The tremor in Kamlesh Kumar’s voice gets choppier as he says, “I cannot believe that my uncle is no more. This is a nightmare”. Kamlesh’s uncle is late Putali, one of the 13 Indian Air Force (IAF) personnel on board the AN-32 aircraft that went missing on June 3 in Arunachal Pradesh.
The phone call to Putali’s home in the village of Bhuali in Lucknow’s Bakshi ka Talab block came around 8.30 pm on the same day evening. “We were told that the aircraft had lost contact and was untraceable”, says Kamlesh. Day and night the family and their neighbours remained glued to their television sets, looking for any scrap of information, clinging to the hope that the aircraft would be located. Almost every family in the village has a member working in the IAF—an ambition that is nurtured in part by the presence of an air force station of the Central Air Command in the block which stands on the outskirts of Uttar Pradesh's capital.
Putali, a non-combatant (enrolled) employee of the IAF, had last visited his home between April 8 and May 2 this year. The second of three brothers, he was the only one in the family with a steady job. Both his brothers work as labourers at construction sites and farmlands.
Kamlesh, 25-year-old son of Putali’s elder brother Munni Lal, says, “Chacha never married because he had our responsibilities to bear. He said marriage would stand in the way of his duties”. Theirs is a large household with 15 members which include families of both brothers of Putali.
The last phone call Putali made home was on May 27. “As usual, he asked us if we had eaten. And cautioned me against falling in bad company”, Kamlesh remembers. He has since then played that conversation numerous times in his head, searching for the exact words that were spoken.
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Kamlesh and his cousin Vinay would listen to their uncle’s on-duty anecdotes with fascination. “His duty hours would start at 2.30 am. At times he would cook for as many as 1,500 people. It was definitely not easy work, but I never heard him complain”, says Kamlesh. Both cousins had also asked Putali a number of times about the possibility of joining the service. “Every time he told us that this was no ordinary job and that would let us know when we were prepared and fit for what the job demanded’ says Kamlesh.
On June 13, when the IAF finally confirmed that there were no survivors in the air crash, Kamlesh says that it seemed like a hoax. “I still think I will wake up and everything will be alright”, he told THE WEEK on Friday afternoon when the family was yet to receive Putali’s remains.
Kamlesh says one of Putali’s dreams was to have their modest family home reconstructed. But for now, like many others that he might have had, this too may remain unfulfilled.
