A table covered with photographs, a heap of bodies and phone numbers of doctors — relatives of train passengers missing since Friday’s disaster are left with these options to know the fate of their near and dear ones.
Those who are stumbling upon the bodies of their near ones are lucky. For the rest, the search continues.
Sheikh Jahangir from Panskura in Purba Medinipur has been looking for his missing brother, Sheikh Sayel Ali, since Friday night. Sayel was in coach S1 of the Coromandel Express. On Sunday afternoon, Jahangir tracked the 15-year-old down to a morgue in a hospital in Bhubaneswar, around 200km from the accident site near Balasore.
Sayel was tagged as “dead body number 177”.
Sayel was on his way to Chennai to look for a job in a marble-cutting factory with five others from his village.
“As soon as we got to know about the accident, one of my cousins called up Sayel. An unknown person answered the call and said he was being taken to a hospital. That was the last we heard about him,” Jahangir said. “Between Friday night and 10.30pm on Saturday, we kept calling up his number but no one answered. At 11pm, the phone was switched off.”
In their search for Sayel, Jahangir and a relative went to the Balasore Medical College and Hospital.
They couldn’t locate him among the bodies. Nor was there any picture of him among the photographs of the victims lying on a table.
Their next stop was a hospital in Soro and then the SCB Medical College Hospital in Cuttack.
“They were a group of six inside the S-1 compartment. Four of his friends managed to survive but my brother and Kartick, the sixth, were missing. At Cuttack, we sought help from some journalists and handed them a picture of my brother,” Jahangir said.
On Sunday, someone called from Bhubaneswar and asked Jahangir and his relative to contact a hospital there. The two, who were in Balasore, called up some contacts in Bhubaneswar who finally identified Sayel. “The doctors said the body would undergo post-mortem before being handed to us. Those at the hospital had sent a photograph of our brother on WhatsApp and I identified him,” said Jehangir.
A family from Patashpur in Purba Medinipur have been searching for Manas Maity since Friday evening. Kalipada, the eldest of three brothers, was the first to leave for Balasore on Friday night. He returned on Saturday, unable to trace the youth in his 30s who was travelling to Chennai on the Coromandel Express.
Ranjit, the youngest, then left for Balasore.
“We had posted the picture of my missing brother on social media and sought help after failing to trace him in Balasore. The block development officer in Patashpur first contacted us. Subsequently, the officer-in-charge of Patashpur police station passed on the number of a doctor at AIIMS Bhubaneswar,” Ranjit said.
At the hospital, doctors forwarded a link to photographs of unclaimed bodies to Ranjit’s phone through WhatsApp. Each missing person is captured in a set of three photographs. Ranjit stopped at one as the man in the picture looked like his missing brother.
“The face was partly damaged. But I realised the bedsheet on my brother was ours. The doctor said a DNA test would be conducted. My blood sample will be taken. If the reports match, the body will be handed to us,” Ranjit said.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee said on Sunday evening that 182 passengers from Bengal were still untraced.
“There are many people who are in Balasore looking for their missing relatives. The state government is making arrangements for their stay till they identify the bodies,” Mamata said.
“Identifying bodies is not easy. At times, parts of the body get tampered with.... Then there is the DNA test.” Railway officials in Balasore said they have kept pictures of the deceased at different hospitals to help relatives identify them.
“Some bodies have been kept in a house in Balasore. Others are in morgues in hospitals in Bhubaneswar, Soro, Cuttack and a few other places,” said an official. “We have also placed the pictures on tables outside the places where the bodies have been kept.”