By the time the wedding band entered Mansarovar Park in the national capital on November 29, 14-year-old Sahil Ansari, unaware that his life would end within moments, had just finished another long day at the neighbourhood grocery shop.
For months, his routine had barely shifted: unlocking shelves at dawn, stacking packets through the afternoon, and pulling down the shutter late into the night. The shop was small, but the hours were not. The Muslim family had migrated from Jharkhand, his father paralysed last year, and Sahil had dropped out of school. Quietly, without complaint, work had replaced childhood.
On his way home that evening, Sahil stopped to buy a chocolate. A wedding procession was passing through the DDA Market stretch. Children from the neighbourhood ran alongside the baraat, the groom’s procession, where ₹500 notes were being thrown as part of the celebration. They were later found to be fake. Sahil joined them, still holding half the chocolate in his hand.
Witnesses say a man from the procession grabbed him by the collar, accusing him of “gate-crashing” and trying to pick up money. The confrontation escalated in seconds. The man slapped Sahil and pulled out a firearm.
He was not a bouncer or security staff hired for the wedding, but CISF constable Madan Kumar Tiwari, posted in Kanpur and attending a relative’s wedding while on leave.
“He shot him after slapping him,” said one of the boys who was present. “He even fired at us when we tried to run.”
The bullet hit Sahil near the ear. Locals raised an alarm, police arrived, and his family, who lived a short walk away, reached before the body was moved. At GTB Hospital, he was declared dead. A post-mortem followed the next morning.
Sahil’s mother Nisha recalls his day in strict sequences, each hour measured in labour.
“He left at 7 a.m., had lunch at one, and came home after nine,” she told Maktoob. “He had just finished work. That’s all.”
This was not a child “loitering” at a wedding, he was the only wage earner his family could depend on after his father’s paralysis.
His father, Sirajuddin Ansari, still struggles to accept that the police first called it a “minor scuffle in a baraat.”
“The person was drunk,” he said. “He took out the pistol and shot the bullet in his child’s head. It took me a while to reach, but my wife reached immediately, he was already dead. His life ended in five minutes.”
For both parents, this was no accident, but the deliberate choice to fire at a child without asking a single question.
“If they alleged he was a thief, there is a police station right beside,” his mother said. “They could have taken him there. Why shoot? My child had no mistake. He didn’t even ask his name or where he came from.”
The constable was later arrested in Uttar Pradesh and booked for murder. The firearm has been seized, though unanswered questions remain, whether the weapon was personal or service-issued, and why an armed member of a security force carried a gun to a private celebration.
Sahil’s friends, aged 12 to 16, do not speak of bail or laws or IPC sections. They remember a slap, a gun, a sound. One whispers that Sahil “thought the note was real,” and then falls silent.
His mother says Sahil wasn’t the kind of child who would fight back.
“If it was an older child, they might have fought. But my child was only 14. He never fought with anyone, he didn’t even know how to abuse. He was so innocent.”
She bristles at the implication that children picking notes justified violence.
“At weddings, so many children go for such things. But guns aren’t allowed in weddings. Yet that person still took it.”
The baraat continued after the shot. Lights moved forward on rented poles. Music kept playing. Children who had rushed for the notes scattered into nearby lanes. Police sealed a section of the road. And on the pavement where fake currency had been thrown, lay the still body of a boy who spent his days working so his family could survive.
“I just want justice,” Sirajuddin said. “No one came to us. No police official came. Only the media came.”
Grief has replaced exhaustion in the small home Sahil left every morning. The family sits together, waiting for a justice system that too often delays for families like theirs, migrant, poor, Muslim, unseen.
