Prabir Roy is grieving as a father would after losing his daughter. But as he struggles to reconcile to a life without Saheli, who died in an accident early Saturday morning, certain questions refuse to leave him. As he raised these questions , he spoke briefly about that night.

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Saheli, already dressed in the Deccan ground staff uniform, was lying by her mother’s side before the car arrived to take her to the airport.

As on every night that Saheli had to report for the early-morning shift, Prabir Roy walked his 25-year-old daughter down from their second-floor flat as the company car reached the three-storeyed pink building at B12 Kalachandpara Road at Garia at 2.10am.

She had to get to the airport by 3.30am, an hour before Deccan’s first flight. Manish Kumar Singh, Saheli’s colleague, was already in the car, sitting next to the driver.

After seeing Saheli off, Prabir, a retired bank employee, locked the doors and went back to bed. He wasn’t yet fully asleep when the phone rang around 3.15am. It was a call from someone in Saheli’s company. She had had an accident, that person said, assuring him that company representatives had already reached NRS Hospital and were trying to shift her to Apollo Gleneagles.

He left in a taxi, with younger daughter Sanchali, his elder brother and his nephew who live in the same building.

Once they reached NRS around 3.45pm, Prabir didn’t want to go in. Sanchali rushed into Emergency and found her sister lying on a trolley, covered in blood oozing out of her head. There was no sign of any treatment being administered.

The Deccan representatives were running around trying to have all three of their injured colleagues — Sulekh Roy got in the car after Saheli was picked up — released from NRS so that they could be taken to Apollo.

Much of what was happening around him at the time was a blur to Prabir. He remembers a rush of activity — a police officer in Emergency saying that “you need written permission from the local Entally police station to remove them”; the hospital’s house staff adding that “you can’t take them without completing the formalities”.

All this while, Saheli was alive — bleeding, unattended, but alive, he recalls.

One of her colleagues fell at the policeman’s feet, “Please let us take them away. Let them first live. One of use will stay back, if you want.”

At 5.10am, Saheli was declared dead by the same doctors who did not treat her.

They did not, however, forget to call a contingent from the police station as protection against possible trouble from what is known in Bengal’s hospitals as “patient party”.

Her two other injured colleagues were kept waiting, also without treatment, for the formalities (before death?) to be completed — just as in Saheli’s case — before being allowed to be removed.

Around 7.30-8, Manish and Sulekh, who too was critically injured, were permitted to be taken out. At about this point, the officer-in-charge of Entally arrived and the process of what is called “releasing the body” began.

The Entally OC, Prabir remembers, said they would have to go to Phoolbagan police station, because the accident spot comes under its jurisdiction. He was apparently also told to go to Regent Park police station, as their house is located in that area.

At 3pm, over 12 hours after he saw her off to work, Prabir Roy took his daughter home. Dead.