TUSHAR’S BLOG

When 23-year-old Kunal Shah got up to give a woman his seat in the 6 pm train to Borivli, he didn’t realise he was giving death a second invitation. The management trainee, who worked for a publishing house in Dadar, had earlier in the evening turned down a request from a friend to hang out with him and catch a later train. Both decisions did him in.
On Tuesday, Kunal and a female colleague, Hemal Kamdar, boarded the train from Dadar station a little after 6 pm. At 6.25 pm tragedy struck.
While his colleagues and friends were frantically trying to reach him on his mobile when they heard about the blasts, Hemal jumped off from the ladies’ compartment and began a desperate search for her friend. It ended four hours later when she spied Kunal’s ATM card lying in the debris near what used to be the general first-class compartment. The young man had died on the spot.
Kunal’s father Rajnikant, who was away in Amritsar, was informed that his son’s condition was critical and he should return to Mumbai as soon as possible. A few of his friends in Amritsar arranged money for him to take a midnight flight to Delhi and then an early morning flight to Mumbai. When Rajnikant landed in Mumbai at 8.30 am on Wednesday, he had no idea that the dead body of his eldest son would be waiting for him at home.
The woman to whom the young man gave his seat before moving to the door seconds before the blast survived. “There wasn’t so much as a scratch on her though she was in the same compartment,’’ says a tearful Rajnikant. “She was the one who carried him to the hospital and remained there until someone from our family went to identify him.’’ Evidently, 7/11 was Kunal’s tryst with destiny. TNN