A life spent with railways, he died on a train

Wife Maya (48) wants to talk about the husband Suresh was, about the life they shared together but can’t. Everytime she tries to string together a sentence, she starts crying. She retreats into one of the other rooms of the house that still doesn’t look lived-in.

Family and friends describe Suresh as hard working, honest and simple. Businessman neighbour Ramesh Dubey adds punctuality. “If you saw him leave the house in the morning, you could be sure it was 7 am without bothering to check a watch,” he says. Suresh’s last assignment was as GM with RITES Private Ltd, an autonomous railway body. “But all he had was one pair of shoes and three pairs of decent clothes,” says eldest son Avaneesh, explaining what they meant when they called him “a simple person.”

Suresh’s simple moorings came from a life of hard work and struggle. Otherwise how could this village boy from UP become, first an electrical engineer from Motilal Nehru Regional College, Allahabad — and then go on to do an M.Tech in Information Technology from BHU.

A self-taught computer wizard, it was Suresh who opened up the world of computers to his sons while he would himself spend hours together at his home PC either fine-tuning some office software or playing online bridge. “For our friends and us, he was a round-the-clock ‘help-desk’ for computer-related problems,” says Rajneesh (23).

But ask the sons about the one characteristic they would always remember their father by, and their choice is unanimous: honesty. And they have many tales to share.

During the time when the family used to live in official accommodation at Bhadwar Park in Colaba, Suresh, then a senior officer, would adamantly refuse official transport to go to work. “He would say it was a waste of government resources to use an official vehicle when commuting could easily be done by a bus,’’ recalls Rajneesh, his second son. Suresh would also abhor the use of government resources for anything personal. “Once I was making long-distance calls from the office phones behind his back. While on my third, he caught me red-handed. After giving me a dressing down for misusing the office phone, he called up the accounts officer and asked him to put the last three long-distance calls on his personal account,” recalls Nalineesh.

In fact, all three agree that given their father’s honesty, they dreaded the thought of him coming to know of their own indiscretions, even if unintended. “Once I was caught travelling with a pass minus identity card. I was booked for ticketless travel. But calling up father or giving his reference to the ticket checker was out of question. I quietly paid up the fine,” says Avaneesh. The family has one regret though. If Suresh was punctual all his life, why couldn’t he stick to his schedule that day? No one will know why he left office early and boarded the 5.57 Virar instead of the usual 6.30 Virar from Churchgate. Half and hour into his journey home, the blast on the train killed him. For the Pandeys, more than a month after Terrible Tuesday, the focus is on getting back on track. And ensure that their father is not forgotten in his hometown. The sons, all engineers and well settled in life, plan to use the compensation they have received to set up an educational scholarship in his memory at the two Jigna (UP) schools where he studied as a boy.