Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Strug­gling to cope with the death of Sasha Lyssa Ali-Bis­nath, five of her cousins and her on­ly broth­er Rossi Ali yes­ter­day tat­tood her name in Ara­bic across their bod­ies. Ali said he want­ed to have Lyssa's name next to his heart as his way of cop­ing with her sud­den demise. Ali-Bis­nath died af­ter she had a cae­sar­i­an sec­tion done at a pri­vate nurs­ing home on De­cem­ber 20. Her ba­by Siara Bis­nath and two-year-old So­lara daugh­ter are now in the care of her par­ents.

Speak­ing at their Freeport home yes­ter­day, Rossi said life with­out Lyssa was un­bear­able. He said af­ter he de­cid­ed on the tat­too, five of her cousins-Am­rit, Damien, Loris­sa, Saman­tha and Am­ri­ta Ba­boolal-al­so tat­tooed her name on their ab­domen, legs and fore­arms.

"Every morn­ing when we wake up we re­mem­ber that she is gone. We can­not sleep, we can­not eat. I still can­not be­lieve this. Every­body say­ing that each day will be bet­ter, but this is not true. The pain is there every sin­gle day," Rossi wept. He said a coun­sel­lor came to speak to him last week and told him he was still in the stage of de­nial.

Ali said he had nev­er been apart from his sis­ter and the tragedy of her death was too much to bear. Fear­ful of a cov­er-up, Ali said he want­ed Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan to reg­u­larise the op­er­a­tions of pri­vate health in­sti­tu­tions. Khan has al­ready launched a probe in­to the death and has as­sured that a state­ment would be is­sued pend­ing the com­ple­tion of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Ali said So­lara had been con­stant­ly ask­ing for her moth­er. "We tell her that her mom­my is in heav­en but she does not un­der­stand that. She says that she wants to go to heav­en too." He added that the death had af­fect­ed the fam­i­ly so much that some of his fe­male cousins no longer want­ed to have chil­dren.

Ali's moth­er Leela called on Gov­ern­ment to pro­vide psy­cho­log­i­cal help to her fam­i­ly. She al­so ques­tioned why there was on­ly one doc­tor on du­ty at the time when her daugh­ter un­der­went the cae­sar­i­an sec­tion. Al­though she did not dis­close de­tails of the med­ical re­port, Leela said she did not want such an in­ci­dent to hap­pen to any oth­er fam­i­ly.

She said while the fam­i­ly files le­gal ac­tion, their at­tor­ney ad­vised them to keep all med­ical re­ports con­fi­den­tial. Ali-Bis­nath's hus­band Damien was re­port­ed to have gone to the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to col­lect fur­ther med­ical records.