daughter (Sunita) had insisted on accompanying me, but I didn´t take them promising to return early,” she said.
When she returned home at around 11 in the night, she found her room on the first floor dark, though the lights on the ground floor were on.
“I got scared when I saw the bloodied face of my husband,” she says.
She called her daughters and, when they did not respond, pulled away the blanket covering them after switching the lights on.
What she saw was nightmarish.
“I rushed out of the house crying for help and apparently lost consciousness.” Her father Bir Bahadur Ghalan reveals that she regained consciousness two days after the incident.
The devastated mother claims that she never quarreled with her husband in the 18 years of their married life, and the daughters absolutely doted on their ´appa´ (father).
“But his heart was like a stone,” she rues.
Captain Lopchan found her lying unconscious on the verandah when he rushed for help. “When I reached upstairs, there was this gory sight of bludgeoned daughters lying dead on one side, while the father was in a deep sleep after killing them,” the neighbor says. “I tied his limbs and asked other villagers to call the police. His mouth gave off stench of liquor when I was tying him,” he adds.
Bhakta Bahadur´s mother Gangamaya insists that her epileptic son was a gentleman. “But he committed such a horrendous act now,” she rues. Chhetra Bahadur Thoker, 32, says his friend had never stepped out of the house in the past one and a half years and had no work.
“He did not drink in front of us but consumed alcohol when we were not around,” Bhakta Bahadur´s elder brother Hasta Bahadur said.
Aashmaya said that her husband suffered from epilepsy after their marriage and was on medication after being treated at a hospital in Lalitpur. But he had stopped taking medicines since the past six weeks.
Bhakta Bahadur is currently being kept at the District Police Office, Hetauda around 60 kilometers away from the village. “We are taking the investigations forward questioning everybody related to the incident,” Inspector at Area Police Office, Phaparbari, Kushal Kumar Basnet said.
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