THE LAST JOURNEY BY RICKSHAW
FROM KUMUD JENAMANI, Telegraph, April 9
Jamshedpur, April 8:
Some days ago, Humayun Kabir was on a special mission for his
country. Maybe on the border where he would have been looking
down the barrel of the enemy's gun. Maybe in Gujarat where the
army was called to maintain peace.
The 38-year-old jawan did not live to tell the tale to his
family in Murshidabad district. Death came not in some heroic
battle to save the country but on a train that was taking him
home, when he was very close to home.
Between Rourkela and Chakradharpur, in Jharkhand near the Bengal
border, Kabir died after what has been diagnosed in preliminary
findings as a heart attack without treatment because trains do
not have doctors in attendance.
Kabir, a father of three, was travelling to Howrah en route to
Murshidabad from his base at Ahmednagar in Maharashtra.
His friend Md Akhtar said over the phone from Ahmednagar that
Kabir had a severe stomach-ache the day he boarded the train.
Akhtar revealed that just a few days before, Kabir had completed
a special mission.
Last night on the Pune-Howrah Azad Hind Express, after he
complained of chest pain, fellow passengers informed the
Chakradharpur station. But when railway officials turned up with
doctors around 9.30 pm, he was dead.
Kabir's journey home — in death — began there. Since the
Chakradharpur hospital did not have a freezer to keep the
body until his relations arrived, it was sent to Tatanagar by
a local train. In Tatanagar, there was no cortege neatly covered
with the tricolour waiting to take him. It was wrapped in what
looked like a bedspread and was tied to a stretcher and put on a
cycle-rickshaw.
The rickshaw-puller pedalled his way across 7 km through the heart
of the city, sundry marketplaces before finally arriving at the
mortuary. "I had a hard time dragging the body from the railway
station. It is heavy and I have had to pedal hard through the
undulating terrain," the rickshaw-puller said.
He had no knowledge that the body was of a jawan. "Even if I was
aware of it, what could I have done?" he asked.
The Government Railway Police was in charge of the body. An officer
on duty at the GRP’s Chakradharpur station said: "Was it disrespect
to put a human body on a rickshaw? Okay, he was an armyman, but for
the police every man is equal."
