Voters at a booth in South Dinajpur’s Tapan block at 5.30pm on Sunday. A Telegraph picture

Domkal, May 18: Nazrul Islam sat for a lunch around 10am today so that he could go to vote.

A Congress supporter, Nazrul, 50, a small farmer at Ghoramara in Domkol, had asked his only son Alib Hossain, 20, to wait for him as he had planned to go to the booth together. Alib, a first-time voter, did not wait for his father.

As Nazrul mixed the rice with the curry, he could hear shouts from the booth, only 200 metres away. He sensed trouble and that was confirmed in seconds, when the rice in his hand fell with the deafening sound of blasts, one after the other.

“As soon as he heard the explosions, he looked at me and asked me where Alib was. I told him he had gone to cast his vote. He stood up, washed his hand and walked out,” said Marjia Bewa, 45.

This was the last time Marjia saw her husband. Nazrul was hit by two bombs in his stomach and legs and killed yards away from his house when Congress and CPM supporters were fighting.

“Nazrul was looking for his son without paying heed to our shouts. We repeatedly asked him not to go into the booth. But he went ahead. Soon, I lost him in a haze of smoke. Everyone was running helter-skelter. Some of us found Nazrul lying in a pool of blood,” said Razzak Sheikh, 40, a neighbour.

“We took his blood-splattered body to the Domkol subdivisional hospital, where doctors declared him dead,” said Marjia.

Alib had fled the scene after the first hint of trouble and hid inside a house. “How can I face the fact that my father died because I went to vote without him,” he said, sobbing.