At the start of last week, 24-four-year-old trainee Sadanand Ratan Patil had been chosen by the Taj Mahal Hotel management to be a full-fledged staff member in their establishment. On the early hours of Thursday morning, his dream to become a chef ended in the most brutal of ways.

While he was on his way from the first floor of the hotel to the basement below, the young chef-in-the-making was shot by one of the terrorists moving from the second floor to the first. “The last I saw of him, he was standing on the stairway leading from the basement to the first floor. I was going downstairs and he was going up,” said Mohit Vichare, another trainee chef and a good friend of Patil’s.

Vichare describes Patil as a friendly person who was always smiling. “He was always cheerful and never interfered with anyone else’s life. He wanted to become a chef and had been working with the hotel for five to six years,” said Vichare.

As fate would have it, Patil was not the only one from his family who worked at the Taj. His younger brother and their father too are employees of the hotel. While his father was on leave, his brother, also a trainee chef at the hotel, came out safe. “His father and mother are in shock,” said Vichare.

“He loved to travel. He had just visited Matheran some 10-15 days ago. His dream was to become a chef,” said Vichare, who has studied with Patil in Sophia’s Catering College, and then worked with him at the hotel.

According to Vichare, Patil was waiting to get out of the hotel when he last met him by the stairway. “A little earlier, we sat together in the cold kitchen, and spoke to our principal on the phone. That was around 2 am. The last I saw him was around 2:30 am. After that, around 10:00 am, I got to know that they had found his body,” said Vichare. “We sat making sandwiches for the guests and ourselves between around 1:30 to 2:30 am. We chatted and joked. We were so happy. He had told me that the battery of his cell phone was discharged. So when I last tried calling him, I thought the battery would be dead, which was why he was not picking up,” said Vichare.

Asked how he felt after exiting the hotel safely, Vichare says, “I thought about the people inside. I don’t know how many friends I have lost.”