Ahmedabad: A lost voter ID that prevented a Kutch pilgrim from boarding a flight from Delhi to Kathmandu on Aug 25 turned out to be a stroke of luck, as the one-day delay helped ensure that all 43 members of his group crossed the Nepal-China border just hours before disaster struck.Harshad Soni, a businessman from Kutch, was part of a 43-member group, with pilgrims aged between 26 and 64, travelling on a 15-day tour for Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage.The trouble began at Delhi airport on Aug 24. Soni had lost his voter ID and had no other valid identification with him. He could not board the flight with the rest of the group. His passport, meanwhile, was with the Chinese Embassy in Delhi, where he had submitted it for his Kailash Mansarovar visa.The rest of the group left that afternoon while Soni stayed back in Delhi, waiting anxiously for visa clearance. The news finally came at night: the embassy had approved the visas.At 4.30am on Aug 25, Soni boarded a flight to Kathmandu. With the China border around six hours away by road, he opted to take a helicopter. His wife Sunanda and the other 42 pilgrims had already reached the border by then.“As soon as he got the visa news, he reached Kathmandu and then flew by helicopter to the border,” Sunanda said.Soni was also carrying the passports of the other pilgrims. The group crossed the border on the night of Aug 25, just hours before disaster struck the region. Shailesh Maheshwari, one of the tour operators who organised the trip, said, “We were the last ones to cross the border.”“The next morning, the border was to open at 9am. Just then, disaster struck,” he added.The group spent about 20 hours around the border area, including nearly six hours inside the immigration office. They had lunch there, freshened up and waited before moving ahead. It was only after reaching further along the route that they understood the scale of the disaster, Maheshwari said.For Sunanda, the sequence of events now feels less like coincidence and more like divine grace.Both Sunanda and Harshad were making their first Kailash Mansarovar pilgrimage. What began with the frustration of a lost ID and a missed flight has left the family looking at that delay differently. “We are too disturbed by the incident,” Sunanda said. “Nothing that we saw before exists anymore. That is a shock.”The pilgrims are now safely across the border, but their return to Kutch on Sep 4 remains uncertain.
