Mary’s memories of her brother Thomas Cherian are vague, limited to the times he came home to Kerala while working in the Army, bearing gifts. Being the only sister among his four siblings, Cherian would be nice to Mary even as he picked fights with the others the way siblings do. Their home in Pathanamthitta would be full of mirth in those days. Mary especially remembers the last time he came – for a total of 20 days after his training was complete. It would also be the last time she saw him, before he went missing in a plane crash over Rohtang Pass 56 years ago.
The plane journey was undertaken by men in the Army from Chandigarh to Leh in February 1968. It went missing after the crash and there was no hint of the 102 passengers on board. Cherian was only 22. For decades the family waited without knowing if Cherian was dead or alive, until in 2003 the wreckage was discovered and the missing men were officially declared dead. It took another 21 years for Cherian's remains to be recovered, along with his university certificate – tucked into his pocket – bearing his name: Thomas C Cherian. The Army, which was routinely conducting searches for the bodies from the ’68 crash, found Cherian at the Dhaka Glacier area, around 16,000 ft above sea level. A team of mountaineers led by Dogra Scouts made the discovery. The family expects to perform the final rites on the afternoon of Friday, October 4.
Mary was only 12 when her brother went missing. “He was the second of five children and I am the fourth. He had gone to join the army when he was 18, following in the footsteps of our eldest brother, Thomas Mathew. We last saw him when he came home for a 20-day break after his training was complete. Till the day my mother died, she’d clutch a photo of my brother and say, ‘my son, my son’. She could never get over the fact that he went missing,” she recalls.
Mary remembers the day her father, OM Thomas, called out to her mother after reading about the plane crash in the newspaper. “He said, ‘your son was in that plane’. My brother had written to us that his next posting was in Chandigarh and that he’d be going there. It was shortly after that that news of the plane crash came. A day later, we received a telegram that he had gone missing. But we thought he was only missing, and he’d be found,” Mary says.
Shyju, Thomas Mathew’s son, says that there was speculation in the early days that his uncle might have been abducted by Pakistani forces. “My father would tell us that one day if a man called Ponnachan (as Cherian was called at home) comes home, we should know that it is our uncle and welcome him in,” Shyju says.
Shyju’s father died a year after OM Thomas, in 1991. The other two brothers are Thomas Thomas and Thomas Varghese. Their mother, Aliyamma, died in 1998, five years before Cherian was declared dead. “We had kept nothing that was his, those days people did not do that. My brother had taken everything important with him in his suitcase. Now we are grateful that we will be able to bury him in his homeland, in the church here, and perform his final rites,” Mary says, with the unmistakable sound of the relief of closure in her voice.