After the serial blasts, no political party has called for a bandh in Gujarat. But Modasa, a town near Ahmedabad, observed a self-imposed bandh on Monday. It was grieving for 32-year-old Dr Prerak Shah, who died in the blast at the Civil Hospital, along with his wife and unborn child.

His teachers and colleagues at the hospital recall a good friend and sensitive colleague and lament the way he died. Shah had brought his wife Kinjal for a medical check-up and they were on their way out when the blast caught them.

As Shah’s friends and acquaintances trickle in for a condolence meeting at their house in Modasa, his banker father Ramesh Shah breaks down. “At the end of the day the hospital has lost a doctor. But for me, I have lost my elder son... Is there no end to this? Not even the hospitals and doctors are spared?” he asks.

“Prerak died, I survived. My survival is still a mystery to me,” says Dr Kishore Damore, who also belongs to Modasa and was Prerak’s senior in school and a colleague at the Civil Hospital.

Recalling the moments before Shah’s death, he says: “When the blast killed him, I was a few yards away, approaching an ambulance. I had just knelt down on my knees when the blast happened.”

Initially they did not realise Shah was among the casualties. “As his keys fell on the ground from his pocket, someone shouted, ‘It’s our Prerak’,” says Damore. “They identified Kinjal later in the mortuary.”

... contd.