A year of grief and waiting: What remains when a plane falls from the sky

A year of grief and waiting: What remains when a plane falls from the sky 29 minutes ago Share Save Add as preferred on Google Zoya Mateen Mumbai Imtiyaz Ali Javed, his wife Mariam and their two children died in the Air India plane crash last year When I called Imtiyaz Ali to ask if we could meet, nearly a year after a plane crash killed his brother Javed, his sister-in-law Mariam, and their two children, we first decided to speak at his home in Mumbai. Hours later, he changed his mind. "Let's meet at the hotel instead," he said. Later, beneath the dim lights of a business hotel in Mumbai, he explained why. Javed and his family had built a life in the UK, but they returned often to Mumbai to see Imtiyaz and the rest of the family. But after the crash, the house no longer felt quite the same. Something in it had shifted irreversibly - altered in ways the routines of ordinary life could neither explain nor repair. "It feels," Imtiyaz said carefully, "like Javed is still there." His mother Farida Bano would later put it more simply: "He follows me everywhere," she told the BBC. "Day and night." In a few weeks, investigators are expected to release their final report into the crash of Air India Flight AI171, the Ahmedabad-to-London flight that fell from the sky less than a minute after takeoff last June. There was only one survivor among the 242 people on board. For a year, the families of the victims have lived with unanswered questions: what happened in the cockpit, why the aircraft lost thrust, whether the disaster was human error, mechanical failure or something else entirely. I had met Imtiyaz twice before, in Ahmedabad, in the stunned days after the crash, when families were still waiting for DNA confirmation to identify their loved ones. Back then he spoke with the dazed logic of someone still bargaining with reality. "Maybe he will come back," he told me then. Nearly a year later in Mumbai, the disbelief had faded - the waiting remained. "This confusion, this limbo haunts us," he said, describing the absence of closure about what had happened. The Alis were, in many ways, an ordinary Mumbai family shaped by migration and sacrifice. Their father died early, and the children were raised largely by their grandmother in Mumbai while their mother worked in Dubai for many years. Javed eventually moved to the UK, part of the vast stream of Indians who leave home searching for financial stability abroad but remain emotionally tethered to their families. Imtiyaz remembered how inseparable his brother and mother had been. "The whole day they would be talking," he said. Then he paused. "And now," he said, "the silence is what kills her." Imtiyaz Ali The family celebrated Eid together last year - it was just days before the crash For days after the crash, they tried to shield their mother, a heart patient, from the truth. Air India officials and doctors advised caution. A psychologist was brought in. Her heart was fragile, and they feared the shock might