Villagers shunned killer cracker unit

BRAHMONBAR (Pingla): Subhendu Bhakta, 23, and Arindam Maity, 26, were the only persons from Brahmonbar who apparently took up a job at Ranjan Maity’s factory. Subhendu is suspected to have been killed — though his name did not feature on the list of the deceased — in the late-night explosion while Arindam, who stopped working at the factory last year, escaped with a missing thumb on his right hand following an earlier accident there.
Almost everyone in the village seemed to shun the factory, where they claimed explosives were made. The Rs 300, which Ranjan paid for making 1,000 “crackers”—the rate was higher for the “big crackers”—was not worth the risk, villagers felt.
While neighbours claimed that Subhendu, the only bread-earner of the family, worked at the factory, his wife, Tapasi, 21, and mother, Chandana, maintained that he worked in the field for a living and that he had merely gone to meet Maity on the fateful night. “My father, Madhu Sana, had fractured his arm, for which we were supposed to take him to Cuttack for treatment. But we didn’t have the money,” Tapasi said. “So, Subhendu decided to have a talk with Ranjan Maity about it. He went there at 9pm and half-an-hour later, we heard the blast. We ran to the site and looking for him but couldn’t trace him.” The police, she said, had packed off whatever human remains that could be found in large gunny bags. “But we could not see him anywhere,” said Tapasi, who has a three-year-old daughter.
Arindam, who quit working in the factory last October, was seen watching TV with Ranjan’s mother, Urmila, on Thursday afternoon. “On Monday, I asked Ranjan Kaku why he had not shut the cracker factory,” Arindam said. “I told him that it would do more harm than good. It had shattered my dreams, and now, I can hardly do my own chores. He told me he would close the factory after finishing Kali Puja orders in October.”
On clearing his Madhyamik, Arindam dreamt of joining the Army. “I was supposed to take the exam on October 12,” he sad. “On October 3, I saw the children trying to light a cracker that they found at the factory. I also tried lighting a cracker but it burst, blowing off my right thumb and immobilizing my forearm. I could never take the exam and my entire life is ruined.”