A 20-year-old girl who completed schooling in Kolkata and is studying in France is spending sleepless nights in anxiety and helplessness as her parents and sister are in Ukraine.
Aakansha Das's father, mother and seven-year-old sister live in Dnipro. The family had initially planned to travel to border areas on Sunday but abandoned the idea, fearing they “might be stuck on the road with no fuel”.
The Telegraph spoke to Aakansha, who is in Lisbon in Portugal for a few days, on Sunday afternoon.
My parents had thought of travelling to the Ukraine-Hungary or Ukraine-Poland border but that would require 17 hours of travel, across 1,500km, from Dnipro.
There are checkposts on the way and there could be disturbances. There is no way of knowing which roads are functional. It would be logistically impossible to travel and they might be stuck on the road with no fuel. Other borders are almost equally far away and with so many people trying to flee, one does not know how many hours it could take to reach there.
So they decided to stay in the apartment in Dnipro. If the situation worsens, they would take shelter in the basement parking lot or a bomb shelter across the road.
I called up the Indian embassies of Poland, Hungary and Romania but was told that my family would have to reach borders and only then would they be able to help.
I am constantly in touch with my family through calls and text messages.
I want them to sleep at night and so I am awake tracking whatever news I get of the war. If I get any update on air raids, I can alert them.
This is as much as I can do for them. My sister is only seven and how do you tell such a young girl that one is at war?
My parents sounded calm in the first two days of the war but yesterday I felt they were panicking.
I am feeling guilty. How do I get to be safe when my family is not?
