Bangalore: Fulmati Devi was eight months pregnant when her husband Hriday Narayan Ramjee Chauhan, a technician from Wadala in Mumbai, went missing on 18 February in the Black Sea with 24 other Indians working aboard cargo ship MV Rezzak.
Fulmati was informed about the missing ship only after she gave birth to a girl on 8 April. The daughter, yet to be named, may never get to see her father.
Further away in Andheri, a western suburb of Mumbai, Poonam Afroz Ahmed, a Maharashtrian Hindu, is inconsolable. After courting 29-year-old Afroz for almost a decade, the two tied the knot 16 months ago.
Poonam, 23, married Afroz, 29, on 5 September 2006 after he popped the question on Valentine’s Day a year earlier. “My sixth sense says he is alive. There were occasions when he used to be unwell while on voyage, and I could feel that something was amiss. It is impossible for such a big tragedy to happen in my life without my sixth sense giving me an indication,” she says.
Hope floats: ‘In the absence of proper evidence, we cannot accept the ship has sunk,’ says M.B. Goswami, seen here in an undated picture with husband B.B. Goswami, the ship’s master.
Poonam last spoke with Afroz in Russia for nearly an hour on the midnight of 17 February, shortly before the ship was to sail to Turkey carrying steel billets.
Three months on, she’s not been able to come to terms with her husband’s disappearance, even if it means a struggle for necessities because she can’t withdraw money from his bank account. “The bank is asking for a declaration from me stating that my husband is no more. I cannot give such a death certificate,” she says, her voice choking with emotion. “It’s not that easy.”
In one of the biggest shipping disasters involving an all-Indian crew, MV Rezzak went missing while on its voyage from the Russian port of Novorossiysk to the Turkish port of Bartin Limani. Family members of the crew are yet to come to terms with the disappearance.
“We are 100% sure that the ship has not sunk. There is no confirmation. We are not going to accept that the crew perished in the mishap,” says Uma Mohan, sister of the ship’s chief engineer Mahendra Gopal Krishna Menon. “Why doesn’t the Directorate General of Shipping explore the case from the maritime fraud and piracy angle?” she asks.
“In the absence of proper evidence, we cannot accept that the ship has sunk,” says M.B. Goswami, wife of B.B. Goswami, the ship’s master.
Others, too, are holding on to hope.
In West Bengal’s 24 Parganas district, Lakshmi Roy is undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer, and her husband for a nerve disorder. Her brother Kishor Kumar Roy, a cook on Rezzak, was her main financial support. “We are waiting for his return,” says 21-year-old Soma Roy, Lakshmi’s daughter.
The family of Ashok Kumar Dukhi Prajapati, a 37-year-old technician on Rezzak, too, believes he will return. “My heart says my husband is still alive,” says 32-year-old Sangita Devi.