The grandfather of the bride-to-be sat with a grim face, unable to come to terms with the fact that he had just lost his daughter and son in the accident.
Kar Sundararaj’s children S Venkatesh Yadav, president of the Akhila Karnataka Annayya Chiranjeevi Fans’ Welfare Association, and Anita Muniraju were travelling in the ill-fated bus to Hyderabad to distribute wedding invitations.
The whole family was in a celebratory mood as Anita’s daughter Anusha’s wedding was fixed for November 15. The brother-sister duo had left for Hyderabad after dinner on Tuesday night.
As Venkatesh was close to actor-turned-politician Chiranjeevi, he had planned to visit him at his residence to personally invite him for the wedding. “They were actually supposed to go by train. But since they did not get a reservation, they went by bus,” said Sundararaj.
Ravi Prasad, a friend of Venkatesh, remembered how he organised blood and eye donation camps and distributed fruits to poor patients in hospitals on the birthdays of actors Chiranjeevi, Pawan Kalyan and Ramcharan Teja. “He did it religiously every year,” he said.
“Recently, he had become a film distributor. I did not know I would be seeing him for the last time,” Sundararaj said.