“My daughter wanted the world to know her; I wish she did not have to die for that,” mother Asha Dua said in the family’s Faridabad home on Wednesday, the day her body was cremated.

Dua said Yamini, a Class X student, was a “happy, ambitious and friendly” girl. And she was popular in her school — St Joseph, Faridabad. “Her entire class came here to offer condolences,” Dua said. “She was very popular with everyone in school, and outside.”

It’s tough forgetting the last moments, she said. “I packed her luggage to the last details the night before she left for the trip. She wanted me to pack in a camera, too — she was keen to capture every detail in it.”

Yamini got her way, of course, for “she was a very strong-willed girl; she made sure she got what she wanted.”

Elder sister and best friend Kanika, a final-year Physiotherapy student, is still in too much big a shock to talk much. The two, she said, have shared the same room all their life. She pointed a collage of their pictures — from childhood to adolescence — on the bedroom wall, and then waved her around to point out the emptiness. “I was the closest person to her.”

Yamini had gone to Chamba for a picnic with 60 schoolmates and six school staff members. On the banks of Ravi, she and three girls were swept away when a huge tide gushed in. The other three survived.

The family today said the dam on the river was opened to let out excess without prior warning, which led to the tragedy. “But we won’t ask for action,” father Vijay Dua said. “Our daughter is gone. No amount of action will bring her back.”

The body was cremated on Wednesday afternoon.

In Chamba, inquiry ordered
SHIMLA: A magisterial inquiry has been ordered to find out causes that led to Yamini’s drowning. Chamba Deputy Commissioner Pushpendra Rajput today said the Chamera Dam authorities would be questioned as to why the water level went up without prior warning. The inquiry has been marked to SDM R K Gautam. Additional Superintendent of Police S R Rana said the group had halted for lunch at Tadoli, on the bank of Ravi, some three kilometres ahead of Chamba on Pathankot road.