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 Sniper Attack Stole One Life, Gave Focus to Anothe |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Sniper Attack Stole One Life, Gave Focus to Another
Daughter Honors Victim's Dream, Gets Degree
The refrain started at an early age, whispered as he pinched her chubby cheeks. On the days he couldn't see her -- because he left at one dawn only to return hours before another -- he towered over her bed and tried to channel his dreams into hers. When she outgrew his lap, the message crescendoed into screaming matches over school dances, missed curfews and C's in calculus.
Don't be like me.
Premkumar A. Walekar had dropped out of college. He worked two jobs. He bought a lottery ticket every day.
"I don't want you to go through what I go through," he'd say to Andrea, his firstborn.
On Oct. 3, shortly after his 54th birthday, he was shot and killed as he pumped gas into his taxi in Montgomery County, among the first victims in the Washington area sniper shootings. In life, his message often fell on defiant ears. In death, it falls on dutiful ones.
Tomorrow, Andrea Walekar, 24, will graduate from the University of Maryland University College, an event her father had anticipated for years. She thought about dropping out herself last semester, her studies forgotten in the stream of flowers, visitors, casseroles and interviews. Then she remembered what her dad would have wanted, what he always wanted.
Six days after his death, she e-mailed a professor, pledging to return the following week: "My father really wanted me to finish school and he was looking forward to my graduation. So this will just motivate me more."
In 1968, Premkumar Walekar left Pune, a city near India's west coast, to study electronics at Montgomery College. He found part-time work as a waiter. Then came a job driving a truck for a magazine distributor. In letters to his family, he depicted the United States as a place where sleep was scarce and car insurance high. He took a second job, as a chef.
Eventually, what had brought him to this country -- education -- seemed too expensive and time-consuming. In the early 1970s, he dropped out.
Over time, he brought over his two sisters and brother and their families. He returned to India to wed Margaret, a marriage arranged by his brother. Andrea was born in 1978, Andrew in 1979. The family bought a home in Wheaton, then Olney. Often though, Walekar would lament to his wife, "I wish I could have had money so I could finish my school."
She soothed him. "You did pretty good. You worked so hard for me and the children."
His brother, Vijay, called him a workaholic. In the mid-'90s, Walekar picked up a few night shifts driving a taxi. With the extra cash, he admittedly spoiled his children, nephews and nieces, taking them to the movies, buying the girls dolls and little purses, bringing home food from McDonald's between shifts. For birthdays and anniversaries, the extended family gathered for banquets at Indian restaurants and danced to the latest soundtracks from Bollywood, India's film industry.
His actions spoke for him. He was not the type of father to say, "I love you," all the time, leaving that to his wife. Andrea and Andrew grew up believing that their 5-foot-11 father -- "Tall for an Indian guy," Andrea said -- was like the superheroes they saw on television and in comic books. They revered yet feared him.
The Walekars, churchgoing Seventh-day Adventists, did not allow Andrea to date. That was something Americans did. Nor was she allowed to attend dances in middle school, except once at the end of eighth grade. Hours before her midnight curfew as a teenager, her father would start waiting for her.
She dreamed of being a supermodel and even made it past the initial rounds of the Miss India USA and Miss Maryland Teen USA pageants. Her father saw them as frivolous but nonetheless joined a host of relatives to cheer her on.
He seemed torn about what to tell this young woman in whom he saw so much of himself. As parents do, he and Margaret would stay up late talking about their children's futures. "Andrea is another dreamer, just like her dad," Margaret often said.
Later, he would tell Andrea: "Those pageants won't help you. You need to have an education."
Her desire to become a model faded as she pondered whether an Indian American could make it onto the catwalk or the pages of a fashion magazine. But as a senior at Sherwood High School, she didn't even bother applying to college, thinking her years of "goofing around" wouldn't impress an admissions committee.
Heeding her father's advice, almost a mandate, she enrolled at Montgomery College. She toyed with being a nurse like her mother, decided she preferred business and made the dean's list. When she received her associate's degree in 2000, her father implored her to attend the commencement exercises.
She told him it was no big deal. "You'll be there for my bachelor's," she said then.
On the morning of Oct. 3, she was awakened by a telephone call from a friend saying someone was going around Montgomery County shooting people. She turned on the television and thought she glimpsed her father's cab, adorned with stickers of the U.S. flag.
She drove to the gas station. "It's not your dad," she was assured. "They're saying he's black." With her father's dark complexion, people often made that mistake. Andrea sensed then that he was gone.
In the days that followed, she was afraid to be alone, afraid to go outside, afraid of the sniper. To keep her father's presence alive, she thought about getting a tattoo of his name in Hindi, but she knew there was only one way to honor his memory. She threw herself back into school.
Initially, she sent in her homework by e-mail. She took some midterms online.
She and Andrew took turns chauffeuring their mother, who doesn't drive, to her job at Montgomery General Hospital. Weeks after their father's death, the media remained part of their lives. Andrew, tired of the attention, and Margaret, too grief-stricken to speak, deferred to Andrea.
Patiently, she would recount anecdotes that helped the reporters piece together who her father was. She would slowly spell his name, locate Pune on a map, explain how arranged marriages work. She liked telling his story.
"I want everyone to know who my dad was," she said.
After graduation, she'll make a scrapbook of the news clippings. She wants her children to know who their grandfather was.
Once the sniper suspects were arrested, Andrea returned to her teller's job at the Provident Bank branch in the Silver Spring shopping center where a woman on a bench was felled by a sniper's bullet shortly after her father was. The supermarket where Andrea buys flowers for his grave is steps away from the liquor store where a clerk was shot in September, an attack that police have linked to the sniper suspects.
With reminders everywhere, Andrea's friends wanted to take her on a shopping trip to New York City to cheer her up. Just for a few days, she agreed in November. She needed to get back to class.
She finished the fall semester with a 3.2 grade-point average and signed up for six classes this spring to finish her degree in business management.
Between finals this week, she visited her father's grave, placing flowers next to the evergreens and azaleas her aunt had just planted.
So many of Premkumar Walekar's plans were pegged to his daughter's graduation. This summer, he and Margaret were going to return to Pune, where he planned to retire in an apartment building with marble floors, a security guard, a pool and a gym. But he wouldn't leave until Andrea had graduated and started a good job.
She's sending out r閟um閟 now, hoping to find a position in which she can help people. She wants to attend graduate school and thinks she'd like to be a recruiter, possibly tackling the nursing shortage.
On June 8, the family will celebrate her graduation with a party at Bombay Peacock Grill in Columbia. In a few years, the family expects to throw another -- for Andrew, who this summer starts college, as his father wanted.
For the rest of their lives, Andrea says, she and Andrew will face decisions by wondering what their father would have said. There are the little things: Should she take her nose ring out before an interview? There are the big things: Does she have to marry an Indian Christian?
When she wants to feel close to her father, Andrea often makes the same drive from home as his last. Down Georgia Avenue. Right on Connecticut. Right into the Mobil gas station's middle lane of pumps. She grips the green handle for regular gasoline and thinks how it was one of the last things her father touched. She smells the gasoline, as he must have. She looks around: a supermarket, an optometrist's office, the Mobil Mart. These were his last sights. He bought a lottery ticket before he was shot. He died dreaming.
What was he thinking? Did she make him proud? And still she asks why. Why did this happen? Why won't he be here to see her graduate?
Each of the 1,700 graduates from University College received six tickets to commencement. Andrea gave hers to her mother, grandmother, cousin, aunt, uncle and friend. Afterward, the rest of the family will meet to congratulate her -- at her father's grave.
Her mother has been picturing the scene and trying to blink back the tears.
"I don't want to cry because I don't want to discourage Andrea," she said. "He was very proud. . . . I want to carry that on."
Andrea has caught her mother a few times and tries to reassure her.
"Mom, don't cry," she says. ". . . After graduation, we'll go to the grave site, and I can tell him, 'I did it, Dad.' "
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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