ODISHA, India: Twenty-year-old Bijay Lakshmi was a demure and shy girl when she got married barely a year ago with so many dreams in her eyes, but had to grow into a woman soon as she became mother to a daughter in April.
For past couple of weeks, Bijay Lakshmi was not keeping well and her 27-year-old husband Gobind Charan Sahu – who worked as a plumber in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata, was coming home to get her treated and also to meet with his two-month-old baby daughter Bhagya Lakshmi whom he had briefly seen at her birth.
But destiny had a different story written for her.
On Friday (Jun 2) night a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction in one of India’s deadliest train accidents in decades.
The crash killed 275 people and left near 1,200 injured.
Sahu was among the dead.
Bijay Lakshmi is too shocked right now to fully comprehend the extent of her tragedy.
On Monday she sat stunned, with tears rolling down her cheeks, as she waited to complete formalities before receiving compensation money for her husband’s untimely death.
Her mother-in-law, Savitri Sahu said Lakshmi was still in shock, not eating or drinking anything since she heard the news of her husband’s death.