Couple leaves kid in taxi on way home from airport

Couple leaves kid in taxi on way home from airport

Tamaghna.Banerjee@timesgroup.com

Kolkata:29.10.2020 

A six-year-old boy, sleeping in the backseat of a yellow taxi, was left behind in the vehicle by his parents, who had apparently forgotten to get him down while rushing to get their luggage off the taxi’s boot on Tuesday evening, hours after they flew back to Kolkata from Lucknow.

But, thanks to the fast intervention by cops and a quick thinking by the cabbie, the child was reunited with his parents within an hour after he had gone missing.

The incident happened around 7.30pm on Tuesday after the family of four — a couple in their late 30s and their two kids aged 10 and 6 — took a pre-paid taxi from Kolkata airport. The family had returned from Lucknow and were heading to their Alambazar home near Dakshineswar.

The man had sat on the frontseat while the mother with her two kids were in the backseat. While their 10-yearold daughter was awake, the six-year-old son, who was sitting right behind the driver’s seat, had dozed off.

“After getting down at their home, they started taking out the luggage from the car. But none had noticed that the boy was left behind. The father said only after they went up home they realised that the boy had never got out of the car. They had the taxi’s counterfoil slip where our traffic control room’s number was printed, along with the car’s registration number. They called us and sought help,” said Dhritiman Sarkar, DC (traffic), Bidhannagar City Police.

Upon receiving the SOS call, cops contacted the prepaid counter at airport where a staffer checked database and called up the taxi owner. He then contacted the driver — Devtadeen Koery — and asked him to check if there was a kid in the backseat. Koery was surprised to find the boy still sleeping with his head against the car’s rear right door. “In my14-year-long career, I have seen people leaving behind mobiles and bags. But I have never seen someone leaving a child behind. Since he was tucked at the rightmost corner, I couldn’t even spot him in rear-view mirror. I had almost reached airport by that time and took the child to the nearest traffic guard,” said Koery.

Once he was taken to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport traffic guard, cops called his parents, who rushed to take their kid back.

Devtadeen Koery, the taxi driver