Bhubaneswar: When Ashok Kumar Tripathy (53), an HR consultant, left his house in Jayadev Vihar in Odisha’s capital for Mumbai, he looked forward to the trip. He was very happy.
“He didn’t tell me when he would return. He just said take care of the house. He looked very happy,” said 34-year-old Parasuram, the caretaker of the double-storey house. He took up the job only four months ago.
Ashok and his wife Vaibhavi Bandekar Tripathy (51) had separated and he was going to Mumbai to meet her and their two children, Dhanush (24) and Ritika (15). From there, all four would go on a holiday to Nepal.
He was excited.
“As per court orders, the children had to spend 10 days with their father every year” and this time “they were headed to Muktinath in Nepal”, according to a report in The Indian Express.
Vaibhavi and the children lived in Thane near Mumbai, where she worked at a private firm. Ashok, who was from Sonepur in Odisha, had moved back to his home state, where he ran a HR consultancy firm in Bhubaneswar.
Dhanush, an engineering graduate from BITS-Pilani, worked at a private firm. Ritika was a Class X student.
All of them looked forward to the family reunion. But little did they know that it would be their last family reunion.
Ashok, Vaibhav and their two children were on the ill-fated flight which crashed in Nepal on Sunday morning.
All 22 people, including three crew members, onboard the Tara Air Twin-Otter (9N-AET) are believed to be dead. The family from Odisha were the only Indians onboard. The other passengers included two Germans and 13 Nepali nationals.
Rescuers have recovered 14 bodies so far from the crash site in Mustang district in northern Nepal.
A cousin brother of Ashok was supposed to join him and his family on the trip but could not make it for some reason.
“He planned the Nepal trip with me when he came to Sonepur. I too was supposed to join them but couldn’t make it somehow,” said Kanan Tripathy, Ashok’s cousin who is a banker in Sonepur.
His elder brother, Satyabrata Tripathy, who too lives in Sonepur town, had spoken to him two days back. Satyabrata, a former president of the Kalahandi district consumer court, learnt about the crash from social media at about 12 pm. “Ashok and his wife left for Nepal on May 27. They had plans to visit Pokhara and Jomsom,” Satyabrata told TNIE.
Ashok was one of five brothers. One of them, Rajen, is a twin and is a software engineer in Pune. Ashok’s father Krushna Prasad Tripathy was a district judge and passed away 11 years ago. He lost his mother in 2020. Ashok used to live in a two-storey house in Jayadev Vihar, Bhubaneswar.
The family’s driver, 29-year-old Ashish Sawant, who had dropped them at Mumbai airport, is in shock. “I have lost everything,” he told PTI.
Sawant, who lives in Thane, told PTI that he had been working as the family’s driver for the last seven years and dropped Vaibhavi to her office in Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) in Mumbai.
“It was just two days back that I dropped the family at the Mumbai airport and today I received this shocking news,” he said.
After hearing the news, he rushed to their house in Rustomjee Athena apartment in Balkum area of Thane to enquire about them.
