COIMBATORE: The body of a 27-year-old woman, who died in the stampede outside the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on Wednesday, was brought to her native Udumalpet in Tiruppur district on Thursday and cremated in the evening.
The deceased was identified as Kamatchi Devi, daughter of S Moorthy and S Rajalakshmi from VH Rao Nagar in Udumalpet.
Kamatchi has been working as an analyst at a leading e-commerce firm in Bengaluru in Karnataka state for the last eight years. Moorthi is a correspondent of Vivekananda Vidyalaya Higher Secondary School at Myvadi in Udumalpet.
On Wednesday, Kamatchi and her friends were near the stadium to celebrate the maiden victory of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) franchise in the Indian Premier League. In the ensuing chaos and stampede, Kamatchi and 10 others were killed.
Her body was brought to her native and kept at their school premises to pay respects. Kamatchi’s body was cremated in Udumalpet Town on Thursday evening.
'Feel like we lost someone from family.'
"We all feel like we have lost someone from our family, said Vidhya Varalakshmi from Udumalpet, a small town in interior Tamil Nadu, which woke up to the tragic news of the death of the Amazon employee.
Feted as a 'daughter of the soil' by her town people, Kamatchi was one of the 11 who died due to a stampede near Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on June 4.
"We are unable to digest that her life is snuffed out at such a young age," Varalakshmi told PTI Videos.
As the town waited for Kamatchi's mortal remains, people poured in, expressing their grief at having to be a witness to the 'unbearable loss of the town'.
"Literally everyone in our town knows the family, as they have been running a school for the underprivileged here for nearly 40 years now. Murthy's only daughter is Kamatchi. The school was started by her grandfather. We cannot believe that this has happened to that family," said a neighbour to PTI Videos.
Kamatchi had completed her MS in the United States, a rare feat in their part of the world, one of her relatives, Jayanthi, said.
She was of the opinion that, most likely, Kamatchi must have given in to peer pressure and gone to the ticketed event organised at Chinnaswamy Stadium on June 4 to celebrate RCB's historic IPL win.
"We were told that most tech companies had declared a holiday yesterday. She must have thought it would be fun to go out with her friends. What happened is really tragic," added Jayanthi.
Varalakshmi, who remembered Kamatchi as being soft-spoken and extremely kind-hearted, also said that almost everyone in the town thought she was going to accomplish many great things.
(With inputs from PTI)