Stranger than fiction

Dilip had absentmindedly tampered with a live system instead of the defective one.

That unforgettable day I was travelling by the Bombay-Howrah express to attend a meeting at Calcutta during which my mind was feverishly ruminating over that recent gruesome accident. Young Dilip had only just joined my department as a junior engineer in the Electrical section. Soon he had proved himself to be a strikingly intelligent and duty-conscious engineer capable of liquidating even complex technical problems. Yet there was something that was conspicuously odd about him. He kept himself aloof socially and maintained just the required level of communication due to which his peers knew little about his antecedents. Though my direct interaction with him was limited I could vaguely sense his persistently disturbed state of mind, which I had thought of discussing with him some day as the department head.

That fateful night I had the misfortune of receiving an emergency call from the night shift manager informing me that Dilip had been charred to death due to a massive flash-over while he was rectifying a fault in the high voltage switch gear. The on-the-spot inspection revealed that Dilip had absentmindedly tampered with a live system instead of the defective one that had been isolated for safety.

While I was, during the journey, trying to piece together the sequence of things  which could have lead an intelligent engineer of Dilip’s calibre to commit such a fatal error, the train stopped at Bilaspur where a sickly old gentleman entered my compartment and occupied the opposite berth. He seemed lost in his own thoughts to the extent that even my presence might not have registered in his mind though we were the only two in that compartment. It was evident from the distant unfocussed look in his moist sunken eyes that he was fully gripped by something gnawing within him. For no particular reason I instantly felt concerned which made me ask him casually about his destination to which he reluctantly replied that he himself didn’t know why he was going to Calcutta! Then all of a sudden, looking at me in the eye for the first time, he opened up and poured out his woes as if to unburden himself with some one in the hope of getting some solace. To cut the long story short, he was on the look out for his only son who had left him and his wife following a serious altercation over their stern opposition to his marrying a girl he loved belonging to a different community. Thereafter the boy had totally severed contact with them leaving them desolate and remorseful-- typical disastrous story of orthodox Indian families! This was the reason for his aimless travelling with the fond hope of finding his son!

Concluding his narration tearfully he held out the photograph of his son seeing which I froze in horror and my heart missed a beat — it was that of Dilip! A cruel quirk of fate had conjured up a painful and near-impossible coincidence! Before I could recover from the shock he asked in a feeble voice, “Will he ever come back?”
I did not have the heart to extinguish his flickering hope. “He might, God willing”, I stammered a comforting lie and could not muster courage to talk further till the train reached Howrah station.