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Kashish is a senior correspondent and anchor with NDTV 24x7)
"I wish there were enough words to express how special it has been working with all of you... In short thank you so much for making this journey so wonderful
Loads of love n luck,
Milita aka Mili girl aka militia aka mil aka mili aka millo aka millest aka milita ji :-) "
With these words, Milita Datta left NDTV after six years of working here as a producer, in which there are few who would not vouch for her talent, her no-nonsense attitude, her ability to deliver every single time and in between all the madness of a television job, find time to mentor and help her juniors.
So when the news of her death came this morning, there was complete shock in our newsroom. Even though she left three years ago, she left behind many friends and many admirers.
At this time, her body is at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital in Kalyanpuri, a few kilometres away from where she lived with her husband, mother-in-law and a young daughter, barely two years old. The all-crucial post-mortem which will establish the exact nature of her injuries and likely indicate the cause of her death is still waiting to take place. It has been delayed because a panel of doctors is being appointed to carry it out given that her death has taken place in completely mysterious circumstances.
As the day comes to end and the word about her death spread, there are now even more theories about how she died but still little or no clue about what happened.
Having visited the scene of the crime - the basement of her apartment complex - and speaking to her family and friends and the police, this is the sequence of events that we have pieced together.
For the last year-and-a-half, Milita was working at Rajya Sabha TV as a producer. Like every night, she called her husband around 10:30 before leaving her office to tell him she was driving home.
As per the lone CCTV camera at the main gate in her apartment complex at Vaishali in Ghaziabad, she entered the building around 11:10 pm.
She drove her red Hyundai i10 into the basement of the complex and the next thing we know is that her husband found her lying with multiple critical injuries just a few minutes before midnight. It seems when she didn't come home by her usual time, her husband tried to call her but couldn't get through to her on the phone. Then he got worried and decided to go and look for her. He went down to the basement to get his car and saw her lying on the ground, barely a few feet from her parked car.
There were some blood stains right in front of her car. Her spectacles were lying folded on plastic tarmac just above her body which is one reason why police suspect she fell from the second floor of the building. But curiously her floaters were lying neatly folded near the plastic sheet on the ground floor. And the tear in the plastic sheet which the police think is where she might have fallen through is barely one-foot-long. It is precisely all these contradicting set of clues which are not adding up at all that have led to many different versions of how Milita died.
Add to that is the fact that Milita's handbag and another bag containing possibly groceries was still in the car which suggests that she never actually went out of the basement at all.
Friends close to her husband told me that he says she was just barely conscious when he found her and so he quickly put her in his car and drove to a private hospital in the city but tragically she died en route, because the hospital declared she was 'brought dead'.
It is that crucial 45 minutes from when she entered the apartment complex to when her husband found her that hold the key to what happened to Milita on Monday night. But with no eyewitnesses and a contradictory set of clues, it is going to be a tough task for the Ghaziabad police to piece together what happened.
Imagine then what her family is facing. Shock, grief, anger, frustration, helplessness - are only a few words in my limited vocabulary to even try and empathise what they're feeling. Her father looked completely lost when I met him at the government hospital waiting for her post mortem to take place. Her uncle who was trying to string some words together for him managed to speak enough to request for some privacy for them to comprehend the bizarre and tragic death of their beloved daughter.
Overwhelmed was what Milita said she felt when she left NDTV, that's what her family and friends are feeling now as she's left them.
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