Aged widow doesn't want to attend daughter's funeral

Shattered by the death of her daughter in the Mangalore air crash, 70-year-old Santosh Aggarwal, who is already struggling to cope with a string of tragedies, says she does not want to attend the funeral as she "only wants to remember her smiling face".

Santosh's son, his wife and two children were killed in a road accident eight years ago while her husband died following a heart attack last year. Yesterday, she received the news of her Dubai-based daughter Meenu Gupta dying in the Air India plane crash.
       
Relatives and neighbours descended at her Sector 42 residence here but many were unsure of how to console the grieving mother.
       
Meenu was to travel to Manipal in Karnataka where her son is pursuing his MBBS. Her husband Rahul Gupta is a doctor and runs two hospitals in Dubai where the couple have settled since 1991.
        
Santosh says she had visited her daughter in Dubai in March this year. "Now, I only want to remember her smiling face," she says.
       
She says that it will be better if her daughter's last rites are performed in Dubai and not in Chandigarh. "It would be difficult for me to see her in such a state".

Meenu had studied at a local college before completing her Masters in Science from Punjabi University in Patiala.
   
Santosh's second son is a doctor at PGIMER here and has already left for Mangalore. 158 people were killed in the Air India plane crash yesterday.