A Father Braces for Life After a Plane Crash Took His ‘Everything'
Lingering in his bed, the city around him still asleep, he stared at the two faces on his phone screen: his son, Harshit, and his daughter-in-law, Pooja. He stared and stared, and then moved the phone close to his lips, giving each forehead a kiss.
They were gone now, and what little joy he had finally found after years of hardship was gone, too. On this day, he would be with them once more as he scattered their ashes in the Narmada River, at the junction where three streams meet.
Twelve days earlier, Mr. Patel, a 60-year-old widower who works for a security company in Ahmedabad, India, had wished Harshit and Pooja safe travels after they spent two weeks with him on a surprise visit from Britain, where they had moved in search of a better life. And then suddenly they were taken from him, killed along with 239 others when Air India Flight 171 crashed soon after it took off on June 12 and burst into an inferno.
'They were my everything,' he said of the couple in an interview. 'They were my support.'
In its vast sprawl, in its deep inequality, India can feel like a pit that swallows people like the Patels — the poor, the aspiring — and renders them nameless, numbers rounded off in a nation of 1.4 billion people.
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