He was escorting an elderly passenger to the general coach.

“It’s never a man who dies; it’s an entire family. There have been no celebrations in our family since bhaiyya died,” says Kumar’s younger brother Manish.

On February 18,2007,Kumar left for Old Delhi railway station at 8 p.m. “He didn’t want to go. But he eventually went and never came back,” says Manish.

The next morning,as the Kumar family watched news of the attack on TV,they prayed for his safety. The blast,after all,had taken place in the general coach of the train where a TTE is not posted. “It was much later that I heard from someone that a senior citizen had asked for my brother’s help and he had gone to drop him to the general coach. I called up my brother’s colleagues who assured me they had spoken to him over phone. But they insisted I come to Panipat where the blast had taken place.”

Manish left for Panipat with a cousin. They first searched for Kumar at the railway station in Panipat before going to the blast site. “We thought he might have jumped out of the train and become unconscious. We did the rounds of many hospitals and finally found him at the Panipat Civil Hospital amidst scores of burnt bodies,” says Manish. They brought back his body that night.

Though Kumar’s family received a compensation of Rs 10 lakh,they had to make the rounds of many offices before they could get a government job for Kumar’s wife,Anita. Anita now lives a block away with her nine-year old twins and her mother.

Meanwhile,following his death,Kumar’s mother has been under treatment for the past five years for psychological disorders. “She hears voices,people shouting and trying to kill her family,” says Manish.