Victim turned crusader of inter-caste alliances

Twenty two-year-old

Kausalya Shankar

has come a long way from being a girl who tried to kill herself after witnessing the honour killing of her husband Shankar, 22, at the Udumalpet bus stand in

Tirupur

on March 13, 2016. Having survived the attack herself, the young widow is now a confident fighter who wants to put an end to the caste culture.

Apart from being employed in a central government institution, a job she got on merit, Kausalya now runs

Shankar Thani Payirchi Maiyam

, a free tuition centre for underprivileged children at Komaralingam. The latter is her husband’s native village near Udumalpet where she is also involved in a host of other activities.

Hailing from Palani, Kausalya was a first year student in a private engineering college at Pollachi. She fell in love with Shankar, a third year student in the same college and who shared the same bus.

They got married when the girl was in her second year. She later dropped out of college and was with Shankar who was by then in the final year.

On March 13, 2016, the two went shopping at Udumalpet when hirelings of her family hacked both of them. They were taken to the Udumalpet government hospital and referred to the Coimbatore Medical College and Hospital, but he died on the way before her eyes. Kausalya survived the attack and was discharged from the hospital but she attempted suicide two months after Shankar’s death. She was discharged a week later and it was then that the transformation began. “I should thank many organisations and counsellors who showed the way for me”, said the girl who is now deeply influenced by the ideologies of Periyar. Motivated, she undertook tuition for kids of Komaralingam. Even as she refused a government job on compassionate grounds, she prepared for the exam and got the job she is now doing.

Since her life was under threat she was always under police protection, but this also changed as she started gaining confidence of facing life on her own terms.

Meanwhile, Kausalya ensured that the financial assistance Shankar’s family got from the government did not go waste by constructing her husband’s dream house with it.