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Thanks to the film Neerja, directed by Ram Madhvani, which releases this Friday, there is a spurt of interest in the braveheart Neerja Bhanot, who faced the hijackers of the ill-fated Pan Am flight on September 5, 1986.
Neerja’s father, Harish Bhanot, remembered his daughter through an emotional article written for The Hindustan Times on October 5, 1986, two months after Neerja’s untimely death. Here are excerpts from the piece which traces her birth, her troubled marriage and the day she put her duty before her own safety to save the lives of her passengers and crew members.
Neerja was a “no problem” child, right from day one. She was a “no nonsense” girl right from the start. She went to Sacred Heart School (Chandigarh). Her family name was “Lado” and I do not think I had called her Neerja more than a score of times in her 23 years.
Neerja was doing a lot of modelling. She had returned from Frankfurt on Tuesday (September 2) morning. She spent all of Wednesday shooting. On Thursday, she had yet another prestigious assignment. She reported for shooting at 9 am and returned home only around 8 pm. The hard day did not tell on her, she bounced about saying that she had the “most satisfying shooting day ever with director Ayesha Sayani”, whom she described as a highly talented professional. She had a light dinner and went to sleep after telling her mother to wake her up 90 minutes before the pick-up call from Pan Am. Her mother was keen that she should telephone Pan Am to get excused because she had had a hard day. But a highly duty conscious Neerja did not oblige her mother.
I learnt of the Pan Am plane hijacking at Karachi, at a press conference. I felt uneasy. As I reached my own office, I had a telephone call from Mr Irfan Khan of Hindustan Lever. He advised me to be with him, mainly because his office had better facilities to get the latest information from Karachi.
What happened at Karachi airport? As the terrorists rushed up the ladder to “capture” the aircraft, Neerja dashed to inform the captain in the cockpit. A terrorist, however, caught her by her ponytail but she was able to shout the “hijack code”. Another flight attendant who understood the code conveyed it to the cockpit.
Neerja’s notes say that a the cabin crew has to follow up the hijacking warning with 6 steps. In the Karachi situation, she was required to “communicate” with the hijackers. Her smiles, even in deep distress, won a response. She looked after the passengers, within permissible limits. Her smiles were taken as an assurance by the passengers and crew members that the worst was over.
The power generator was running out of fuel and voltage was falling. Then “something” happened. Neerja was standing close to the leader of the terrorists. The light had become very dim. Suddenly, guns began vomiting fire within the aircraft. Neerja jumped to the emergency exit and threw it open.
The terrorists’ guns became silent only after spitting out the last bullet. The cabin crew got together on the tarmac and found the “leader” missing. Two crew members ran back to the aircraft to find a profusely bleeding Neerja at her post of duty. The shock of being hit by bullets did not stop her heartbeat. She had been bleeding, from at least two bullet wounds, for nearly 15 minutes. But she was in her full senses and told her 2 colleagues to take care of her bullet-hit arm. With a little assistance, she slid down the chute to be received at the other end by another member of the crew. She was helped to walk to the ambulance. But she became a martyr before any medical assistance could help her to survive.
Neerja was a very sensitive, deeply affectionate and an extremely decent person who believed in sharing with her people all her joys but not the jolts. She had well-defined principles and there was little room for compromise in that area. Of the 23 years of her life, she had lived 22 years and 10 months under bracing sunshine. The two-month long ugly patch was a dowry cloud. Following her ad-based arranged marriage in March 1985, she had gone to the Gulf to join her husband to set up a happy home. But the marriage went sour within two months. She was starved off finance and food in a foreign land and the bright girl lost five kg in two months. She had to borrow money from the husband even to make a telephone call.
The letter listed a straight formula: accept the humiliating terms without a whimper and return at your own cost or “we will separate”. The worst was that the letter asked her as to what was she? “You are just a graduate”. The young girl could not pocket this. She applied for a flight attendant’s job with Pam Am. There were nearly 10,000 applications but Neerja Harish easily found a place among the top 80. Some of her close friends in Pan Am knew of her marriage mishap. They say that Neerja had been clearly stating that if one day something happened to her, please see that even “his” shadow did not fall on her dead body. The girl with sinews of steel accepted the challenge “what are you” and has told, “what she was”.
(Neerja’s father, Harish Bhanot, who was a journalist with The Hindustan Times, passed away on December 31, 2007 in Chandigarh)
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