Greater Noida bus fire: Rush at Noida mortuary; IIT Delhi engineer searches for fiancée

For 22km after it left from Kashmere Gate, around 8

For 22km after it left from Kashmere Gate, around 8.39 pm, Mohit Sharma followed the bus on his scooter, speaking to his fiancée Shruti Rawat, who was onboard, the entire distance. After 52 minutes, somewhere in Noida, she forced him to turn back. The time Mohit spoke to her was in an 18-second call at 10:21pm to say goodnight.

People outside Sector 94 mortuary on Thursday. (Sunil Ghosh / Hindustan Times)

Around 11.30pm, the bus caught fire while it was on the Yamuna Expressway in Greater Noida. Nine people, including Shruti, were killed in the incident.

“As per the passenger list received from the operator, there were 35 people in the bus. Nine bodies were recovered,” said a police officer involved in the investigation. Till late on Thursday, only six victims had been identified: Shruti Rawat, in her 30s, from Chhatarpur in Madhya Pradesh; Saroj Gupta, 52, Usha Devi, 62, and Mayank Gupta, 28, all from Hamirpur; Devendra Bharadwaj, 60, from Hisar, Haryana; and Harisharan, 55, from Orai.

“When we are in love, we cannot easily say goodbye to a person with whom we are connected,” Mohit said at a post-mortem house in Noida’s Sector 94, where he was waiting to identify Shruti.

Mohit, in his 30s, works as a supercomputer engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. He had been in a relationship with Shruti, a project manager at an IT company in Noida and a native of Chattarpur in Madhya Pradesh, for seven months, and they were due to be married in November. “I met her through a distant relative,” he recalled.

On Wednesday, she was travelling to celebrate her sister’s birthday in Orai in Jalaun (Uttar Pradesh) when the fire broke out. He regrets changing his plans to join her. “I was also planning to go. Maybe I could have saved her. I feel helpless,” he said.

He learnt about the incident around 6.30am when Shruti’s sister reached the final stop to pick her up and was told by the bus operator that the bus had caught fire in Greater Noida.

“Flashbacks of our memories and the time we spent together keep coming back to me,” he said.

Losing a father

Harisharan Gupta, 53, from Orai in Jalaun, had come to Noida to check on his son, Om, a BTech graduate who had been ill. They were going back home and had boarded the bus from Noida’s Sector 37.

While Om escaped the fire without injuries, his father got stuck inside the bus as people struggled to exit the vehicle.

According to a family member who did not want to be identified, “Om informed us that chaos erupted inside the bus when they learnt about the fire. People started rushing out over each other. Om was pushed by his father to escape, but by the time he managed to get out, he got stuck in the narrow passage of the bus and could not come out.”

After waiting for minutes when Om’s father did not come out and he could not find him, he called his sister in Noida. When she reached the spot, charred bodies were being pulled out from the bus after the fire had been extinguished.

Did not learn for hours

Some people did not learn about the incident for hours. A family of Greater Noida was also at the mortuary, waiting to identify Saroj (53) and her nephew Mayank (28), both residents of Rath, UP, who died in the fire.

“My mother and cousin, who had come to attend a family function at my home in Greater Noida, boarded the bus from Noida’s Sector 37 around 10.30 pm. Around 3 pm on Thursday, my relative, who had booked their tickets, received a call from the bus operator informing them that a fire had broken out in the bus. They did not tell us about the deaths,” said Saroj’s daughter Nancy, in her 30s.

The bodies of the six victims who have been identified were handed to their family members after a post-mortem, said Ajay Kumar Singh, station house officer, Jewar. “The identities of the remaining three bodies kept in the mortuary could not be ascertained. Their post-mortem examinations will be conducted on Friday.”