Tragedy and humanity are close cousins, and sometime meet the cruelty of borders in unforeseen circumstances.
That is what happened some four months ago when a gas tanker on way from Jammu to Leh met with an accident and rolled down into the Suru River near Kargil town in Ladakh.
The white coloured tanker (JK02BK 6225) along with its driver and two teenagers, all from Thanamandi area of Rajouri, drifted away with the fast moving waters of mighty Suru into Baltistan on the other side of the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Nothing was known of the three persons and the tanker that vanished on June 7 in the river, until a man from Kharmang district of Baltistan noticed mobile phone numbers of its owner written on the body of the tanker.
Nearly a month after the accident, the man, out of kindness, contacted the owner over Whatsapp in Jammu and sent him photographs of the tanker and that of a partly decomposed body of a young man that was found in it.
The owner shared the photo with the families of the three, and one of them recognised the dead person as their son, 19-year-old Saleem Khan, from the two silver chains he was wearing around his neck.
“We recognised that it’s the body of our son,” Mohammad Kabir, the boy’s father told Greater Kashmir.
“People there have also buried the body of my son but we want to conduct Nimaz-e-Janza (last rites) in our native village.”
The fate of the driver and the other boy, Mohammad Jabbar traveling in the tanker was unknown.
Jabbar and Khan, both students, had boarded the tanker in Srinagar for paying obeisance at the Baba Nagri shrine in Kangan and then decided to travel on with the tanker to Leh only to meet the accident before reaching Kargil along the way.
Jabbar’s family has approached authorities with demands to trace their missing son.
Mohammad Kabir told Greater Kashmir he traveled to New Delhi four times to meet with External Affairs Minister, SushmaSwaraj so that the body of his son could be brought back from Baltistan.
Distraught, with tearful eyes, Kabir, a poor man, says no one met with him at the ministry, yet he traveled to New Delhi again on Friday for the fifth time, hoping someone would listen.
Deputy Commissioner Rajouri, Mohammad Aijaz Assad admitted that families of the missing boys approached him and he has also written to the higher authorities.
“Demand of one of the families is to bring back mortal remains of their son recovered in Baltistan.”