‘Need to have something that tells us they are gone’: At Ahmedabad hospital, long night for kin of crash victims

Her nephew Javed, along with his wife Maryam and their two children, was on the Air India 171 flight that crashed in the city on Thursday.

Her other nephew Imtiaz, Javed’s brother, flew down from Mumbai on Friday to give his samples for DNA matching.

Though families have been informed that it will take at least 72 hours for the results of the DNA tests to come out, many like Salma could not help but make their way to the hospital on Saturday, perhaps in an attempt to make sense of the harsh reality of their loss.

The Memons are a large and closely knit clan scattered across Mumbai, Hyderabad, and parts of Madhya Pradesh.

Javed was in Mumbai last week for Bakrid, and also to visit his mother who underwent a heart surgery two months back. “We have been lying to her for the last two days. She has begun suspecting that something is amiss, and asking where all the family members are. We are so scared of telling her… But we will take the remains home so that there is a finality to the loss,” says Salma.

Anil Patel, who lost his son Harshit and daughter-in-law Pooja, is also at the hospital, hoping to get some information. “I was told by an official that the remains will be given to us in a packed state and we will have to complete the last rites soon,” says Patel.

The families have been told that whatever luggage could be salvaged has been kept in a storage. Once the identification of the bodies is complete, they will also be asked to identify the luggage and valuables.

Officials say while some of the bodies are charred due to the explosion, others have some body parts missing. The challenge is to hand them over in “a dignified manner” so that the families can conduct last rites, they add. While blood samples have been taken of the kin, they are, in some cases, being matched with multiple remains. Kept in a postmortem room at the hospital with temperatures to match adequate safe-keeping, the bodies will be handed over as and when the tests confirm the identities, says an official.

“We have no option but to wait. It is difficult to come to terms (with the loss) without seeing the bodies,” says Patel as he waits outside Kasauti Bhavan, an examination room that is temporarily serving as a centre to collect the samples for DNA test.