To claim the 14-year-old’s body.

The police today confirmed that Pushkar came under the wheels of Paschim Express sometime while the train was pulling out of the station on Saturday evening. He might have slipped; he might even have jumped. No one knows for sure, for his friend and ‘associate’, Vikas, was in another compartment as the two travelled ticketless.

Their destination? Mumbai. “Pushkar told me he knew many people in Mumbai and we could make a living there,” Vikas, who was rescued on Saturday night, told Newsline today. “He said his father must have reported him missing at the police station since he did not return home on Friday. He said the police would arrest him if I did not accompany him to Mumbai.”

The seeds of the tragic tale were sown in the classroom on Friday, Vikas said, when they were taking a test in Science. “Our teacher caught Pushkar copying; his paper was seized and he was asked to get out of the class.

“That evening, after school, he came to my house.”

That evening the boy’s father, Jagdish Prasad Singh, filed a missing report at the local police station. No one yet knows where the Class VIII student spent the night.

That same night — Friday — Vikas’s father G R Bhatt found a wallet from his son: it had Rs 200 cash and Pushkar’s photograph. “I took it away and asked my son to tell Pushkar to collect it from me,” Bhatt said. He had no idea about the tragedy in the making.

The Getaway
After Pushkar met Vikas the following afternoon, they took a bus to New Delhi railway station, where they got into Paschim Express. Their destination, Vikas says, was Mathura for the time being. And since they were travelling without ticket, “Pushkar asked me to sit with a family, and said he would sit with another. That way, the TTE would not ask us for tickets.

“I sat with some people; he went to another coach.”

Parents of both boys lodged a missing complaint on Saturday.

“Late Saturday night, it must have been around 4 am, I received a call from Faridabad station,” Vikas’s father G R Bhatt said. “I was told that a boy with an ID card of ‘Vikas Bhatt’ was found dead at the station.

“I almost fainted.”

The missing identity
After a while, Bhatt said he received another call: this time the caller said Vikas was found loitering, alone, on Meerut platform.

The police suspect Pushkar, while trying to dodge a TTE, must have fallen off the train at Faridabad while Vikas advanced to Meerut. And since he was carrying Vikas’s bag, Faridabad railway authorities rang up the Bhatts.

Pushkar’s parents were informed only on Sunday evening. Till Monday evening, they were waiting in Faridabad for the postmortem to get over and return with their son’s body.

Pushkar’s father Jagdish Prasad Singh told Newsline, “The only reason my son ran away is because the teacher had put undue pressure on him.”

Singh runs a tuition centre; his wife is an LIC agent. The family lives in YP Block, Pitampura. Pushkar’s sister Jagrithi, 12, studies in the same school.

Vikas’s family lives in Income Tax Colony, Pitampura.