It was the phone call that ended a wait that had lasted decades – 56 years and eight months, to be exact.
A caller from a police station in the Pattanamthitta district of the southern Indian state of Kerala gave Thomas Thomas the unexpected news that the body of his elder brother Thomas Cherian had finally been found.
Cherian, a military engineer, was among 102 passengers on board an Indian Air Force plane that crashed in the Himalayas in 1968 after severe weather conditions.
The plane disappeared from radar while flying over the Rohtang Pass, which connects the northern state of Himachal Pradesh to Indian Kashmir.
For many years, the AN-12 aircraft was considered missing and its fate remained a mystery.
Then in 2003, a team of climbers found the body of one of the passengers.
Since then, army search expeditions have recovered eight more bodies, and in 2019, the wreckage of the plane was recovered from the mountains.
A few days ago, the 1968 disaster hit the headlines again when the army recovered four bodies, including that of Cherian.
When the news reached the family, it seemed as if “56 years of suffocation suddenly evaporated”, Mr Thomas told BBC Hindi.
“I was finally able to breathe again,” he says.
Cherian, the second of five children, was only 22 when he went missing. He boarded a plane to reach his first field assignment in the Himalayan region of Leh.
Only in 2003, when the first body was found, was his status changed from missing to dead.
“Our father died in 1990 and our mother in 1998, both waiting for news of their missing son,” says Mr Thomas.
