A year after Air India crash, one family waits for answers while learning to live with loss

A year has passed since Air India Flight 171 fell from the sky near Ahmedabad with 242 people aboard. Only one survived. For the families left behind, the waiting has become its own kind of catastrophe—a limbo without answers, without closure, without the simple mercy of knowing why.

Imtiyaz Ali agreed to meet me in a Mumbai hotel rather than at his home. When I asked why, he explained that the house no longer feels like a house. His brother Javed, Javed's wife Mariam, and their two children died in the crash last June. They had built their life in the UK but returned often to Mumbai to see Imtiyaz and their mother, Farida Bano. Now the spaces they occupied feel inhabited by their absence in a way that ordinary life cannot repair. "It feels like Javed is still there," Imtiyaz said carefully. His mother put it more directly: "He follows me everywhere. Day and night."

The Ali family was shaped by the patterns of migration that define so many Indian households. Their father died young. Their mother worked in Dubai for years while the children were raised largely by their grandmother in Mumbai. Javed eventually moved to the UK, part of that vast current of Indians who leave home seeking financial stability but remain emotionally bound to the people they left behind. Imtiyaz remembered how inseparable his brother and mother had been. They talked all day. "And now," he said, "the silence is what kills her."

When the news came, the family tried to shield their mother—a heart patient—from the full truth. Doctors and a psychologist warned that the shock might be fatal. So they told her in fragments. An accident. Mariam and the children were injured. Pray for them. Hours later: Mariam was critical. "What about Javed?" she kept asking. "What about the children?" Imtiyaz lied. "I told her they were fine." But she sensed the truth in the silence. When Javed left for Ahmedabad, he had not called her for two days. He never did that. She could not sleep. Eventually they flew her to Ahmedabad under false pretenses. The moment she entered the hotel room where the family had gathered, she knew. "I told her the plane had crashed," Imtiyaz said. "Javed was dead."

In September, three months after the crash, his mother's heart condition worsened. Doctors inserted three more stents, bringing the total to five. Stress was aggravating her heart disease, her diabetes, her blood pressure. When she cried missing Javed, her sugar levels shot up. Around the same time, Imtiyaz's frustration with Air India and Tata Group officials deepened. The family spent months seeking updates on the investigation, the return of belongings, promised medical support. Responses came slowly or not at all. Action seemed to arrive only after media attention or public pressure. "We trusted them," he said quietly. "We thought they would stand with us."

Investigators are expected to release their final report within weeks. Under international aviation rules, such reports typically come within a year of a crash. An interim report was released a month after the disaster. But for families, the technical details only compounded the pain. "We live in a modern country," Imtiyaz said. "Why must we wait a year for answers?" His mother, listening beside him, gave a small shrug. "I don't care about the report anymore," she said. "Can any report bring my son back?"

For her, the loss now lives in smaller, more durable memories. The dinner the night before Javed left for Ahmedabad—"so merry," she recalled. The first long visit from her grandchildren, who "hugged me so tightly they didn't want to leave." Javed fussed over her throughout the trip, taking her shopping and insisting she buy fifteen new outfits. "I told him, 'Why? Am I going to a wedding?'" she said, beginning to cry. On his final night in Mumbai, he slept with his head in her lap. "He said he would come back soon." In the evenings now, when the heat over Mumbai begins to soften, she goes alone to the graveyard carrying his favorite foods—mutton stew, fish fry, sometimes mangoes—packed as if he might still return. She lowers herself slowly; the stents in her heart have made movement difficult. Then she speaks to him. "Look, I am here, my son," she calls softly. "I came to see you."

Imtiyaz became consumed by the search for answers, writing emails to airlines, hiring lawyers, trying to understand what caused the crash. The panic attacks came later. "Sometimes I wake up shaking," he said. "I feel like I'm back there—hearing the news for the first time." For months he believed the investigation report might eventually bring peace. But what finally steadied him was something else. A few weeks after the burial, his elder sister sent him an old audio message from Javed. In it, recorded before the crash, Javed described a dream: two angels had come for him and, before taking him away, bathed him in a fragrance that smelled of roses. "When I woke up," Javed said in the recording, "I could still smell it." Imtiyaz sat silently after listening, tears welling up. In Islamic tradition, such deaths are sometimes described as honoured. After the funeral, relatives told him that Javed had died an honourable death. At the time, he could not believe them. But hearing his brother's voice changed something. "This," he said quietly, "was the answer I needed. He is at peace." The investigation may eventually explain how the plane crashed. But the voice note taught him how to continue living. "There are some questions," Imtiyaz said, "that only the dead can answer."