35 pieces of Shraddha’s body

Love is a powerful emotion. Love inspires you to excel and set an example. But the way every coin has two sides, love has two sides. Love hurts. Love leaves heart broken. Love makes jilted lovers do insanely cruel things like throwing acid at the face, stalking online and so on. But today love has done something so macabre, so gut-wrenching and so spine-chilling that minds have gone numb from shock. Does love kill too? And, if yes, in what kind of cold-blood?

Shraddha Walkar from Mumbai was a young and vivacious girl. Just like any other girl next door she had ambitions and aspirations to strike it rich one day. Shraddha – a typical middle-class Maharashtrian girl next door – was just 29 years old. Just like girls her age, she fell in love. If you thought that Shraddha Walkar fell in love, got married with the love of her life, had babies and lived happily ever after, think again.

Aftab Ameen Poonawala (28) and Shraddha Walkar (29) were in love. They wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. They were from Vasai East and Vasai West respectively. Their families did not approve of their relationship. The boy and girl walked out of their respective homes. They left the city and relocated to New Delhi. Everything was hunky-dory between the young lovers until Shraddha Walkar made a mistake that cost her her dear life.

Like every innocent girl in love Shraddha Walkar wanted to tie the knot with her sweetheart Aftab Ameen Poonawala. She proposed marriage thinking that Aftab Poonawala too wanted their ever-blossoming relationship to culminate into a lifelong bond called marriage so that they could live happily ever after. Alas it was not to be so!

Aftab Ameen Poonawala was not prepared for the marriage as yet. When Shraddha Walkar pressed on with her demand that they must get married without wasting more time, Aftab lost his cool. In a feat of uncontrollable rage, he did not push Shraddha around or give a tight slap across her face. Just like typical lovers they did not have those tiffs followed by the I-am-so-sorry ritual through red roses and chocolates.

Aftab – whom Shraddha trusted more than her life and walked out of her parents’ home thinking that Aftab would forever keep her happy and take care of her -proceeded to strangle innocent, gullible and naïve Shraddha Walkar who was head over heels in love with her killer. Poor Shraddha Walkar breathed her last. She lost her life at the altar of love at the ripe of age 29.

If you thought that Aftab Ameen Poonawala was overcome by remorse and grief and he rushed to the nearby police station with the intention of surrendering himself saying, “Inspector, arrest me and hang me right away. I have – in cold-blood – killed the woman who loved me selflessly. I deserve no mercy. Here I am. Haul me in.”, think again. Aftab did not do anything like this. He was utterly nonchalant, non-repentant and carefree. He – with the help of his Devil-may-care-attitude – began to think of a plot to cover the murder and get away scot-free.

Aftab Ameen Poonawala purchased a big refrigerator. In a mind-numbing act of cruelty, he went on to chop Shraddha Walker’s lifeless body into pieces. Mercilessly and remorselessly, he kept on chopping her girl friend’s body into as many as 35 pieces. What kind of a human being could do such a thing with the body of his lover? What was Shraddha’s crime? Her crime was to fall in love with this beast of a man called Aftab Ameen Poonawala who strangled her to death without batting an eyelid. He used the newly bought refrigerator to store those 35 pieces of Shraddha Walkar’s body.

After New Delhi went to sleep in the night, he stepped out of his house at around 2 a.m. with a polythene bag stuffed with two or three pieces of Shraddha’s body parts.  He would get rid of all the 35 body pieces one by one over a period of eighteen days using the same modus operandi.

Aftab Ameen Poonawala is a deranged murderer whose story of inflicting cruelty upon his girlfriend makes Jack the ripper pale in comparison. What kind of a mentally disturbed person thinks of killing her live-in partner for proposing marriage, slicing her body into 35 pieces and then proceeding to store them into a refrigerator only to dispose of them later on in the darkness of eerily quiet nights?

The mind has stopped working. The outrage that has followed across social media platforms demonstrates how traumatised the nation is feeling. The murder of Shraddha Walkar has sent shockwaves across the country. Love kills. And, love kills in the cruellest fashion.

It is said that love can break your heart into many pieces but it never said that love could chop your body into 35 pieces. Beyond being deranged.

— Savio Rodrigues 🇮🇳 (@PrinceArihan) November 14, 2022

What is going to happen now? How many Aftabs are lurking around the corner out there to kill Shraddhas? Why are our girls not safe from the clutches of such mindless murderers who start strangling girls – their girlfriends – at the mention of the mere word ‘marriage’? Should the parents of young girls be worried about this trend? How to educate girls against falling prey to seducers-cum-killers like Aftabs who are ready to strike at an appropriate moment?

What Aftab Ameen Poonawala has done is beyond shocking. Shraddha Walkar was a symbol of pure love. She trusted Aftab blindly and allowed him to take her away from her parents only to kill her later on. Aftab is a symbol of pure evil that deserves no mercy whatsoever. Had he declined to marry her, maybe Shraddha Walkar would have returned to her parents alive. Old parents would not have lost their loving daughter. The entire nation is mourning the death-by-love of Shraddha Walkar. May Shraddha’s soul attain sadgati.

Aftab Ameen Poonawala has crossed all the limits. Had he surrendered himself after committing the act of strangling his live-in partner to death, it would not have caused so much outrage. Feelings of betrayal would have run their course. But cutting the lifeless body into 35 pieces gives a totally different angle to this entire saga of gruesome murder. Girls must think one thousand times before falling in love. Life is more important than love. Nobody deserves to die at the altar of love. Shraddha Walkar will remain immortal. She will continue to live on in India’s collective psyche. Om Shanti Om.