I don’t even know what the boy looks like,’’ sighs 61-year-old D H Vaigankar tiredly as he pours over the list of the identified dead at Parel’s King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital mortuary on Wednesday morning.

After a desperate call from a relative in Goa, Vaigankar was determined to help his distant relatives, the Naiks, to search for Ranjan (35)—an engineer by profession—who was travelling in the first class compartment of the Churchgate-Virar fast local that blew up at Matunga station on Tuesday.

But after seven hours and a round of several city hospitals from KEM, Sion, Bhabha, Cooper, Nanavati, Hinduja and Holy Family, the name ‘Ranjan Naik’ was not on any list—injured/ in ICU/ dead.

Finally, Vaigankar gets a photograph and starts looking at the unidentified bodies piled across the morgues.

At 4.10 pm, Vaigankar, accompanied by Anjan’s brother-in-law and colleagues, makes another trip to the Information Centre at Sion Hospital to view a series of bloody images, each appended with a number. But they do not find any face resembling Rajan’s.

‘‘Perhaps his body has been mutilated beyond recognition,’’ says friend P Rathod.

Heading in an uncertain direction, they decide to take a last look at photographic prints of the dead at the police counter set up to deal with procedures following the identification of a body.

Going through them, Ranjan’s brother-in-law looks at the photo of Body No. 28 for a long time—it is badly disfigured—and says: ‘‘That is him.’’ The inspector compares a passport photo of Ranjan with the photo taken by the hospital, and asks the group to go in and see the body.

... contd.