They were three siblings – Rajesh, Ranjith, and Asha – living with their parents and their many little dreams in a modest house in Kalliyoor, in the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram. Two years ago, Ranjith passed away in a train mishap. Rajesh had then told his sister that they would be there for each other, a promise he could not keep for long. On August 4, Rajesh, a swimmer and rappelling instructor, was confirmed dead three days after he went missing during a rescue mission for the Kannur floods. He was 37.
When his body was brought home, Asha felt a flurry of complaints brimming within her. This was a brother whom the family would hardly get to see; she had last met him a month ago when he came for Ranjith’s second death anniversary. The rest of the family – including Rajesh’s bereaved wife Safiya and two adolescent children – saw him a week ago before he rushed to the site of the disaster in Kannur.
“That’s what he always did. Whenever he heard about a disaster, he would jump in on a rescue mission. He seemed to get a high out of rescuing people. He did that both for the 2018 floods and the 2024 Wayanad landslides. In Wayanad, he received a salute from the Collector after he rescued a little child very daringly. This time too, he had helped move a number of families in Kannur to relief camps before he heard about an older man trapped in an islet,” Asha said, sitting in an inner room of their home in Kalliyoor where they had all grown up together.
On August 1, Rajesh and two other men had gone to rescue a 61-year-old farmer called Benny, who was trapped in Cherupuzha. When they reached the man, Rajesh lent him his life jacket and sent him to be carried between the two other men on a rope while he had tagged behind them. But Rajesh got caught in a strong undercurrent and was swept so far away that they could not trace him for three days.
“I got a call on the same night from one of his friends saying that Rajesh has had a mishap, but not to tell anyone else yet. I didn’t know it was so bad,” Asha said.
The next day – August 2, a Sunday – the family went to attend the memorial service of a relative. When they got back home, there were television crews waiting outside, said Rajesh’s father Rajasekharan. A few relatives, including Rajasekharan, soon went to Kannur, only to receive Rajesh’s remains.
“He had been in Kannur for a few months, working with an adventure park there. He was always doing that, training children in adventure sports wherever he went. It’s not like he had any money to organise all this, he took loans for the rescue missions,” Rajasekharan said.
Rajesh had developed an interest in adventure sports after he married Safiya, said a neighbour. He had met her at a hotel management course. They married young and had two children when he began his sporting career. Safiya worked as a canteen staff member in a city hospital.
Rajesh was a sort of mentor and leader for young people in the neighbourhood, active as he was in gathering people for festivals, organising annual feasts at the local temple for the poor, donating food and clothes at an orphanage, and so on. A large banner paying tribute to him, by the adventure group he led – ADMS – could be seen on one side of the lane to his home.
“Everywhere you go, you will find my father’s students, and everything will be free for us where they work,” said his proud 14-year-old son, whose photograph of sobbing uncontrollably over Rajesh’s casket was splashed across newspapers.
But Rajesh never had the time to teach his own children, Asha said. He was always busy, always running around. “When I asked him about it, about the debts he was accruing, he would say that he had many dreams that would one day come true,” she said.
On the day after his funeral, women thronged both the rooms of Safiya and Rajesh’s mother, Geetha. Visitors kept pouring in, with the occasional local politician dropping in.
There was some commotion a day earlier, when news came out that Rajesh’s body was not placed in a freezer in the ambulance when the family brought him home from Kannur. “They [local authorities] had assured us that it would be fine to take him like that, although by then his body was three days old. Midway through the journey, his body began to give out an odour [as part of putrefaction] and we had to arrange for another ambulance with a freezer. I told this to the Chief Minister and other responsible figures when they came home,” Rajasekharan said.
While paying his last respects to Rajesh, CM VD Satheesan promised financial support to complete the house he was building.
Rajesh was cremated with state honours and laid to rest next to his brother Ranjith. Asha, the only sibling of the three now left behind, wondered in her grief what those many dreams of her brother Rajesh were, the ones he said would one day save him.