Swimming, rowing was their passion, say shocked families – Times of India

Kolkata: Staring at the lifeless bodies of the two young rowers, kin and parents of both the teenagers rued at how the recently mastered water sport that both the teenagers were so proud of took their lives.
“He just loved to swim and was recently in love with rowing which had become a sort of obsession. A lot can be said about negligence, but the fact is that we will never get him back,” said Sounak Chatterjee, elder brother of Souryadeep.
Parents of Pushan Sadhukhan were distraught as relatives and his father’s colleagues mostly handled the last rites of the Class-IX student on Sunday. His father Pijush, additional officer-in-charge of Ultadanga traffic guard, stared at the Kolkata Police morgue where his son’s body was undergoing post mortem, while his mother Sonali was speechless at their Jhill Road home.
“Sonali was right there at the Lake but had gone for a walk. But as the storm started, she ran back to the Lake club and found the boats capsized. While the club authorities kept telling her everything was under control and that they were rescuing all the kids, Pushan was never rescued. What they could only retrieve, after a long time, was his lifeless body,” said a family friend.
“His father was so proud of Pushan. He had excelled so much in rowing in such a short span. On Saturday only, his father had shared a video on our Whatsapp group showing how their team tipped past the leaders to reach the finals. His father had even applied for a night shift to watch his son at the finals on Sunday,” said a Kolkata Police officer.
A classmate TOI spoke to said hours before the incident he had told one of his friends from another school team that he was aiming for gold. “He was extremely focussed on winning the championship,” said the student.
While Pushan was fairly new to rowing with around a month’s experience, Souryadeep had been training at Lake Club for the past three months. Both of them, however, were good swimmers, relatives said.
Sounak said: “I had dropped my brother at the Lake around 3pm when the weather was sunny. But how could the authorities let them stay in the water when the weather turned bad? They didn’t even call us to inform about the incident. He was very active on Instagram and for four hours there were no posts and he was also not responding to calls. It was only after we called one of his rowing mates that we came to know that he was missing and sometime later, all they could recover was his lifeless body.”
Souryadeep’s father Souvik even claimed that the trainers had left the club once the storm started and there was a long delay before divers started searching for his son. He even lashed out at school authorities for not being more careful about the kids who were at the lake representing the school only.
Lake club officials said they were not aware of a storm prediction but had taken all necessary steps when the storm started. “TV news started airing about the prediction only around 4pm and by then the kids were already in the water. Had we all known about the storm neither we nor the parents would have allowed them in. It was an unusual storm. There are monsoon regattas but such incident has never happened. There were trainers and we tried our best to rescue them. If only we had a speedboat, the rescue operation could have been faster,” said Debu Datta, joint secretary of Lake Club.
Cops have started an unnatural death case and suspect that the boys possibly had their legs entangled in Sarobar weeds. “They had completed a 1,000-metre rowing session and were off for another 600 metres. It must be exhausting and when it demanded swimming against wild waters. Their legs were possibly entangled in weeds,” said an officer.