After saving lives, they laid down their own

Hanumant Ahirrao can’t get the last conversation he had with his son out of his head. “The situation is very bad; the weather is getting worse. We are trying hard to save as many lives as we can,” Ganesh Ahirrao, a 32-year-old constable with the eighth battalion of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) from Maharashtra involved in rescue operations in rain-ravaged Uttarakhand, had confided in his father on June 23.

But fate dealt a cruel hand on the angel of mercy. Ahirrao was one of the 20 personnel on a rescue mission who died after the Mi-17 V-5 chopper they were in crashed north of Gaurikund on Tuesday.

His family is trying hard to come to terms with the tragedy. “After completing a rescue operation on Sunday, he called us and said the weather was posing a problem to rescue operations. We did not know that it will claim my son’s life,” says Hanumant, a farmer from Jalgaon district’s Wadala-Vadali village in, from where many youth have been drafted in the defence forces.

Suresh Patil, Ahirrao’s relative, says the whole village is in mourning. “He is survived by his wife, a three-year-old son and a seven-month-old daughter who live in the battalion’s base camp in Ghaziabad district in Uttar Pradesh. We are proud that he lost his life while serving the country.”

Ahirrao’s brother, Gorakh, is with Border Security Force (BSF).

A little away in Betavad village, Dhule district, the family of Shashikant Pawar is inconsolable. The constable from Delhi, also with the NDRF’s eighth battalion, too was in the fated chopper.

Pawar had spoken to his wife just a day before the chopper took off from the IAF’s Dehradun base. After filling her in on his health, he told her that he was moving ahead with his group.

The news of the tragedy caught the family unawares since they had no idea which particular mission Pawar was on. While his wife feared the worst when she heard of the chopper crash, the family got to know of it only on Wednesday.

Ravi Pawar, Pawar’s cousin, says he and the NDRF constable’s mother were called to the district collector’s office in Dhule. It was only after the officials questioned them and took out a photograph of Pawar that it all began to make sense.

“We are very proud that he died while performing his duty and serving the people of our nation... But the family will never recover from this loss,” says Ravi.

Pawar, the son of a farmhand has a one-year-old son, had grown up in abject poverty. He was recruited in the BSF in 2002, and then later in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. His younger brother followed on his heels and joined the BSF as well.

Mumbai too was plunged into mourning. The pilot of the IAF chopper, wing commander Darryl Castelino, 38, had been posted in Barrackpore, West Bengal, but he spent most of his childhood in the city.

Castelino was from a family of modest means who lived with his parents and two younger sisters in the Sawantwadi locality of Chirag Nagar, Ghatkopar (W).

Sources say the responsibility to bring some financial stability fell on Castelino after his father’s death a few years ago.

“He was very studious and a good cricketer. He always shared his happiness and problems with me. After all, we had been neighbours for more than 20 years. I remember how hard he worked when he was preparing for the National Defence Academy,” said a former neighbour.

Alok Avasthy, commandant of the fifth battalion of the NDRF based at Talegaon in Pune, says, “The bodies of Pawar and Ahirrao will be first taken to Dehradun and then Delhi. From there, they will be brought to either Pune or Aurangabad and thereafter to their native places.”