Noida: He had dropped his fiancée at Kashmere Gate, then followed her bus for 50 minutes on his scooter, talking to her on the phone all the way. At 10.19pm, Shruti Rawat called to say goodnight. She promised to call again from Orai after reaching home.She never did.By Thursday morning, Mohit Sharma, an IIT Delhi supercomputer engineer, was at the post-mortem house in Noida Sector 94, confronting his biggest fear that had taken shape overnight. Shruti was among the nine passengers killed when the sleeper bus caught fire on Yamuna Expressway.The couple were to marry in Nov this year.Their evening had begun ordinarily. After work, Mohit accompanied Shruti to Kashmere Gate, where she boarded the bus around 8.40pm. She was travelling to Orai in Jalaun to celebrate her sister’s birthday. Mohit wanted to go along, but Shruti – a project manager at an IT company in Noida – asked him to stay back and focus on work.He could not quite bring himself to let her go. Once the bus left, he called her and followed it towards Noida on his scooter. For nearly 22km, they continued talking as he rode behind the bus on his scooter.“In love, we cannot easily say goodbye to a person with whom we are connected,” Mohit told TOI later.For about 50 minutes, the journey became an unlikely extension of their goodbye. Then, Shruti insisted he turn back. He took a U-turn and headed towards his home near IIT Delhi.At 10.19pm, Shruti called once more as she was turning in for the night. She promised to call him the next morning after reaching home. It was the last time they spoke.The couple had been together for seven months. They had met through a distant relative, grown close and decided to marry this year itself.Around 6.30am on Thursday, Shruti’s sister reached the Orai bus stand to receive her. Instead, the family learnt from the operator that the bus had caught fire in Greater Noida.Repeated calls from Shruti’s family jolted Mohit awake. He began looking for answers, first reaching Kailash Hospital in Jewar. There, he received the number of a witness, Utkarsh, and began piecing together what had happened.He then moved from one place to another, searching for Shruti and waiting for a confirmation – that she was alive.At the Sector 94 post-mortem house, amid families trying to identify their loved ones, memories of the previous evening kept returning to him. “The flashback of our memories and the time we spent is coming back and forth in my mind,” Mohit said.But then, his worst fears came true. The goodbye he thought would last only till the next call had become the last moment of their life together.What torments Mohit is the thought that he might have been able to change what happened. “I was also planning to go. Maybe I could have saved her,” he said.Mohit is working on IIT Delhi’s Param Pragya project, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But on Thursday, his work meant little. At the post-mortem house, he was simply a fiancé waiting for confirmation of the woman he was meant to marry in just two months.
