Thaindian News

Ghaziabad, May 26 (IANS) Frequently dispatched on air ambulance duties, anaesthetist Rajesh Jain left his home here at around 1 p.m. Wednesday to ferry a patient from Patna, telling his family that he could not say when he would be back. Little did anyone of them know that he would never return.

“Rajesh could not tell us the exact time of his return from Patna. He left home at 1 p.m. yesterday (Wednesday) and just told us he had to rush to Patna to bring a patient to the hospital by air ambulance service,” his grief-stricken father N.C. Jain said.

An anaesthetist at New Delhi’s Apollo hospital, Rajesh Jain was killed Wednesday night when the single engine air ambulance aircraft crashed onto a house in Haryana’s Faridabad town, adjoining Delhi. Apart from him, his colleague Syed Arshad Abbas, the patient Rahul, Rahul’s cousin, a male nurse and the two pilots and three women in the house were killed in the accident.

Speaking to IANS at his house in Gautam Nagar here, Jain’s father, a retired engineer from the Uttar Pradesh public works department, said his son completed his MBBS from the Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College, Meerut in 1994 and later a specialised post-graduate degree as an anaesthetist.

Rajesh’s wife Amita Jain, a software engineer working with an MNC in Greater Noida, was stunned when she learned about her husband’s death.

Hugging again and again their one-year-old son Shantanu, Amita recalled that Rajesh used to drop her in Noida while on his way to hospital. “We were leading a very happy life. He loved his son very much,” she said. Tears rolling down her cheeks, a numb Amita said she did not know how to live the rest of her life.

Rajesh’s elder brother, Rakesh Jain said he had received a phone call around midnight from a family friend Praveen Garg informing him that a plane carrying a patient to Apollo hospital has crashed in Faridabad and asking them to check with the hospital whether Rajesh was safe.

“We called the hospital, but we did not receive any satisfactory reply. A doctor asked us to come to hospital. They also had come to know that the plane had crashed somewhere in Faridabad,” he said.

The family members reached the hospital where the hospital management confirmed that Rajesh was among those killed in the crash.

Rajesh’s body was cremated at Hindon crematorium Thursday, his brother added.

“Youngest among the four brothers, Rajesh was brilliant right from the beginning. He was a successful anaesthetist. He had developed skills in bringing critical patients to the hospital,” Rajesh’s father said.

“The hospital used to send him on such special occasions when VIP patients were to be brought or sent back. He had visited Nigeria to drop a patient by a chartered plane. Once he went to Mumbai to bring back veteran actor Dilip Kumar. He used to visit states like Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and other places on his assignments,” he added.