Ahmedabad, June 12 (IANS) When Honey Patel (Sharma) received a video call from her mother shortly before Air India flight AI-171 took off from Ahmedabad for London on June 12 last year, there was nothing to suggest it would be their final conversation.

Her mother, 56-year-old Anju Sharma, had already boarded the aircraft and wanted to show it to her grandson, Dihan, who loved watching aeroplanes.

“She video-called us to show the plane because my son loves watching planes,” Honey recalled while standing at the crash site on the first anniversary of the disaster.

“She said, ‘This is Nani’s plane.’ We still have that video and her voice. Then she told us, ‘I am sitting in the plane now, beta. I will call you after I reach there,” Honey told IANS.

That call never came. Anju Sharma was among those killed when the London-bound Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed seconds after take-off from Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025.

The aircraft struck the B.J. Medical College hostel complex in Meghaninagar area, killing 241 of the 242 people on board and 19 people on the ground, making it one of the deadliest aviation disasters in India’s history.

The investigation remains ongoing one year later. For Honey, the tragedy was compounded by an earlier loss. Her father had died in 2021, leaving her mother as the central figure in her life.

“After Papa passed away, I only had Mamma here. My sister lives in London, so we lived like friends,” she said emotionally.

The bond between mother and daughter had deepened over the years. Honey described her mother not merely as a parent but as her closest companion.

She said, “She was more than a friend. I don’t have any friends. She was my friend, she was everything for me.” The day began like any other travel day. Anju was excited about visiting her family in London.

Honey spent the previous night and the morning with her mother before the journey. “She made my favourite food herself before leaving. She was so happy that she was going to London this time. They had so many plans there,” she noted.

At 1.51 p.m., Honey’s world changed. Her relatives in Ahmedabad called urgently, asking for her mother’s flight ticket after hearing reports of a crash involving a London-bound aircraft.

“I said it couldn’t be Mamma’s plane. They told me there was only one London flight and asked me to send the ticket,” she recalled.

After switching on television news channels and speaking to family members, the horrifying reality became clear.

Honey immediately contacted her elder sister in London. She then called her husband and, once the flight details were confirmed, the family left Vadodara for Ahmedabad.

Rather than travelling to the crash site, they were advised to go directly to Ahmedabad Civil Hospital. “We searched every floor for Mamma. We went everywhere, but we couldn’t find her,” she said.

Eventually, officials informed the family that nobody had survived the crash. “Then we were told that from the crash site, nobody had survived. After that, the DNA test happened,” she told IANS.

The identification process took days as authorities relied heavily on DNA matching because of the condition of many victims’ remains.

One year later, Honey has returned to the site. It is her third visit. Twelve days after the crash, she and her sister came to pray.

Two months later, she attended a candlelight memorial. On Friday, she returned for the first anniversary. The grief, she said, has not eased.

The family received some of Anju Sharma’s belongings, including two T-shirts, a slipper and fragments of the luggage she had carried.

Other personal possessions, including jewellery and her mobile phone, were never recovered.

“We got some clothes, but not her ornaments or her mobile phone,” Honey said. The family submitted documents to Air India regarding missing belongings, but says some items remain untraced. Among them was an earring believed to belong to Anju.

“They told us many people had claimed the same item and it would only be given if there was a match,” Honey said. Ultimately, she has tried to accept the loss.

“If Mamma is not here, what can we do? Whatever belonged to her has gone with her,” she said.

The loss continues to ripple through the wider family. Anju’s younger brother, Milan Sharma (38), who lives in Vadodara but originally comes from Kurukshetra in Haryana, still struggles to comprehend how a routine airport farewell became his final goodbye.

“The last time I came here was to drop my sister. I never imagined I would later bring her back in a coffin,” he said.

Milan described Anju not simply as an elder sibling but as a maternal figure who helped raise him after he moved to Gujarat as a child. “She was not my sister; she was my mother. I was very young when I came to live with her,” he told IANS.

Anju was the eldest among eight sisters and, according to Milan, the person whose word carried weight throughout the family.

“Nobody could refuse her. Nobody could ignore what she said. We used to call her ‘Daddy’ because she was fearless and always took responsibility for everyone,” he recalled.

Even now, the family remains haunted by memories of her final hours. Milan remembers receiving a video call from his sister while she waited in the airport lounge. He was travelling to Mumbai that day.

“She told me she had ordered a dosa but did not feel like eating it,” he said. He also remembers one of her final messages: “She always used to tell me to take care of myself.”

When news of the crash first emerged, the family clung to reports that some injured passengers had been taken to the hospital. “There was hope she might be among them. We stood outside the hospital with that hope,” he said.

The reality proved devastating. His niece provided DNA samples, and the family received Anju’s remains three days later. “There was not much left of the body,” he said quietly.

The tragedy also deeply affected Anju’s elderly parents in Haryana. Milan said his father remains in bed rest and still struggles to accept the loss of his eldest daughter. “Even today, sometimes he feels she has just gone to London and will come back,” he said.

His mother, meanwhile, continues to preserve memories stretching back decades. Among them is the first dress Anju wore as a newborn.

“My mother still has that dress. She kept it all these years,” he said. As speculation continues over the cause of the crash, both Honey and Milan reject suggestions that pilot error was responsible and believe a technical issue may have been involved.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has said the investigation remains ongoing and has urged restraint over speculation until the final report is released.

For the Sharma family, however, the investigation’s conclusions will not alter the central fact of their lives. Milan lost the sister he called a mother.

Honey lost the woman she called her best friend. “After Papa went, I only had Mamma,” Honey said.

Five years after losing her father and one year after losing her mother, those words capture the void left behind by a tragedy that changed her family forever.

–IANS

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