A lot of observations, insights, information, images, voices and plain emotion from my Mangalore-Air India Express-crash assignment are strewn across pages of my little notebook. As I revisit them, they appear like the strewn wreckage of the plane itself and of the people who occupied it at the disaster site. Each disintegrated and dismembered little jotting in my Moleskine led to the assemblage of a single bigger narrative in the abstract of my mind. What holds them together is a glue called grief. I present some of them here:
I
Ours was the first commercial flight to land early Sunday morning, 24 hours after the crash, and, when landing preparations were on, suddenly the aircraft started gaining height again. Perhaps the ATC had not given clearance. As we circled many times over the airport, and that day it was not the airport but the crash site, we felt like vultures hovering over a dead prey. In an ATR craft, I sat on seat number 9F, right over the wheels. When we finally touched down, I felt the impact and was not sure if we would stop: the previous day the Air India Express flight had hurried on. The gorges, approximately a 50 meters on the right side of the runway, ran with us.
II
As we stepped into the airport hall, there were women in burqas huddled in a corner. They were relatives of victims who had landed in a special flight. After the immobile mass of mourning black, we stepped out of the airport and saw a long line of white taxis. They were all ambulances and hearse vans the previous day. We had to take one of them.
III
At the crash site plastic water bottles were littered all over. A policeman told us that the locals and aid-workers consumed them all as they struggled to recover the 158 bodies the previous day. They ran up and down the gorge hundreds of times with the bodies, to put them into waiting ambulances on the road.
IV
We reach the mortuary of A J Hospital and Research Centre and see the bodies lying on the floor. Why are they not in the cold storage chambers? Won't they rot? We ask the hospital authorities. They say the mortuary has only four storage chambers, while they received 14 bodies. Eleven dead due to burn injuries and three due to 'blunt' injuries. That was the case across hospitals in the city. The cold storage facilities in morgues were limited. One surgeon put the figure at a maximum of 20 across five major hospitals in the city - Wenlock, AJ, Fr. Muller's, Kshema, Yenepoya. How could 20 cold storage chambers accommodate 158 bodies? So they lay rotting on the floors.
V
All hospitals sent their ambulances to the crash site, as a result the bodies got distributed to various hospitals across the city. This caused great inconvenience to relatives as they had to run from one hospital to another to identify their dear dead. A suggestion repeatedly aired by the families of the victims was that the district administration should have collected all the bodies in one place, segregated them into male, female and children and that would have made it slightly easier for the relatives.
VI
When we went to see Umar Farooq, one of the survivors, he was being dressed for his facial burns and a nasal fracture. His brother Abdul Razack standing near his bed told us something amusing, which made us chuckle even amidst the pervading melancholia. Apparently, after he jumped out of the airplane, slid down the slope with the help of his jeans, and was getting close to the railway track behind the crash site, two dogs threatened to attack him. Farooq, who had been scared of dogs all his life didn't know what to do. He had escaped the crash, but the dogs? Luckily, two locals came running, chased away the dogs and put him into an autorickshaw so that he could quickly reach a nearby hospital.
VII
When we were leaving the A J Hospital mortuary, three Air India staff from Mumbai deployed to help families of victims asked if they could be dropped at the main gate of the hospital in our vehicle. As they got in, we asked if the relatives who came were enraged with them. One person responded: "No, not at all. They are very civilised and very decent. They were calm and composed." Our driver, who was a local was angered by this response: "Don't say this loudly, if our people hear this they'll thrash you," he warned.
VIII
At the Wenlock Hospital mortuary Sadanand Belchada (about 60) was seeing his son's body, Lokesh Belchada (26), being put into a casket. Since rigor mortis had set in more than 24 hours ago and the body was not in a flat position, the volunteers were finding it difficult to close the lid on the coffin. The limbs were falling out of the casket. They were trying to bend the hands and stuff the legs in. The father intervened and pleaded with them not to harm his son any further. So they let it be. The lid was placed and a string was tied around the coffin to hold everything together.
IX
There could be no better projections of hope for the city than Abdul Hamid Ali alias Amicha, a poor butcher, who arrived at the Wenlock Hospital mortuary at 9.30 am on Saturday, immediately after he heard of the crash and left the place 35 hours later, on Sunday. He had helped clear nearly one hundred bodies. We were witness to Sadanand Belchada holding the hand of Amicha and thanking him with a gaze of gratefulness. Amicha had helped Sadanand identify Lokesh after nearly 24 hours. "For Amicha and his other volunteer friends who worked all night, food and water came free from nearby Hindu hotels," said John Sequeria, a cab driver, who had made innumerable trips between morgues. Communal harmony is a hackneyed phrase. Too politically correct to capture the spirit that moves people like Amicha.
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X
Some aid-workers at the Wenlock Hospital mortuary pull us aside and gently lobby for the mention of their organisation's name in the article we would write, but some others notice this and tell us: "Don't credit anybody, this is voluntary humanitarian work done by the people of Mangalore. The good name should go to the city. People from all religions and all castes have worked here."
XI
There was a peculiar problem with the body of Z. Glusica, the pilot of the crashed jet, who was a British national of Serbian origin. His inquest report was in Kannada and the Air India staff wanted it in English to be able to transport it across the seas.
XII
The aid-workers and volunteers at Wenlock Hospital mortuary had by default created a system to beat their exhaustion. When a team was working on parcelling and loading a body, there was another standing behind them peeling plantains and stuffing them into their mouth or pouring water. Needless to speak here about the cruel sun and the humid sea-side weather.
XIII
When we reached the St. John Baptist Church at Permude seven kilometres from Bajpe, a funeral mass for Melwyn Kiran Menezes was being conducted in the local Konkani language. The entire parish had assembled and they sang in one voice. One Konkani hymn went this way: "Those grief-stricken come to me/Those weighed down by burdens come to me/I shall give you rest." At the end, as the requiem band tried to build up the tempo for the final march, they made a prayer: "Almighty God may you give them eternal rest/And may eternal light be on them." The coffin entered the darkness of the burial chamber.
XIV
During the mass when the holy communion began, it was interesting to watch people move towards the pulpit and move back to their seats creating a rhythmic certainty amidst all the uncertainty that surrounded them. That is perhaps what any organised religion does - to quickly bring the unknown to the realms of the known.
XV
The Emirates, for most people who had passed away and their families, was not an exotic destination, it was a place where they journeyed to be able to graduate in life - into a new class in their town, a new neighbourhood, a new home, a new car and in the case of the young, perhaps a new wife.
XVI
There were two enduring images that my colleague Nilotpal Baruah captured. One:
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A tagged hand of a charred body casually making place for itself amongst the busy hands of the volunteers. The soot on the charred body; the soot and deep crack on the wall behind and the intervening dark shadows made a moving image.
And Two:
Darkened and shrivelled plantains in a half-empty cluster lying at the edge of a coffin. The plantains mirrored the bodies.
What has been more enduring than these images is the stench of the mortuaries. It is locked up in our nasal passages and threatens to open up each time we reach our dining tables.
