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'Like a cursed machine, the bus went on rolling over and over...'

Fog. Dirty, dense fog. It enveloped the bus completely, wrapping itself around like a thick wet blanket.

Inside, the driver was finding it difficult to navigate. The lights had been malfunctioning and he couldn't see very far. Most of the picnickers were asleep in their seats. They had had a full day at Hazarduari in Lalbagh, before setting off for home at 2030 hours.

With the the lights giving trouble, the passengers had to spend the better part of the night in Murshidabad, before starting off at 0330 hours again.

Behind the driver, Kajal Sanyal was awake. He was on the aisle seat and could almost feel the driver's tension. The man was using his muffler on the wheel -- maybe, his hands were too cold. They were in Jalangi now, near the Old Thana More.

Kajal closed his eyes and tried to doze. But before sleep could come, there was a screech of tyres and he found himself crashing through the windowpane...

That saved his life. From where he landed on the ground, he could see the bus, framed in the eerie half-light of the dawn, turning over and over before disappearing into the thick fogblanket.

“One moment I was inside with my friends, going back home, happy and relaxed,” he says, “The next, I was out, watching the bus hurtling towards death, with my friends trapped inside and screaming for help."

Sixty feet down, the bus hit the ground, rolled over several times and careened down a grassy strip into the ice-cold water of the Padma river. And sank. It came to rest at the bottom, taking with it most of its 86 passengers.

Nineteen lucky ones managed to swim ashore, and the authorities fished out 54 bodies, including two teachers and two cooks. Twelve are still untraced.

“I woke up feeling an emptiness in my stomach. Then I crashed into the seat in front as our bus lifted itself suddenly and started spinning in the air,” says Krishnendu Pal, one of the survivors, “Like a cursed machine, it went on rolling over and over... I thought I would not live to see another day.”

The driver Gurupada Biswas and his helper had, seconds before the bus hit the water, jumped out. They fled the scene immediately, but later surrendered.

Biswas's statement to the police said that he didn't see a turn on the road because of the fog. And when he saw it, it was too late to do anything.

Many of the survivors, however, blame him for the mishap. Had he been younger the accident could have been avoided, they say.

"The bus was not running at high speed," Arun Kumar Sarkar, a class XI student said, “But our driver was old and unwell, and found it difficult to see through the dense fog.”

Taraknath Rajak, another student, said the mishap occurred after the driver misjudged a bend and accelerated by mistake. Another version is that his muffler got entangled and he couldn't turn the wheel.

The police version, meanwhile, places the blame squarely on Biswas's shoulder. Accordingly, he was speeding 'through near-zero visibility', when he lost control.

The students -- mostly from the Jagannath high school, the Jamsherpur high school, the Karimpur Girls school and Panna Devi college in Karimpur -- were on a picnic organised by a tutorial there. All were enrolled at the centre, whose owner-teacher Sanatan Dey was killed along with his colleague Sanjib Biswas. All 10 girls who were in the group were killed.

Police officials said the bus, owned by Karimpur businessman Braja Dutta, did not have a permit for plying the route.

Murshidabad district magistrate Saurav Das, meanwhile, has contacted his counterparts in the Kushtia and Rajshahi districts of Bangladesh (the river flows across the border) as some of the untraced bodies may have been swept across.

EARLIER REPORT:
66 drown as bus plunges into river

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