Memories of Kanishka & some more...

Sandeep Sinha

THE Kanishka plane crash took place on June 23, 1985. This Air India flight that took off from Toronto for Delhi was bombed at an altitude of 31,000 ft over the Irish airspace and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 329 people on board. My memory of that tragedy is attached to one person on board the ill-fated flight — actor Inder Thakur, who was the flight purser and died along with his wife and child.

I was an undergraduate then and was loitering around on the college campus along with my friends during what we called the ‘leisure’ periods. There were still a few weeks left for summer vacation. Suddenly, there was a commotion and word spread that Inder Thakur, who had played the role of actor Sachin’s elder brother in the film Nadiya Ke Paar, would be visiting our college. The film was a great hit in the early eighties with its portrayal of romance in the first flush of youth with all its innocence.   

A group of boys had come across the actor moving around in the town. His wife, an airhostess, was from my hometown of Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, and the handsome model-turned-actor was visiting his in-laws. He was persuaded to visit the college.

It was a sight to behold. Clad in jeans and jacket, a backpack on his shoulders, the actor arrived to a thunderous applause from the students. He was more handsome than what he appeared on the screen and his presence was electrifying. Smiling and waving to the crowd on the stage before the chemistry block in the college, he brought the house down when he uttered in his inimitable style, Aye Goonja, the name for the heroine in the film, Sadhna Singh.

A few days after the actor left, vacation began and I left hostel for home. One day the newspapers announced the bombing of Kanishka in which the actor had perished along with his family. I had a lump in my throat. It was hard to believe that the actor, who looked like a Greek god, and who I had seen only weeks back in a mood for recreation, had died, that too in this manner. The sight of the stage on which he had appeared haunted us with his memories for some time. It was also an irony of sorts that our college had been founded by Irish missionaries from Dublin and the tragedy in which the actor, his wife and child died, also took over Irish airspace.

In the months to come, more heart-break was to follow. A junior, who lived in the hostel and was from a family of film producers, the Shahabadis, that also owned a chain of cinema halls, came and said, ‘There’s some sad news for you.’ It turned out that Sadhna Singh had married his uncle, a film producer. The hostel mess wore a deserted look that day.

Time has passed but memories of the events remain timeless.