On the night of November 26, when Mumbai’s terror siege began, it was 31-year-old Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan who called his sleeping father and told him to switch on his television to watch the unravelling terror. It was the last conversation between the father and son.

On Thursday evening, after NSG commandos began their operations in Mumbai, when Unnikrishnan tried his son Sandeep’s number, it was answered by a close friend Sarvesh.

“He told me Sandeep had gone out on work but he did not say where. I suspected he had gone to Mumbai and his whereabouts were being kept a secret for operational reasons,” the former secretary to the director of the INSAT programme at ISRO stated.

It was a relative who was watching television that called the Unnikrishnan couple on Friday morning to tell them something was amiss with Sandeep in the course of the NSG commando operations in Mumbai.

Unnikrishnan did not tell his wife but tried his son’s telephone, and again found his friend at the other end.

“He told me he had just returned from the unit and had not heard anything about my son being a casualty. He told he would call as soon he heard something. When he did not call through the day I knew something was wrong,” says Unnikrishnan.

From the description of friends and family, Major Sandeep was a no-nonsense, determined and focused officer.

“He was a stickler for discipline. He would be upset if my appearance was even slightly dishevelled or if there was a stain on my trouser. I know he was brave,” Sandeep’s father, who moved to Bangalore from Kerala four decades ago, said as family and friends gathered at their residence in the sparsely populated ISRO colony on the outskirts of Bangalore.

Over the silence of gloom and quiet whispers in the house, Sandeep’s mother’s voice broke through intermittently from an adjoining bedroom asking: “Why did he have to go there? Why did my son have to go there?” Women from the family, including Sandeep’s elder sister Sandhya, tried to console her.

“We don’t want to talk about him. It is not something he would have liked. He was the kind of person who would want to go about his work quietly,” an old schoolmate from Bangalore said.

“There was a perfectionist in him. He was very determined,” a childhood and family friend, Sanish Damodaran, recalled.

Sandeep had joined the National Defence Academy after schooling in Bangalore till Class XII. He was divorced.

His family has said they don’t want a big funeral. “Let him be accorded whatever military honours are due. We do not want ceremony because he would not have liked it,” an uncle told a Bihar Regiment liaison officer.