Mumbai, New Delhi: Manjri Varde misses her family album. It’s lying somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And along with the photographs of Manjri’s near and dear ones, the bomb that ripped through tonnes of metal on what was an Air India Boeing 747 jumbo jet, also carved out a watery grave for her brother Parag Bhatt, sister-in-law Chanda and their five-month-old baby boy Siddhant.
“A close family friend, who used to stay on Peddar Road, suddenly telephoned us … I think it was around 3 in the afternoon … and told us that we need to be in Juhu, where my parents used to stay. We were a bit confused and couldn’t make out why they wanted us to be in Juhu. Anyway, we immediately rushed out. Once we were there, this family friend broke the news that AI 182 had crashed. My parents were shattered and my two younger sisters were completely broken hearted,” Manjri told Gulf News at her Versova residence.
“But I somehow managed to hold myself back until the 13-day mourning period was over. My ‘break’ came after that.”
With aged parents and two young sisters, Manjri knew that someone would have to defy emotions and play the sheet anchor and that was precisely what she did — very much like young homemaker Amarjit, whose seven-year-old son Ashamdeep and ten-year-old daughter Jasleen were too young to even realise the full import of the news that the plane on which their father Captain S.S. Bhinder was the First Officer, had crashed into the Atlantic.
“‘I am finished’ — that was my first reaction when a family friend, an actor from the Punjabi film industry, came to our Mumbai residence and broke the news,” a visibly emotional Amarjit told Gulf News in New Delhi.
“From then on, I was the mother as well as the father to my young children. With my husband gone, I knew I had a huge responsibility to make sure I brought my children up in the best way I could,” Amarjit said, her voice quivering.
The steely, ice-cold eyes of Ashamdeep, seated barely a couple of feet away from his mother, bear reflections of every ounce of the pain, the trauma that the family has endured for three decades.
