For many from Bengal, search for relatives ends at morgues

BAHANAGA: The search by several families from Bengal, looking for their relatives who had gone missing after the Balasore train tragedy, ended in a makeshift morgue, set up in a classroom at a school in Bahanaga, where bodies were brought in from the crash site, around 700m away.
Two-hundred-and-eighty-eight people were killed in the collision involving two passenger train-Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express and Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express -travelling in the opposite direction and a freight carrier in a loop line in Balasore on Friday.
On receiving the news, Manoranjan Mistri left his Sonarpur home to reach Bahanaga in Odisha around 10am on Saturday. He scouted the crash site for his two neighbours-Dipankar Mondal and Arnab Mistri-for over four-and-a-half hours but he could not find either amid the debris and the mangled remains of the trains. Manoranjan was directed to the school, where he met Anirban Sengupta, a West Midnapore deputy magistrate, who was guiding people from Bengal at a camp office in this morgue. After Mistri identified himself and showed Sengupta his neighbours' Aadhaar documents, he was taken to a room, where bodies, draped in white cloth, were lined up. But it was not easy to identify anyone there, as most of the bodies had blackened in the impact of heavy injuries. Mistri managed to find Dipankar's body, but not that of Arnab. "Dipankar, Arnab and Sushanta Hazra had taken the Coromandel Express for Chennai, where they were going to work as masons. Only Sushanta survived. He called us to say the others were missing," said Manoranjan. Dipankar's body will be taken back home, but Manoranjan will stay back, trying to trace Arnab at the Balasore hospital and Soroh hospital morgues.
Apart from the Bahanaga school, bodies have also been kept at another makeshift camp near the railway gat. Till 4pm on Saturday, 31 casualties from Bengal had been identified at the morgues.
Oidul Naskar, another resident of South 24-Parganas, also found his relative Miraj Sk's last remains in the same makeshift morgue. Purna Giri from East Midnapore managed to trace the bodies of two of his acquaintances-Bholanath Giri and Narayan Pradhan-but could not find Rajen Kumar Daktar and Sunil Pradhan, the two others he had gone looking for.