Click to play videoMumbai: There was no dearth of heroes during the tragic three days of Mumbai terror attack.
One such hero, encounter specialist Inspector Vijay Salaskar, fell prey to terrorists’ bullets in the initial hours of the attack.
Just before the attack, he had spoken to his wife and daughter on the phone thinking it would all be over by morning. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be.
“He called me up on my cell from the control room. When he used to ring, it said Control Room calling,” Salaskar’s daughter Divya says.
“I knew I was so confident. If I ever found myself in any sort of trouble, he used to reach there in seconds and get me out of it. Now it's like I have to be on my own, face everything on my own,” she adds.
An only child, Divya was the only one who managed to convince the workaholic Salaskar to take Sundays off. Her father would have liked her to study management. Though with his death, her plans for a course in management at a Pune institute are now on hold. There is a lot that she and her mother need to come to terms with for now.
“At the end of the day, I've lost my father. I don't like the fact that he's never going to come home and I'm never going to have those conversations with him. But I'm also proud of the fact that he couldn't have got a better death. Martyrdom was meant for him,” Divya says.
In the police force for 25 years and with almost 80 encounter killings to his name, Salaskar was one of those responsible for finishing off the scourge of the underworld in the late 90s.
But in his 25 years dedicated to the police force, he never once let work pressures tell at home. His wife Smita says, “He was very sweet natured. He never got angry. We had been married for 23 years and not even once did he ever raise his voice or speak angrily.”
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