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Air India crash: Months from being finished, Kerala nurse's dream house becomes stage of last homage
Ranjitha Gopakumaran, the nurse from Kerala's Pathanamthitta who died in the Air India flight AI 171 crash on June 12, received an emotional farewell from her state on Tuesday.
Ranjitha, 42, a native of Pullad in Pathanamthitta, was returning to her workplace – the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, England – after a brief visit to Kerala to oversee the construction of her new house and to request that the state health service extend her leave.
Her body, which was flown to Kerala from Ahmedabad on Tuesday, was taken to the premises of the house that was her dream, and where she wanted to move in three months later with her two schoolgoing children and her widowed mother.
Before being taken home, her body was taken to her alma mater, Sree Vivekanandan High School in Pullad, where thousands queued up to pay homage.
In the first week of June, Ranjitha, a single parent, had enrolled her son, Induchoodan, and daughter, Ithika, in the same school, in classes 10 and 7, respectively. She expected to return from England this year to settle in the village and rejoin the state health service as a nurse.
On June 11, the day she left for Ahmedabad to catch the flight to London the next day, Ranjitha had given detailed suggestions on the remaining construction work.
A nurse for over a decade, Ranjitha worked in Oman until 2019, when she got selected for the state health service. She returned to Kerala and joined as a staff nurse at the Pathanamthitta District Hospital in Kozhencherry.
Later, she took a long leave and went back to Oman. A year ago, Ranjitha moved to England to work with the National Health Service there.
On Tuesday, when her body reached the state capital, 12 days after the tragedy, ministers, police officials and representatives of NORKA ROOTS were among the thousands who gathered to pay homage.
