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Stories that thread the fabric of our culture and society. Somewhere in them is the idea of India
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This is a story of horror and hope. I’ve been meaning to tell it for a while, but self-doubt is a big bully and it keeps sending my confidence back to the corner to come up with a good reason why. Today my confidence says that the people who listen to stories get them a lot more than the person who narrates the tale, so I’m just going to shut up and get to the point now.
In November 1996, I was in a television studio late at night when the news came in that two aeroplanes had crashed into each other in mid-air near Delhi. There was a sense of complete disbelief that gave way to shock as the news was reconfirmed.
A few hours later, just after midnight, my colleagues, Radhika and Kanan, and I were walking over the debris of the wreckage trying to get as close to the fire that was still raging from the collision. In the darkness I stumbled upon the first dead body that I had ever seen in my life at close quarters. I switched on the light mounted on my camera. A man lying on his back, most of him still intact. I began to frame shots of him. Long shot of the body, close mid-shot of his face, a detail of his bloody bruised hand. I was a witness to his death many hours before his family would get the news.
There was a commotion in the distance. All the other news crews were rushing in one direction. We moved too. Videographers and journalists were now walking backwards over debris and bodies trying to get shots and a sound bite from the first VIP who had arrived on the scene. Walking firmly towards the fire in the centre of the scene with his entourage was the grandson of the then President of India.
“What brings you here," reporters asked him.
“Just plain curiosity," he said and he smiled. “Did you get that," he repeated. “Plane curiosity!"
We went to the hospital in the village closest to the crash site. Bodies had been lined in rows in the open corridor. I recognized a mourning man. He was the librarian in the media institute where I had been a post-graduate student. He was inconsolable. His brother was dead.
We sent tapes back to our office in the car that we had come in. Dawn broke around us. We saw our own colleagues filming the debris from a helicopter and reporting the aerial view. I felt angry looking up from the ground.
We were exhausted. As we left, a sea of people were walking through the fields towards the crash site. It could have been an Indian festival. Some of them had never seen an aeroplane up close before.
We had exclusive footage. Videos shot by us were bought by news agencies and channels from across the world. In the newsroom there was a jubilant energy that disaster reporting always seems to bring with it.
The smell of burnt flesh would linger around me for days after I returned from Charkhi Dadri. I would bathe many times over and I would still be able to sniff that acrid smell in the air around me. I had gone numb, but that smell bothered me a lot. I put away the shoes that had walked on dead people.
All 349 people on board the two planes had died. Among the passengers had been many people who had travelled from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to fly to Saudi Arabia as migrant workers. Many of the family of the dead did not know the details of their itinerary. There were bodies that remained unrecognized. There were body parts that did not fit.
Two weeks later I went to the hospital morgue in Delhi where the unclaimed bodies had been stored. It was time to perform the last rites without their families. Sealed wooden caskets were loaded on to tempos. We began to take shots with our cameras. A large rat crawled out of one of the caskets as my camera was rolling. I was already holding my breath because of the stench.
Two organizations, one affiliated with Islam and another with Hinduism, had stepped in to perform the last rites of unclaimed bodies. I followed a van that transported some of the bodies to a graveyard near Feroz Shah Kotla Fort in Delhi. I had never been to a burial ground before. I was the only woman in the crowd there. Everyone made place for me to be able to film the rituals as they were being performed.
Bodies covered in white sheets were lowered into freshly dug graves. Some sheets just had body parts in them. Evening light washed over us as a group of men began to recite verses from the Quran. I took a shot of a man throwing a fistful of loose earth over a stranger’s body. The image of actor Amitabh Bachchan burying his loved ones in a film came to my mind. It gave me solace. It was my only familiarity with the scene I was participating in.
All of us left the graveyard together and drove straight to a cremation ground in Safdarjung Enclave. I hadn’t realized how syncretic the group of volunteers had been before. At the Hindu cremation ground, the solemn faces of young Muslim men with skull caps stood out visually. Many pyres were set alight together. I zoomed in through the rising flames to take close-ups of the volunteers standing on the other side of the pyre. Everyone in white, the pandit and the maulvi, standing side by side, mourning for unknown people. My tears began to flow. After I handed over the tapes in the office, I would sob violently in the bathroom, letting out screams that had been stuck for days.
These are also stories that thread the fabric of our culture and society. Somewhere in them is the idea of India. Of our shared identity and humanity.
Natasha Badhwar is a media trainer, entrepreneur and mother of three. She writes a fortnightly column on family and relationships.
Also Read | Natasha’s previous Lounge columns
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