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'We look alive on the outside. Inside, we are dead'

When this year began, Ramesh Vittal Naik had three children.

On February 24, he lost Rachna, his youngest daughter, who fell in the bathroom in their apartment, and hurt her head fatally.

On July 11, he lost 27-year-old Nandini, his second daughter, in the bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai.

Naik and son Ashish work in the family-owned automobile workshop. There are two photographs of the two girls Naik has lost, whose loss he mourns every day.

"Within five months, I lost both my daughters," Naik says, in a voice choked with sorrow. "I do not know how the days pass. We look alive on the outside. Inside, we are dead."

"There must be so many families like mine that are grieving today. I would like to shoot the terrorists myself."

"Both my daughters used to help my wife at home. Now I get scared to leave my wife alone at home. My life is incomplete without them. I had so many plans for their marriage."

"I brought up my daughters with so many dreams. Nandini was at the Borivali station that fateful day."

"I sometimes think they have gone to work and will come back shortly. I imagine they are in the house with us. That's the way I pass my time."

"My daughter is there in a video recording taken during my niece's birthday function. At least through that, I have her image, her voice."

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