HYDERABAD: A Pall of gloom had descended over the neighbourhood where Vemuri Tulsiram, the 34-year-old who died in the serial suicide blasts in Sri Lanka, resided. Teary-eyed family members and friends bid their last goodbyes to the scar-ridden body of the Hyderabadi businessman, who was buried on Wednesday afternoon at a church in Borabanda.
“He was a good man,” Tulsiram’s cousin Phani Kumar told Express. His entire family had congregated in their residence in Nagarjuna Nagar colony after the burial, and Tulsiram’s mother, who had lost her husband a decade ago was attending to her relatives. “She was very ill until yesterday. Tulsiram used to take care of her. She has been inconsolable. However, she is better now with everyone around her.”
For Phani, Tulsiram was a man who did what he wanted. “He loved taking drives. He often drove all the way from Hyderabad to Vijayawada to visit me. He was also taking flight lessons,” Phani, a businessman by profession, said, adding that he was unsure if Tulsiram wanted to take up flying commercially.
Tulsiram, who belonged to an upper-middle class family, had considerable business interests in various places including Kurnool, where he owned a land. “He was at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka with his friends when the incident happened. He was on business over there and had plans to open a casino.”
“We came to know of what happened when one of his friends, who escaped alive from the blast, returned to India. Later, we were also intimated by the Embassy in Sri Lanka and they helped us get his body back,” Phani said, adding that they realised the intensity of the blast when they saw Vemuri’s body which, despite being embalmed, had scars all over it.
On Sunday, 8 bombs ripped apart Sri Lanka, leaving over 359 dead. That attack has been claimed to be perpetrated by ISIS as a retaliation to the Christchurch terror attack on mosques.