Father refuses to believe his son died in an Odisha train crash, and finds him alive in the morgue.
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One Kolkata man, who refused to believe his son had died in the Odisha train crash, travelled over 200 km to search for him and finally found him alive in a morgue.
Sometimes fact reads stranger than fiction, like in the case of one Kolkata man who refused to believe his son had died in the Odisha train crash, and who travelled over 200 km to search for him and finally found him alive in a morgue.
Helaram Malik got news of the Odisha three-train crash, a few hours after he dropped his son Biswajit off at Shalimar Station to board the Coromandel Express. According to a report, Helaram, a Howrah-based shopkeeper, called up his 24-year-old son on his cellphone as soon as he received news of the accident.
Biswajit picked up the call and answered in a feeble voice: He was alive, but in terrible pain.
Helaram did not waste a moment. He got in touch with Palash Pandit, a local ambulance driver, and decided to travel 230 km to the site of the crash at Odisha’s Balasore. Accompanied by his brother-in-law Dipak Das, Helaram reached Balasore on Friday night itself.
However, despite inquiring at all the hospitals in the vicinity where train crash victims were being treated, Helaram could not find his son.
“We never gave up,” Das told. “We went around asking people, hoping to get leads on where to go next. One person told us that if we could not find anyone in hospital, we should look at the Bahanaga high school, where the bodies were kept. We could not accept it, but it went anyway.”
At the makeshift morgue, they were not allowed to look at the bodies. However, Helaram and Das were present when a commotion broke out at the morgue because some people saw a victim’s right hand shivering. The man was none other than Biswajit, who had been presumed dead and kept in the morgue.
The 24-year-old was unconscious and had suffered serious injuries in the crash. His father and uncle immediately put him in the ambulance and drove him to Balasore hospital, where he received treatment.
“Given his condition, they referred him to Cuttack Medical College Hospital, but we signed a bond and got him discharged,” said Das.
The family then drove Biswajit to SSKM Hospital in Kolkata for further treatment. His condition is critical but stable, and he has undergone surgery on his ankle with further surgeries expected to take place today.
