Warning: The story contains details some readers might find distressing
The photographs are the first thing Prahlod Thakur sees when he wakes up.
They hang on the bright green peeling walls of his small Ahmedabad home, among religious icons, brass vessels and fading family portraits. One frame holds the face of his wife, Sarlaben. Another shows his granddaughter, Aadhya, wearing a white dress and smiling.
Both of them were in the BJ Medical College hostel complex, less than 2km (1.2 miles) from the Ahmedabad airport, when an Air India plane crashed into it in June last year. There were 260 victims – 241 were on the plane. Sarlaben and Aadhya were among the 19 killed on the ground.
A year later, the loss still feels fresh.
“I just miss them,” says Thakur. “I see the photos and feel like crying.”
Investigators are soon expected to release a report on the crash. Much of the attention over the past year has focused on the passengers aboard the London-bound flight and the unanswered questions surrounding its final moments.
In Ahmedabad, another question lingers: what happens to a place after a catastrophe becomes part of its daily life?
Unlike most disaster sites, where the scars eventually disappear, at BJ Medical College grief has become a permanent resident.
A year on, the hostel struck by the plane still stands like an open wound. Its upper floors stand ripped open to the sky, concrete hangs in jagged slabs and a smoke-blackened staircase disappears into darkness. Soot streaks the walls, while suitcases and clothes remain buried beneath dust, rubble and twisted steel.
Officials have approved plans to demolish the damaged complex and build a new hostel. For now, though, the wreckage remains.
Students pass the hostel on their way to lectures as aeroplanes rumble overhead every few minutes. For decades, the sound blended into the city’s background noise, as familiar and unremarkable as the traffic on the roads.
Since the crash, Thakur says, it carries a very different meaning.
“Whenever a plane passes by, we feel the same pain,” he says. “We don’t even look at the sky.”
