Arup Banerjee’s friend, Sandip Deb, had accompanied the family to RG Kar Medical College and Hospital after Arup’s son Ayush fractured an arm on Thursday night and needed urgent attention.
Arup, 41, was crushed to death after he was trapped in an elevator in the trauma building of the hospital.
On Saturday, Deb, a neighbour of the Banerjees, recalled how he ran from pillar to post seeking help from hospital staff, police and the CISF, only to be told it was “not our duty”, even as his friend screamed for help.
Deb recounted this experience to Metro:
One of my friends and I were standing near the lift on the ground floor of the trauma care building early on Friday morning when I heard Arup’s voice from the basement. He was screaming for help.
A few minutes earlier, he, his wife and son had taken the lift to the fourth floor for the washroom. But now his voice was coming from the basement.
We rushed downstairs through a flight of stairs. At the bottom, there was a door that opened into the basement — but it was locked.
We ran upstairs and alerted a security guard on the ground floor. He came with us to the basement door but could not open it with any of the keys he had. We ran upstairs again to get help from several other hospital staff.
We were told that when there was a problem with the lift, a key could access it. When we asked where the key was, we were told it was in a different building and would take time to bring.
Meanwhile, our friend was screaming for help.
There was a Kolkata Police officer who did not react when we asked him to break the lock downstairs.
We also requested two CISF personnel to break the lock with their heavy boots. They said: ‘Yeh hamara kaam nahi hai (this is not our job).’ When I asked what their job was, one of them said: ‘Agar hum ye tala todenge to hum par action hoga (if we break this lock, action will be taken against us).’
By the time we returned to the ground floor, desperate because no one had helped us, we found the key to the lift had finally been brought from the other building. A liftman went to access the lift.
I could still hear Arup’s voice screaming urgently: ‘Amader taratari tol… amader bancha (rescue us from here).’
A few minutes after the lift operator went with the key, Arup’s voice fell silent.
Instead, now we heard his wife screaming: ‘Keu Buchu-ke banchao (someone save Buchu).’
Buchu is Arup’s nickname. We did not hear Arup after that.
We had no idea what was going on in the basement.
Around 30 minutes later, we learned that Arup’s wife and son had been rescued, and the child admitted to the emergency ward. When we asked how they got out of the lift, we were told they had managed to come out on their own. It sounded impossible.
Some time later, someone from the hospital took us to the basement through a completely different entry. This meant there was an alternative way to access the basement, which no one had mentioned.
We were told that a security guard had accessed the basement through this door and opened the grille gate through which Arup and his family were brought out. I wondered why this hadn’t been done earlier.
Had we reached the basement sooner, we might have been able to access the grille gate where the family was stuck. Perhaps then we could have rescued all three alive.
Later, I learned that when the key to the lift was brought, someone switched it on, and Arup — standing between the lift doors and the locked grille gate in the basement lobby — got trapped as the lift started to move. He was dragged up and killed.
I only wish someone in the hospital had cooperated and helped us save our friend’s life.