A town shuts down for the doctor it lost

As Shah’s friends and acquaintances trickle in for a condolence meeting at their house in Modasa, his banker father Ramesh Shah breaks down. “At the end of the day the hospital has lost a doctor. But for me, I have lost my elder son… Is there no end to this? Not even the hospitals and doctors are spared?” he asks.

“Prerak died, I survived. My survival is still a mystery to me,” says Dr Kishore Damore, who also belongs to Modasa and was Prerak’s senior in school and a colleague at the Civil Hospital.

Recalling the moments before Shah’s death, he says: “When the blast killed him, I was a few yards away, approaching an ambulance. I had just knelt down on my knees when the blast happened.”

Initially they did not realise Shah was among the casualties. “As his keys fell on the ground from his pocket, someone shouted, ‘It’s our Prerak’,” says Damore. “They identified Kinjal later in the mortuary.”

Damore says he not only lost a good friend but a great doctor. “When he was in his first-year, a patient called Ghanshyam was referred for amputation by a hospital in Anand,” he recalls. “What did Prerak know about orthopaedic procedures then? Only the basics. He worked on the patient for three months, and the patient walked out of the hospital on his own feet. That was Prerak for us.”

Dr J V Modi, Associate Professor, Orthopaedics in Civil Hospital, also remembers Prerak as “sensitive, soft and a thorough gentleman”. He was just about to complete his term at the hospital. “On Saturday, he had sat with me for hours discussing his future plans. Destiny had other plans, we did not know it then.”

Being a family friend, Modi also knew Kinjal, “a nice girl, warm, hospitable and loving”. “They had no business dying so early.”