A bizzare mix-up of identities on a railway track turned a tragedy on its head on Tuesday with a 40-year-old man losing and regaining his life within a matter of hours.
It was on Saturday last that Antony Mathai who works in a construction company, left for Bhubaneswar by the Trivandrum-Howrah Express.
On Tuesday morning a phone call from the local police informed his family in Alappuzha that Mathai had been knocked down by a train at Jolarpet near Chennai. His belongings had been found near his body.
The shell-shocked relatives of Mathai and his wife Marykuttty at first tried to keep the news under wraps but were soon forced to spill the beans when crowds began to gather at the house.
“We arranged an ambulance and some of us were getting ready to go to Chennai when the unthinkable happened in the evening,” said Mr John Mathew, a neighbour.
Around 6 pm Mathai himself called home to inform them he had reached Orissa safely though somebody had got away with his belongings!
“At first we thought someone as playing a prank. So we called back and confirmed that the caller was indeed Antony Mathai himself,” Mr Mathew said.
Mathai told his wife and two children that he was offered a guava by a person sitting next to him in the train.
The next thing he recollected was that he had become sleepy. When he got up, he found that the person had made off with his bag.
But fate willed otherwise and the thief somehow got knocked down by a train at Jolarpet.
The Chennai police uncovered the man’s ‘identity’ from his bag not knowing that it was actually a stolen good.
On being informed by Chennai police, the Alappuzha Superintendent of Police called up Mathai’s house to deliver the bad news.
However, with Mathai himself calling home within a couple of hours, the funereal atmosphere turned into one of celebration.