CHENNAI: The `provisional certificate' states: Amit Thapa, 20, expired on March 24 while travelling by the Coromandel Express after having `dashed' against a pole. He was travelling from Chennai to Howrah.

What it does not say is the trauma that his family and friends had to undergo to trace him and literally piece together his body, due to official apathy.

Friends and relatives say they traced Amit's body to a wayside bush off Bhadrak in Orissa, after chasing away stray dogs, to retrieve his remains.

It had simply been `disposed' by the Government Railway Police.

"The police said unclaimed bodies were kept only for 24 hours. Amit died around 10 a.m. on March 24, Friday. They didn't have to throw the body away the next day," says neighbour William Liu, who was part of the search party.

Amit had left Chennai Central on March 23. His mother, says Mr. Liu, waited for a day after her son failed to turn up home.

"By Saturday she was perturbed. Since none of her relatives were in Kolkata, four of us from the neighbourhood went to the Howrah station," he recalls.

There they got the first indication that all was not well. They were directed to Bhadrak, five hours from Howrah.

"At the Bhadrak station, police showed us Amit's luggage. They told that Amit was leaning out of the door after the train left Bhubaneswar and he was killed on the spot after hitting a pole." According to Mr. Liu, what shocked was that the police had "disposed" the body after a post-mortem.

"Only the next day (March 25) we could trace the two rickshaw pullers who had dumped Amit's body in a deserted stretch near the national highway."

Mr. Liu says they could not bring themselves to tell Amit's mother that by the time they found the body, the flesh on one leg was missing and dogs were feeding the posterior.

In fact, the group was so stunned that they agreed to bury the remains on the spot itself and take back only the `provisional certificate' in which the police had wrongly noted Amit's age as 20 instead of 16, so that his relatives would get a better compensation package.

According to Amit's uncle K.T.L. Das, the police or the Bhadrak railway officials should have started by identifying him and traced relatives using the reservation details, the standard operating procedure for an enquiry.

"If they had informed me, then people in Kolkata would have reached Bhadrak on Friday itself. Amit would have at least had a proper cremation," says Mr. Das.

Back in Kolkata, Mr. Liu is waiting for elders to decide who has to go and collect Amit's post-mortem report from Bhadrak. The provisional certificate ends rather revealingly, that "the case is under enquiry."

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