The passport had come in the morning. The trip was booked. The dream was days away.
On the night of May 9, Deepesh Agarwal (23) slipped out for a drive with his friends Sanchay Malpani, 22, and Priyanshu Mittal, 23, in his gleaming new Tata coupe, a birthday gift from his parents just five months earlier. They had only just begun paying the EMIs. By dawn, the car and the three young men were reduced to ashes in what is now being called one of the most gruesome crashes this year.
The trip to Turkey, planned for May 10–20, was to be Deepesh’s last hurrah before settling down and focusing on his career. “Just let me go on this one trip, and after that, I will do whatever you want,” he had promised his mother, Indu. But fate had other plans.
Fast lanes and fatal fates in Hyderabad’s streets
An inconsolable Indu recalls how Deepesh, the eldest son in the joint family, had always been ambitious and enterprising. “I never stop him but that night, I just felt something. I told him not to go. He said he was just meeting friends nearby,” she says, sobbing.
