Dussehra draws crowds across India every autumn. In the Joda Phatak neighborhood, the celebration was a fixture -- organizers said they had held the effigy burning at the same location every year. Navjot Kaur Sidhu, a local Congress politician and wife of the area's legislative assembly member, served as guest of honour. Families from the surrounding neighborhoods, many of them migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, gathered in the open space around the tracks to watch the spectacle. As the massive effigy of Ravana caught fire and fireworks crackled overhead, spectators pressed forward for a better view, standing on and between the rails. The noise of the celebration -- the explosions, the cheering, the roar of the flames -- drowned out everything else. Sidhu would later say she had left the site shortly before the disaster struck, returning only after hearing what had happened.

The Amritsar-Howrah Mail had already passed through in the opposite direction moments earlier, confirmed later by the gateman on duty at the junction. Then came the diesel multiple unit, a local passenger train traveling westbound from Jalandhar to Amritsar. Witnesses said they never heard a horn. The driver told a different story: he honked and pulled the emergency brakes, but so much smoke from the burning effigy obscured the tracks that he could not see the crowd until it was too late. He was also negotiating a curve. When panicked survivors surrounded the train and began pelting it with stones, the driver continued to the next station and immediately reported the incident to the Amritsar Junction station master. By evening, 50 bodies had been recovered from along the tracks. More were found in the following days, with the final confirmed death toll reaching 62. The force of the impact left many victims dismembered beyond recognition, agonizing the families who came searching for their missing.

A local official noted that most of those killed were migrant workers and their families -- people who had come to Punjab from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar seeking livelihoods, and who lived in the modest neighborhoods around Joda Phatak. Two women who met with politician Navjot Singh Sidhu at a local hospital the day after the disaster had each lost their entire families: children, husbands, in-laws. The majority of the identified dead were cremated at the Shitla Mata Temple in Amritsar. Others were sent back to their hometowns for last rites. In the chaos that followed the collision, some in the crowd reportedly stole phones and wallets from the dead and injured -- a detail that compounded the grief of families who received their loved ones' bodies but none of their belongings.

The question of responsibility scattered in every direction. Railway officials called it "a clear case of trespassing" and noted they had not been informed of the festival's location or timing. The event organizers countered that the celebration had been held at the same site for years, and that railway authorities had always been alerted. The driver, detained at Ludhiana Railway Station, maintained he had a green signal and could not have known hundreds of people stood on the tracks. The railways minister of state cleared the driver of negligence. Punjab's chief minister announced compensation for families of the dead and free treatment for the injured. The central government added its own compensation package. Navjot Singh Sidhu pledged to adopt all children orphaned by the disaster and cover their education, while extending financial help to widows. The day after the crash, residents staged a sit-in on the very tracks where the disaster occurred, blocking rail traffic and demanding accountability that no single authority seemed willing to accept.

The Amritsar train disaster exposed a reality that extends far beyond one festival evening. India's railway network -- the fourth largest in the world -- carries over eight billion passenger trips a year across tracks that often pass directly through densely populated areas without barriers or grade separations. Informal gatherings, marketplaces, and foot crossings along active rail lines are a fact of daily life for millions. After the disaster, 37 trains were cancelled, 16 diverted, and 18 terminated early on the Jalandhar-Amritsar route. Condolences arrived from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Ram Nath Kovind, and heads of state from Pakistan, Canada, and Russia. But at Joda Phatak, the fundamental geography remained unchanged: train tracks running through a neighborhood where people live, work, and celebrate, separated from oncoming locomotives by nothing more than habit and hope.