Career
In 1996, aged 76, she was a witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2013 she was posthumously awarded South Africa"s national Order of Luthuli. Following Timol’s arrest, on 23 October 1971, at 3 am, in the early hours of the morning, the Security Police raided Desai’s home.
She was then taken to the notorious John Vorster Square prison in Johannesburg, where she was interrogated for the next four days.
One afternoon, she heard furniture being thrown about in the next room, followed by screams. lieutenant was the “most terrible moment of my life” she told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Teaching Resource Center) in 1996.
Later, it emerged that Timol had fallen from the tenth floor window of the John Vorster Square prison. The police claimed that Timol had jumped to his death.
On the first day of her trial, she suggested to her lawyer that he contact Timol who would be able to shed light on the literature found in her car.
lieutenant was only then that she learnt of Timol’s death. She served most of her sentence alongside the longtime African National Congress stalwart Dorothy Nyembe, and for a short while with Winnie Mandela, whose defiance and courage she greatly admired. After five years imprisonment at Barberton and Kroonstad Prisons, she was released in 1978.
By then she was South Africa"s longest-serving Indian woman political prisoner, and was placed under a banning order and house arrest for a further five years.
