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'If I can't find my Raju I don't know how I can face my wife'

Arup Chandain Calcutta

Om Prakash Shah wishes he is dead. He was travelling in the ill-fated Awadh-Assam express in which all the members of his family died.

"It would have been better if I'd also died with my family," said the inconsolable businessman from Cooch Behar district of West Bengal, while waiting at Islampur Hospital to take the bodies to his home town.

The Shahs were returning from a family reunion in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. His wife, Durga Shah, daughters, twelve-year-old Ritika and ten-year-old Ridima, and five-year-old son, Ritesh, perished in the accident.

"I was standing at the door of the compartment. Suddenly there was a deafening noise and I was flung out of the train." recalled Shah. "When I regained consciousness I found myself in a pool of blood and people screaming all around." Tears rolled down his cheeks.

"The sight inside the compartment was horrible. There was blood everywhere and bodies smashed. I found Ritika still alive."

Shah immediately summoned help from the local people and extricated Ritika from the mangled compartment and shifted her to the Islampur Hospital.

But the search and the time taken to extricate Ritika and the delay in reaching the hospital because of bad road condition proved fatal.

"I saw my daughter die before my eyes," he said in anguish.

But what was worse for this man was that the railway authorities refused to hand over the bodies to Shah till he lodged a FIR at the Islampur police station.

"For me there is no meaning in life now," he says.

Like Shah, Bharatbushan of Sagarpokhra village in Muzaffarpur of Bihar was also returning along with his family to his workplace in Assam in the same train.

Bharatbushan has lost his two-month-old son, Raju.

Bharatbushan had received severe injuries on his neck and became unconscious when the trains collided. He got up to find his wife, Koimi, and four-year-old daughter Sonmatia lying in a pool of blood inside the compartment. Raju, who was not even injured, was lying next to his mother.

"I handed over Raju to the military personnel who were helping the injured and then came out of the compartment through the broken windows and was shifted to North Bengal Medical College and Hospital," said Bharatbushan.

After receiving treatment he found out that his wife and daughter were admitted in the same hospital.

Bharatbushan broke down before the district magistrate of Dinajpur and said, " Sir, please help me out. For two days I have been to all the hospitals where the injured have been kept but I cannot find my Raju. I have asked the army people since I handed my child to some jawans but they could not trace him."

He is sure that his son is alive and that is what hurts him more. "If I cannot find him I do not know how I can face my wife. What will happen to Raju?" he asks officials at Gaisal.

But there's no one to hear him.

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