Mahima, Who Lost Her Parents and Brother in a Kolkata Hotel Fire, Turns Eight — and Still Calls Her Father’s Old Number
Mahima Dutta has stepped from seven into eight years of age. On Friday (November 13), family members cut a birthday cake for her in a small gathering at home. But the two people who should most have been beside her were not there — her father and her mother — and her little brother is gone with them.
At a rented house in the Milpara area of Kushtia town, family members celebrated Mahima’s birthday at home, cutting a cake with her. Seen from outside, it looked like an ordinary occasion, but behind the arrangement lies the family’s story of grief.
In the early hours of August 19, a devastating fire at a residential hotel on Mirza Ghalib Street in the New Market area of Kolkata, India, killed journalist Debashish Dutta and members of his family. Among the dead were Debashish Dutta, the Kushtia correspondent of Dainik Ajker Patrika, his wife Afsana Sharmin, their three-year-old son Swarnashish Dutta, and Debashish’s father-in-law, Md Akram Ali.
Little Mahima survived that fire. Her parents’ absence has now become a harsh reality for her.
Mahima’s grandfather, Dilip Dutta, the father of the late journalist Debashish Dutta, said family members had celebrated Mahima’s birthday at home. But the grief of losing her parents still haunts the child; whenever she remembers the family members who are gone, she cries inconsolably.
Dilip Dutta said: “The most heartbreaking thing is that Mahima still searches for her father. She takes my mobile phone and calls the old numbers her father used. Sometimes she sends messages.”
But no father’s voice comes back from the other end of that phone, and no answer comes from her mother either. Yet whenever she gets the chance, Mahima calls again and again. That her father will never pick up the phone again is still beyond her understanding, family members said.
Carrying the grief of losing his own son, grandfather Dilip Dutta must now look after the little daughter his son left behind — a child whose eyes still search for her father and mother.
