DARK DESPAIR: Vinit Kumar Karan and (below) father Pradip Kumar Das

Pradip Kumar Das’s constant companion for the past six weeks has been a little, red diary filled with names of people he barely knows, phone numbers he has randomly collected and addresses he has never been to.

The two missing links between these scraps of information scrawled across the pages of the red diary are his son Vinit Kumar Karan and Stephen Court.

“Kuch bhi nahin pata saab…mera beta aise kaise chala jaa sakta hai (I don’t have a clue…how can my son disappear like this)?” said the 50-something Das of his eldest child, a 27-year-old chartered accountancy student presumed dead in the Stephen Court blaze without conclusive evidence of him having even gone to 18A Park Street on March 23.

Das, a primary health centre employee posted at Jamtara in Jharkhand, has since been shuttling between that state and the city where his son used to study, hoping to hear “something definite” from police or Vinit’s friends and acquaintances. “I have been coming here almost every couple of weeks and going back even more confused,” rued Das.

Although the police have named Vinit as one of the 43 victims of the fire, they haven’t been able to find anybody who knows of or saw the youth stepping into Stephen Court on the day of the tragedy. The results of DNA tests on the unclaimed bodies — five skulls and body parts of two more victims — also do not match with the blood samples of either Vinit’s father or his younger brother.

The only definite connection between Vinit and Stephen Court is that he was registered with a job consultancy firm whose office was gutted in the blaze.

So where did Vinit go on the afternoon of March 23 if not to Stephen Court?

“A close friend of Vinit tells me he is almost sure that my son didn’t go to Stephen Court. But he did go somewhere and didn’t return, right? My family can’t take this anymore,” said Das, who had worked in Calcutta for a few years in the mid-Eighties.

Das last spoke to Vinit on March 22, a day before the Stephen Court tragedy, and the topic of conversation between father and son was apparently the youth’s decision to stop working as a part-time sales executive and focus on studies. “It was around 8pm. He told me, ‘Papa, I don’t want to work anymore. I want to concentrate on my CA exams, beginning May 4’,” recalled Das.

Could Vinit have changed his mind and gone to the job firm the next day to look for a better opening?

Friend Atasu Dey, who stays in the private hostel at Paschim Putiari near Tollygunge where Vinit also had a room, insists he was with the missing youth until 12.30pm that day, barely an hour-and-a-half before flames were first spotted at Stephen Court.

“Vinit would fast on Tuesdays. Around 12.05pm that day, I went to his room for lunch and he was sitting on his bed as I ate. I went back to my room around 12.30pm to take a nap and returned around 1pm, to find Vinit missing. I didn’t bother finding out then where he had gone but became worried when he didn’t return,” recalled Atasu.

Stephen Court came to Atasu’s mind as one of the places Vinit might have visited that day only because he knew about his friend being registered with the job firm. He finally managed to contact his friend’s family in Jharkhand through a distant cousin of his living in Calcutta on March 26, three days after the fire.

The first number of Vinit’s dual-SIM mobile phone — 9903187121 — is still in “active” switched-off mode but the second one — 8100681190 — has become inactive. The police have found out that on March 23, Vinit received three calls on his cellphone, the first one at 7.05am meant for Atasu.

The other two — at 11.25am and 11.32am — were apparently mistakenly dialled by a trader Vinit didn’t know. The mobile tower location has been identified as Haridevpur in south Calcutta, not far from the hostel.

Such information might not have helped solve the mystery so far but for Vinit’s family back in Jharkhand, hope floats on every small detail packed into that little, red diary.