Kaushik Deb, 28, whose mother wouldn’t let him buy a motorcycle because she feared a mishap, died in one on a weekend trip to the Niagara Falls. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

A phone call at 8 in the morning shattered the calm in the Deb household at Beleghata on Sunday.

“I am sorry to inform you that your brother has died in an accident,” the voice at the other end told 28-year-old Kaushik Deb’s sister Sraboni.

Kaushik, an employee of Syntel Inc, working on a DaimlerChrysler project in the US, was at the wheel of a rented car with three colleagues when the accident occurred. They were on a weekend trip to the Niagara Falls.

“He always wanted to buy a bike but my mother never let him because she was afraid he would meet with an accident. He died in one,” said elder sister Banani Deb Sinha, who lives in Bangalore.

Their mother has been bedridden since receiving the news. “He was my mother’s favourite. I don’t know how she will survive this tragedy,” Banani said.

Kaushik is the second young Calcuttan to die in a road accident in the US this year. Sweety Mazumdar, 25, a geology researcher in Ohio, died on January 2 when the mini van she was in overturned on an icy road on the way back from a New Year celebration in Chicago.

Kaushik studied at St Thomas Day School till Class X and moved to St Paul’s School for his Higher Secondary.

The job in Syntel, his first, came through a campus interview when he was an undergraduate student at the Institute of Engineering and Management in Salt Lake.

Friends said Kaushik, who moved to America in December 2006, was eager to visit home before moving on to another project that would have kept him there longer. He wanted to return home to get Sraboni married and build the third floor of their two-storey house at Purbarag, Beleghata.

“He had even agreed to get married in mid-2010,” said cousin Sougata Mondol.

It’s only Kaushik’s body that will come home in a couple of days.

“His company is taking care of everything, and the insurance company they have a tie-up with is going to bring the body,” Satadal Saha, a family friend, said.