Palghar, Nov 16 The brutal killing of Palghar woman Shraddha Walkar has stupefied her friends in the Vasai-Virar region, including her college classmates who keep discussing the vivacious girl's grisly end in hushed tones since the past two days.
One such close classmate Sharda Jaiswal recalls how - a couple of years ago - many of her friends were aghast to see her going completely bald.
She had shaved off her head, probably due to depression or after her mother's death, though nobody knows the exact reasons, said Sharda.
She added how most friends found it shocking as "Shraddha was very obsessed about her generous tresses then", and later sported only a short boyish hairstyle.
Another close friend G. S. Menezes has warm memories of their entire friends' group going for trekking in different hills in Maharashtra or the foothills of Himalayas in the Himachal Pradesh and other parts of India.
Last May, she even visited the Garden Cafe at Baijnath in Himachal Pradesh, and would often go to other places as she loved nature and outings.
Sharda and Shraddha were classmates in the BMM course in Virar west, a few kms from her home in the twin township of Vasai east, where Menezes was also studying.
"In fact, when I joined college several years ago, she was among my first good friends and then we had quite a large group... Many of us used to go hiking, trekking, short outings in restaurants or coffee-shops, or long drives during weekends in one of our friends' cars," Menezes said.
There were some humorous instances too, in college, when many of the faculty members often mistook 'Sharda' and 'Shraddha', calling them by the other's name, as they giggled and corrected them.
"In college, she was very pleasant with all... friends with many... but close to only a very few people in the group... She took part in all projects, curricular activities, was jovial and fun-loving, though she seemed to have changed after coming in contact with her boyfriend," said Sharda.
Both Sharda and Menezes said after the first couple of years in college, she suddenly dropped out as "she wanted to be financially independent", joined a company called Decathlon and later a BPO
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