Odisha train crash: Unknown passenger leaves behind love poems

Rescuers working at the train crash site in Balasore found sheets of paper, with poems in Bengali professing love, strewn around the tracks beside a mangled coach of the Coromandel Express. The jottings on torn pages of a diary with sketches of elephants, fish, and sun on the other side, were probably written during the leisure time by a passenger whose identity is not known as yet.

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“Alpo alpo megh theke halka bristi hoy, chotto chotto golpo theke bhalobasa sristi hoy” (Scattered clouds lead to light rains, love blossoms from the little tales we hear),” the handwritten poem read. The pages were discovered when rescuers rummaged through the belongings of the victims at the rail mishap site in Balasore district of Odisha, less than 48 hours after the train crash, billed as one of the worst in Indian railway history.

Photographs of these pages have gone viral on social media.

Another half-finished poem which was on another loose sheet read, “Bhalobeshei toke chai sarakhhon, achis tui moner sathe (With love I need you at all times, you are there in my mind at all times).”

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Commenting on these poems of love and longing, netizens termed these poems heart-rending, which showed how life was unpredictable. So far, no one has come forward to claim the ownership of poems or relationship with the poet whose fate too is not known, local police officers said.

(With agency inputs)