Odisha train crash: Love poems found scattered on tracks

Kolkata, June 3

Scattered sheets of paper, with poems in Bengali professing love, were strewn on the tracks beside a mangled coach of the Coromandel Express as rescuers rummaged through belongings of the victims at the rail mishap site in Odisha’s Balasore district, less than 48 hours after the train crash, billed as one of the worst in Indian railway history.

The jottings on torn pages of a diary with sketches of elephants, fish and sun on the other side, were probably written during the leisure time of a passenger whose identity is not known as yet.

“Alpo alpo megh theke halka bristi hoy, chotto chotto golpo theke bhalobasa sristi hoy” (scattered clouds lead to light rains, (while) love blossoms from the little tales we hear),” the handwritten poem said.

Photographs of these pages have gone viral on social media.

Another half finished poem which was on another loose page said “Bhalobeshei toke chai sarakhhon, achis tui moner sathe …”(With love I need you at all times, you are there in my mind at all time …) Netizens commented that these were “heart rending”, and showed how “life was unpredictable”.

Till now no one has come forward to claim the poems or relationship with the poet, whose fate too is unkown, local police officers said.