If they cared they would have noticed. So when they did not notice they did not care. Resultantly there was a heart-rending sight with deaths and badly injured people. The whole length of the speeding train ran over them and the people’s shrieks rented the air in the backdrop of effigy burning.
On the one hand, the flames were loftily rising up in the sky while on another hand people were moaning with an inner roiling turmoil of frightened minds. The train passed away but the trails of sadness still linger among the people.
The railways stretched the cause of accident after trespassing while the state government ordered a magisterial enquiry into the unfortunate tragedy. If permission for conducting the programme was taken, why were lapses not noticed? If the wall demarcates the track from the ground why were people not forbidden to collect by the railway tracks?
If the effigy was burnt into ashes, the dead souls were also not returning. The burning of Ravan’s effigy was a climax of Dussehra festivities but the Amritsar train tragedy was an anti-climax on that Friday’s fateful evening.
Until all hours of the night, the people attempted to find out the bodies scattered all along the track. People on the track faced the horror more terrifying than the effigy burning rite within the echoes of high-density firecrackers.
The sparkling sight was soon saddened with despair and doom. The noise was so deafening as to subdue the train’s whistling shrill. The train with the splash of blood tells the tragic story in itself. The green signal cannot stop the moving train on its rails as the driver looks at only signals.
The train in case of the emergency brake cannot stop suddenly but it gets running up to a good length of distance. The train as the video of the news channels showed stands at Attari railway station. A pall of gloom pervades over the families losing their relatives and dear ones in the tragic disaster.