AI purser brings back diplomatic bag lost in crash that killed father

Barooah said his eyes welled up; his father Ramesh Chandra Barooah had been an AI flight engineer on the plane,dying along with 116 others.

“It was all a matter of destiny… the remnants of that crash in my flight,that too in my custody,” he told The Indian Express. Barooah’s wife Dhiraj,a senior airhostess,was also on the flight. “We both kept talking about destiny,” he said.

Barooah was 18 months old when his father,who was in his early thirties,passed away. He lived in Mumbai at the time,along with his mother and elder brother.

“After I joined AI,I tried several times to go to the spot where the crash is supposed to have taken place. Once,in the early eighties,I reached Italy and was on my way to that spot,but the weather turned hostile,” he said,adding that he always wanted to join the national carrier emulating his father.

The faintly green diplomatic bag,with markings saying “diplomatic mail” and “Ministry of External Affairs”,was recovered from Mont Blanc by a mountain rescue worker and his neighbour after some tourists spotted it on a glacier in August last week. Later,the Indian Embassy in Paris sent an official to retrieve the bag. It reached India a couple of days ago and was displayed by the MEA on Tuesday.

Classified as “Type C”,the 9-kg bag had no official or secret diplomatic communication.

The creased but quite well-preserved newspapers inside feature stories on the Vietnam War,a photograph of then prime minister Indira Gandhi,and the planned exchange of a captured air crew between India and Pakistan. The bag also contains Air India calendars,along with some personal letters.

Till about seven-eight years ago,till Internet made this redundant,Indian Embassies would be sent newspapers daily through a diplomatic bag.