“On Saturday afternoon, we spoke on the phone for about 15 minutes… We spoke about some tests, which she said had gone well. She was very happy,” said Ramesh.

He said hours later, around 9 pm, he received a call from one of Ekta’s friends informing him that a building in Saidulajab had collapsed. Ekta, who had gone to the canteen — ‘Aunty Wala Kitchen’ — next to the building for dinner, was missing and could not be contacted.

Ramesh rushed from Alwar and reached Delhi around midnight, hoping his daughter would be rescued safely from the debris.

At the disaster site, every movement by rescuers offered a glimmer of hope. Every stretcher emerging from the rubble made him look up.

For nearly 19 hours, he waited, uttering a single plea: ‘Please save my daughter’. Ekta’s friends and classmates tried to pacify and console him.

He said her 25th birthday was only days away, he said; the family had been discussing plans for her return home.

In 2020, when the opportunity arose for her to study medicine abroad, her father sold part of the family’s land to finance her education in Kyrgyzstan — despite the financial hardship. “She always wanted to become a doctor,” he recalled.

Ekta then returned to India after her five-year MBBS course and had been preparing in Delhi for the Foreign Medical Graduate Examination (FMGE), the mandatory licensing test for foreign-trained doctors seeking to practise in the country, for the past year.

Living far from home, Ekta remained the centre of her family’s world. “Whenever students from their village travelled to Delhi, her father would send homemade ghee, sweets and her favourite food through them, hoping she would feel cared for even from hundreds of kilometres away,” one of her friends said.