West Bengal: Amarnath victim’s body reaches home

KOLKATA: The body of Barsha Muhuri, the university student who lost her life to save her mother in the flash flood, was brought to her Baruipur residence on Monday morning. Her mother and uncle also reached Baruipur on Monday.
Muhuri, who got stuck in the flash flood at Amarnath, noticed a boulder coming down to hit her mother. She somehow managed to save mother but could not balance herself and got swept away. Assembly speaker and local MLA Biman Banerjee went to meet the family members at their Baruipur residence on Monday morning.
Meanwhile, there was a sense of relief in Sodepur when Narayan Chandra De, a bank employee who could not be contacted by family members since July 8, finally called up his niece on Monday morning. De had gone to Amarnath with his wife Ruma and son Sagar. “I spoke to them on July 8. Since then, we could not contact them. My uncle called me up from an Army camp at Shimla this morning,” said Sathi Sarkar, his niece. “They went with a team of nearly 50 pilgrims. They were at the camps near the cave and the tents were destroyed in the flash flood. Their mobile phones were also lost,” she said. De is likely to take a flight to Kolkata on Thursday.
Amarnath yatra resumed on Monday after the Army prepared an alternative route bypassing the area that got destroyed in the flash flood. Specialised teams were deployed to find if anyone else was trapped under the rubble. Some of the pilgrims, who waited for the routes to reopen, went for the Amarnath cave via an alternative route. “There was a couple — Chandan Garai and his wife Gita from Behala who were in the group we were travelling with. He stayed back and took the alternative route to the caves on Monday,” said Sourav Ghosh, a resident of Barasat. Ghosh, who got saved by a stroke of luck and dragged out five friends from inside the tent, is at Jammu now.