The plane your wife is on has disappeared. What do you do?

It was the morning of 8 March 2014. The phone rang at about half past six. My day had not even begun. My first thought was that it must be from my mother in the other room wanting me to get up and make her some coffee. Guessing it must be her, I considered ignoring it. The insistent ring did it and I picked the call. It was Chandrika’s colleague at the other end, letting me know that a Malaysia Airlines plane was missing. Barely awake, I asked her why she thought I should know this. We spoke for a few more minutes.

I gathered that it was flight MH370 and that Chandrika was on that flight. I asked if she was certain that Chandrika was scheduled to be on that flight and if she could mail me a copy of Chandrika’s ticket details. I thought that maybe this colleague had made a mistake. Had she done the necessary checks?

It occurred to me that I had no information or record of Chandrika’s flight details except that it was to be a long, circuitous journey. I needed confirmation. Our frequent travels had become so routinised that we took our departures and returns for granted. Chandrika and I had become accustomed to simply logging in, when we were travelling, the date and time of return. We didn’t burden ourselves with our respective travel details: airlines, stopovers, hotels and other such. Neither of us were great communicators while travelling. Emails and phone calls were infrequent, restricted to the bare essentials of inquiring if all was okay.

So, all I knew was that I had seen off Chandrika at the gate of our apartment complex the morning of 7th March 2014 for a Malaysia Airlines flight she was taking that morning.

I knew too that she was not looking forward to the long and circuitous route to Ulan Bator that she was taking via Kuala Lumpur (KL) and Beijing. I was aware that she was making the trip after vacillating and initially deciding not to go. I was also aware that she was not warm to the prospect of being in cold wintry conditions in Mongolia. In the days leading up to the trip, she had grumbled about the long stopover in KL. It would seem that, quite uncharacteristically, I knew a lot about this trip.

I received Chandrika’s travel itinerary by email along with her boarding pass. But wait a minute, the boarding pass printed online is no evidence of the passenger actually having taken the flight! I was wide awake by then and this “insight” offered some hope that there may yet be a chance that she may not be on that flight. I watched CNN just enough to note the plane was still missing. It was just half past seven, barely an hour after the telephone call tore me away from the best hour of morning sleep well after MH370 failed to arrive at its destination, Beijing. It already felt like I had been awake for hours.

I reckoned that if indeed the plane had been missing for some hours, it must have crashed. I recalled vivid memories of the day the Air France flight had gone down in the Atlantic. I had watched television that day non-stop, to take in the developments. All my past viewing of TV programming related to previous accidents of a similar nature where an aircraft disappeared from the radar had resulted in a crash. So my mind raced to think of what all this meant. It was very quickly apparent that the day was going to be a long one, and one would be dealing with a lot of people that day. The day of my father’s death when I was seventeen played before me and I remembered how busy that day was.

Should I let my mother know? Should I inform Chandrika’s mother in Bareilly, some two thousand kilometres away from Chennai? Should I call my daughter?

She probably wasn’t likely to be up at that hour, being a weekend. I thought it best to be certain that Chandrika was indeed on the flight. What if she had missed the flight? The initial reports had no mention of Indians on the flight. Instead of acting in haste, I decided that it would be better to be sure rather than raise a false alarm. I realised I didn’t have much time. Turning on the television early in the day was fairly common and I didn’t want the family to hear of a looming tragedy from a television report.

I did alert Chandrika’s elder brother, who was at that time spending some days with his mother in Bareilly, with the caution that we had no firm confirmation yet that Chandrika was on the flight. He broke down, and in no time, told his mother.

Emotions ran high, criss-crossing the cell phone towers across the country that day. For the next three hours or so, we tapped sources in the country and abroad to get some reliable information on the passengers aboard MH370. Chandrika’s cousin worked for an airline in Mumbai, and fortuitously, her husband was visiting us that weekend. He sought his wife’s help to get information. He was to remain a calm and comforting presence for the next twenty-four hours.

Chandrika’s colleagues, in the meanwhile, badgered the local Malaysia Airlines officials to elicit more details. Family and friends in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and China were approached. The Malaysia Airlines website gave away nothing. We kept an eye on TV reports for developments, making sure to keep the volume down so as to not draw my mother’s attention. I stepped out of the house to take calls lest my mother sense that something was amiss. We kept the ambience at home as close to “business as usual”, barely able to disguise the grim sense of foreboding while furiously scouring the internet for passenger details. As news started trickling in announcing that there were Indians on board, it became absolutely urgent that we knew for sure if Chandrika was one of them.

It was early afternoon when we first laid our hands on the passenger manifest released by someone on Twitter. We went down the list in a matter of seconds and saw Chandrika’s name on it.

There was one other check to be done: her passport number. There it was – a match that pointed to a sad ending.

It was not official but appeared believable. A contact in the press got confirmation from the passenger manifest displayed at Beijing’s arrival terminal.

Overtaken by the events of the morning, I had completely forgotten that I had a client engagement in Bengaluru starting Monday. I quickly called my Bengaluru client representative and told him that my wife was on MH370, still missing, and I would not be able to travel to Bengaluru for the workshop that I was to anchor. Perhaps only half listening and not understanding the gravity of my situation, he protested and said that all arrangements had been made, and a cancellation would entail costs.

I repeated that I was unable to make the trip at this juncture, expressed regrets and hung up. What I had said perhaps sunk in a bit late. The client called back within minutes, expressed sympathies, profusely apologised and informed me that they would postpone the workshop to another date when I was ready and willing to work with them.

Excerpted with permission from Life after MH370: Journeying Through a Void, KS Narendran, Bloomsbury.