[Photo: Mr Michael Puhaindran speaking to more than 15 reporters yesterday for the first time. He broke down several times during the 45-minute interview.]
by Rachel Chan
EVEN to the very end, Ms Lo Hwei Yen , the 28-year-old lawyer who was killed in last week's Mumbai terrorist attack, had remained stoically calm.
Breaking his silence yesterday afternoon at her wake at Teresa Ville, her husband, Mr Michael Puhaindran, 37, shared her last words with the media at his first press interview.
Composed, the corporate counsel recounted their conversation.
"In a steady voice she was talking to me, and, reacting to her, I was trying to remain calm as well. Only in her very last sentence did she say, "Please tell them to hurry up."
"That was when I couldn't really take it. I told her I loved her so very much, and she said the same thing. Those were the last words," he said, voice wavering and eyes welling up.
That was their fourth, and last, telephone conversation in seven hours, at about 6am on Thursday.
Agonising hours later, at about 9.35pm, he would identify her body, feet clad in bedroom slippers, on the 19th floor of Mumbai's Oberoi Trident Hotel.
Accompanied by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), he was led up the steps of the pitch-black hotel to where Ms Lo's body lay.
"I was able to touch her cheek," he said. "She still looked very beautiful."
Ms Lo, a shipping-finance associate with offshore firm Stephenson Harwood, had flown to India's financial capital on Wednesday morning (Indian time) to deliver a talk.
She first called him at about midnight, when she heard gunshots fired outside her hotel. She had just returned to the Oberoi after drinks with clients.
About 15 minutes later, she said she was in a stairwell on the 10th floor, with security and hotel staff, waiting for the police.
The couple did not manage to speak to each other again until after 5am. She called to say that she was being held at gunpoint by "only five terrorists" armed with handguns and grenades.
That was when Mr Puhaindran called MFA for assistance. His wife, a self-confessed "crackberry addict" - chuckling as he described her so - had sent an e-mail message via BlackBerry to three of her close friends at 6.36am, telling them of the hostage situation.
He said: "She ended off by saying, 'If I don't make it out of here, I love you all'."
Ms Lo was shot in the head and abdomen.
Fighting back sobs, Mr Puhaindran said he took solace in "how she was strong, right up to the point she was killed."
"There's really no need to know any more. It was quick and sudden and...probably painless," he said. "And that will be enough for people to know."
