Kandikonda Ramani was the daughter of flower sellers. At 24, she was on track to getting a Master’s degree in Chemistry, hoping to land a government job. Perhaps a college lectureship. She would have been the first in her family to graduate and draw a salaried income. That was the future she and her family had always pictured, living in a one-room-and-kitchen flat in a government housing colony on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
But on April 10, Ramani ended her life. Exactly a month after her ex-boyfriend, Manohar, drew his own blood with a syringe and injected Ramani in her forearm. He had HIV.
His infection was the reason Ramani’s parents refused to let them marry. Manohar thought if she was also infected with the virus, her parents would be left with no alternative but to let them marry, the police said after arresting him for attempted murder. Manohar is also Ramani’s second cousin.
While Ramani was under treatment and dealing with the trauma from Manohar’s attack, a YouTube video pushed her to breaking point. Vedhaan Media, a sensationalist YouTube channel with almost a million subscribers, put out an interview with Manohar’s mother Rama, his brother Venu, and an advocate named Shiva Kumar. In the interview, they purportedly claimed that Manohar was innocent, that the horrific plan of injecting his blood was actually Ramani’s idea. They insinuated that the two of them had been sexually involved, as if that somehow mitigated Manohar’s actions. The video is no longer available online.
Ramani squarely blamed this interview for her suicide. In a video she recorded minutes before her death, she said, “They have ruined my life by putting it out on social media for lakhs of people to see. They ruined my character. I don’t want to live without respect.” She broke down before every sentence.
Since she was 19, Ramani had been dealing with one distressing problem after another, all while handling her studies and working part-time teaching jobs.
First, she found out almost eight months into dating Manohar that he had hidden his HIV infection from her. He and his family somehow persuaded her that it wasn’t a big deal.
Last year, after they had been dating for around four years, she told her parents about their relationship. Her parents convinced her that HIV wasn’t a trivial condition, and arranged her marriage with someone else.
But Manohar and his family, along with Ramani’s grandmother, tried to persuade her that she was making the wrong decision. When her parents looked for guidance from religious leaders, one pastor told them that having faith could help manage HIV.
In her suicide note, Ramani kept apologising to her parents over and over. “Mummy, forgive me. You worked so hard to give me an education, but I ruined my life. I shouldn’t have loved him. You had so much trust and hope in me, and I ruined it all. Sorry, mummy. If there’s another life, I wish to be born to you again.”
When TNM visited her home two weeks after her death, her grief-stricken parents were still struggling to make sense of everything that has happened to them in the past few months.
Every thought was laced with doubt and regret – what if they had learned of their daughter’s relationship sooner, what if Manohar had tried to elope with her instead, what if she never saw the awful YouTube video, what if she had just stopped checking her phone, what if she had put out her own video debunking the accusations, what if they had moved to a different house which didn’t constantly remind her of Manohar’s assault, what if they had kept closer watch on her the day she died…
Ramani was already guilted and conflicted by some of her family elders’ ignorance and misguidance, when Manohar committed the reckless, vicious attack. She was heartbroken, scared, and struggling to hold on to hope, when the YouTube channel tried to capitalise on the shock value of the violence inflicted on her. That became the last straw for her. Our story tries to piece together the series of harsh events that ended in Ramani’s death.