'Broke window, jumped... ran for my life'

Several of the dead were in two sleeper buses that caught fire after the fireball erupted from the gas leak; many people still unaccounted for

- Senjuti Sengupta

When Shilpa Sharma awoke by the smell of gas at 5.30am on Friday and stepped out of her house, she thought she had stepped into a ghost town. Thick black smoke had enveloped her neighbourhood, two kilometers from where an LPG tanker collision would soon create a massive fireball on the Jaipur-Ajmer highway, killing at least 12 people and leaving dozens with severe burns.

"Our house is just 2km away from the site of the accident. It was around 5.30am that I was woken up by the smell of some gas and then I heard an explosion. Before I could even see what it was, a kid from my neighbourhood called me asking for help," Sharma recalled.

The explosion she heard would transform an ordinary morning commute into a tragedy for dozens of families. Among them were her neighbours' children, Dev, 21, and Riddhi, 15, whose parents were among the 32 people critically injured in the disaster.

"I had never imagined I would see such a morning," said Riddhi, a Class 11 student, waiting outside the burn ward of SMS Hospital. Her parents, Ramesh Sharma, 55, and Neera Sharma, 47, were on their daily morning commute to C-Scheme on their two-wheeler when they were caught in the inferno. "My father is a driver there while my mother works as househelp in a few houses. At around 5.45am, my father called me and said there was an accident and they sustained burns. When I reached there, I could not recognise my parents."