Chanchal Kumari and brother Sunil await their father’s arrival at the Bandhaghat police outpost, in Howrah, on Tuesday. Picture by Gopal Senapati

A young mother unable to trace her husband in an alien city pushed her daughter and son into the Hooghly during high tide before plunging into the river with her youngest child in her arms.

Alerted by the cries of a woman who witnessed the tragic act, two youths jumped into the river and rescued Sudhama Choudhury’s daughter Chanchal Kumari, 8, and son Sunil, 5. But there was no trace of the 32-year-old woman and her four-year-old daughter Bubli till late on Tuesday.

“There is little chance of the woman and the little girl being found alive,” a police officer said.

According to Chanchal, she and her siblings arrived in Calcutta with their mother by a train from Bihar — which train and from exactly where, she couldn’t tell — on Tuesday morning.

“My mother quarrelled with dadi (grandmother) before we left our village,” she told the police.

Sudhama’s mission was to find her husband Sukhi, a van-puller, but the only information she had about his whereabouts was that he stayed in Natun Bazaar, a part of Chitpur in north Calcutta.

Nobody knows yet whether the mother and her three children reached anywhere near the locality as they wandered about the city till afternoon.

The four were spotted boarding a ferry from Ahiritola Ghat and getting off at Bandhaghat, in north Howrah, around 3.15pm.

Just as the ferry was returning with passengers, Sudhama pushed her two older children into the river from the jetty and then jumped with the youngest one.

An unidentified woman who had missed the ferry’s return trip saw them and shouted for help. The first to jump into the choppy waters was Babua Prasad Jaiswal, a rickshaw-puller who was busy making clay moulds for Vishwakarma puja on the ghat to earn some extra money.

“The tide was strong and I could see the girl (Chanchal) trying desperately to keep her head above the water. I went straight for her,” Babua told Metro.

Another youth, Dinesh Das, swam towards Sunil and dragged him to the shore.

Based on Chanchal’s sketchy narration of why she, her siblings and their mother had landed in town, some members of the Bandhaghat Market Committee managed to trace Sukhi a couple of hours later with the help of migrant rickshaw-pullers in the area.

When Sukhi reached the Bandhaghat police outpost, Chanchal ran into his arms and broke down.

“I didn’t know they were coming. My wife had never set foot outside Bihar. How could Sudhama think she would be able to find me in this sprawling city?” he cried, clutching on to his son and daughter.

The Choudhurys are from Mahimabigha village, in Nawada district of Bihar.