Burdwan, Dec. 3: A man, his wife and seven-year-old daughter were crushed to death but his one-year-old child, flung several feet from the crook of her mother’s arms, escaped with bruises.

Little Sohini landed in a bush on the roadside and suffered cuts on her head and arms when a truck rammed into her father’s motorcycle from behind.

Sumanta Dana, 35, Sharada, 32, and Sangita, a Class II student, were killed immediately.

The man had stopped his two-wheeler on the side of a road in Burdwan this morning to take a call on his mobile when the sand-laden truck came hurtling down.

“None of them wore helmets. The huge truck came to a stop after hitting them, its driver jumped out and ran away,” said Parthapratim Konar, a farmer at Uchalan in the Madhabdihi area of Burdwan, about 140km from Calcutta.

Villagers who rushed to the mangled motorcycle thought all four were dead. “Then, suddenly, one of us cried out that the child in the bush was breathing. A police patrol jeep arrived and we stopped another car to take all of them to the Burdwan Medical College and Hospital,” said Konar.

Sumanta, Sharada and Sangita were declared dead at the hospital. Sohini was discharged after first aid. “We bandaged the girl’s head and arms. We have also asked her relatives to get a CT scan of her brain and a few X-rays done,” said a doctor at the emergency.

A CT scan suggested the child was safe. Hospital sup- erintendent T.K. Ghosh said: “We did a CT scan on the child this evening but did not find anything. We have asked her relatives to get another scan done a few weeks later.”

Sumanta was a clerk in the block development office at nearby Raina. His maternal uncle Dipendu Roy, an affluent farmer, took the orphaned Sohini to his house from the hospital.

Sumanta was apparently going to Dipendu’s house with his family on the occasion of Nabanna — a festival in rural Bengal to mark the harvesting of paddy.

Dipendu promised to take Sohini’s responsibility. “I had been telling my nephew to visit my house for a long time. He had told me that he would come for Nabanna,” he said.

Sumanta also left behind his mother Archana, 60, a widow. “My sister’s husband died 10 years ago and Sumanta had got his job on compassionate grounds,” said Dipendu.