Abdul's left foot had been trapped under the weight of a steel girder that might have crushed him but for two taxis that cushioned its fall.
The 49-year-old spent an agonising two hours stooped, his entire weight on his left elbow and two knees and the yellow Ambassador taxis pressing against his right arm and hips. To add to his misfortune, one of the taxis caught fire. When fire brigade personnel hosed it, the boiling water scalded his back, arms and face.
"I couldn't move. My left leg was under a concrete slab. Every inch of my body was hurting. If I tried to move, the pain became even more unbearable," Abdul, who would cook for workers of a construction company, said from bed number one in the cardio-thoracic and vascular surgery ITU at Calcutta Medical College and Hospital.
The father of seven remembers a loud noise a split second before the flyover crash making him run until something fell on his back.
Abdul landed on his chest. He tried to crawl out on all fours with a taxi beside him when another Ambassador screeched to a halt and he was sandwiched between the two. Then the girder came crashing down."The taxis took most of the girder's weight, but my foot was still trapped. Still, had it not been for the taxis, I would have been surely killed," Abdul recalled.
A net below the flyover meant to ensure that construction materials don't land on cars and pedestrians below also fell on Abdul. He somehow managed to get it away from his face.
Abdul, from Ekdala Madhupur village in Murshidabad district, had made lunch for a dozen workers engaged for a Canning Street project around noon on Thursday. The bridge collapsed on him while he was on his way back to Beadon Row, where he lives.
Once the dust settled, Abdul started calling out to people he could see through the dust and pain. Some of the faces he remembers asking for help were of policemen. "But no one tried to help me. Maybe they realised that it was impossible, the way I was stuck," he said, his voice quivering as he recounted the horror.
Abdul's agony was compounded by the realisation that one of the taxis had caught fire. He could not see the flames. He only remembers the searing pain when a stream of hot water from a fire brigade hose landed on his back, arms and face.
Abdul also can't recall how a thick shard of glass got into his right arm. "I don't know what got into me but at that moment I was suddenly fighting. I grabbed the feet of a man who was offering me water and pleaded with him to stay there," he said.
Bare hands were helpless in the face of such adversity. It took a while for help to reach Abdul. Around 2.30pm, a gas cutter was used to cut open a part of one of the taxis and free him. Since ambulances could not reach the spot because of the debris, a payloader's "scooper" was used to lift Abdul and move him to one.
The injury to his lungs needs immediate surgical intervention and the accumulated blood drained out. "The patient's condition has to stabilise before we can do a surgery. A medical board has been formed and they will take a call on the course of treatment," said Sushanta Banerjee, the director of medical education.
Abdul used to be an agriculture worker in his village not long ago. He came to Calcutta to work as a cook last September.
"He (Abdul) would tell me that he was afraid to cross the roads in Calcutta. My advice to him was to relax and take a good look at the traffic to his right and left before crossing a road. What happened to him proves that being careful is not enough in Calcutta," said Abdul's younger brother Taharuddin Sheikh, who works as a mason in Howrah.
Leap of faith
The front of Sanju Singh's autorickshaw was flattened when a portion of the flyover crashed over his three-wheeler. He might have been another name on the casualty list had he instinctively not jumped out of the auto a split second before the first slabs of concrete fell.
Sanju, in his 40s, is one of two persons officially declared as critically injured among the 16 people still admitted in hospital. A fractured hip remains his hurdle on the road to recovery, although the internal bleeding has stopped.
Sanju, in bed number 17 of the critical care unit at SSKM Hospital, has told family members that everything happened so fast that he can't make sense of how he managed to escape being crushed under the concrete and metal.
Brother Suresh, who owns the autorickshaw he used to drive on the BK Paul Avenue-MG Road route, said: "He was crossing Vivekananda Road on his way from Chitpore to Jorasanko when he saw the flyover falling. Since the auto was already in motion, he couldn't have stopped it from rolling under the structure. The only option for him was to jump and he did just that."
Doctors said it would take Sanju a minimum of six months after surgery to walk again.
-The Telegraph Calcutta