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.