Early on Tuesday morning, around 4am, Meerut resident Narendra Yadav set out with his family for their annual pilgrimage to Khatu Shyam temple in Rajasthan's Sikar district. As part of the plan, he was supposed to pick up his sister from Gurgaon before embarking on the final leg of the journey. However, Narendra could never make it to Gurgaon as his SUV was hit by a bus in Ghaziabad, killing all occupants in the four-wheeler, including his wife Anita, their two teenage sons, sister-in-law and niece. “My brothers Narendra and Dharmendra were going to Khatu Shyam with their family. Knowing that driving in the opposite direction on a road where the vehicles usually ply at a speed of 100 km per hour would certainly result in a fatal accident, the man drove the bus in the wrong direction, very close to the divider, and deliberately hit my brother's car,” said Jitendra, elder brother of the deceased, in his complaint. Dharmendra is fighting for his life at a hospital in Noida along with his six-year-old son. Jitendra's son Priyanshu, 23, said that the family visited Khatu Shyam every year as part of ritual. “Not just that, whenever anything new happens at our house, the family visits Khatu Shyam.In this incident, the whole family of my elder uncle Narendra has been wiped out,” said Priyanshu as he stood in front of the mortuary. Priyanshu said it was by sheer luck that he could not join his family members for the trip. “I had some important work at home. I never thought that all this would happen. People cannot bear one death, how can we bear so many deaths?” he said.
