Rishabh Mohan Agarwal atop the tank at Tikiapara on Thursday. Picture by Gopal Senapati

An IIT Kanpur dropout climbed a 50-odd-metre Howrah water tank on Thursday, inviting instant comparisons with Viru of Sholay fame, but it turned out he wasn’t half as easy to please.

Unlike the screen character he emulated, Basanti’s hand in marriage wouldn’t do for Rishabh Mohan Agarwal. He first asked for his father, next his mother and then his sister.

When boredom got the better of him after nearly eight hours atop the tank in Tikiapara, the 24-year-old asked for two men from the fire brigade to help him come down and his uncle’s turquoise Ford Fiesta to take him away from the crowd that had all along been promising to reunite him with “his Basanti”.

According to his relatives, Rishabh, who studied electronics engineering at IIT Kanpur, arrived in the city with his parents sometime back to undergo treatment. He went missing three days ago and his whereabouts were unknown until someone spotted him on the water tank.

“He developed some psychiatric problem around three years ago (he was then in his second year at IIT) and dropped out after that. He is under treatment and has left home in the past, too. He usually makes someone call us and then we go to fetch him. But he has never done something this dramatic before,” his maternal uncle B.K. Agarwal, a resident of Deshapriya Park, said.

Rishabh and his parents have been staying with Agarwal since arriving in the city from Kanpur. The youth’s businessman father, B.M. Agarwal, is himself a former IITian.

Witnesses said Rishabh, wearing a shirt and a checked pair of pyjamas, would have gone unnoticed had he not called out to passers-by. “We would not have spotted him at all if he did not attract attention by calling out to us,” said Subrata Chatterjee, an electrician in the coach yard of Eastern Railway at Tikiapara.

The water tank was in the middle of a field within the railway yard and Rishabh apparently climbed up around 10am.

The 300-strong crowd, cordoned off about 100 yards from the tank, was at first bemused by the youth’s antics. “Basanti” was the one name that kept cropping up in remarks.

“Iski Basanti ko la re (someone bring his Basanti here),” a man in the crowd said.

“Basanti mil jayegi, aab niche aa ja (you will get your Basanti, come down),” another shouted.

Rishabh then caused a flutter by entering the tank. The crowd sighed when he came out after a dip. He took off his shirt and wore it like a turban after that.

Chatterjee said Rishabh shouted his father’s mobile number and asked the police and fire brigade personnel to inform him. After B.M. Agarwal arrived, a fireman climbed up the ladder to hand the youth his father’s cellphone.

His mother arrived around noon. He spoke to her on the phone and said he had gone to Jamshedpur, where he was allegedly robbed and bashed up by the police. “They even took away my cellphone,” he screamed.

Then he said he wanted his sister, Manasi, to be there. She arrived around 3pm, but Rishabh still wouldn’t come down. Around 5.10pm, two firemen brought him down, but not after giving them a scare. One of the rescuers, Prabir Kumar Ghosh, said: “He saw our uniform and thought we were policemen and were going to arrest him. He called up his sister and said, ‘Tune mere saath dhonka kiya (you have betrayed me)’. We showed him our badges and he agreed to come down.”