Ahmedabad-based Shirin Khambholja, a homemaker and social worker, was on the Pan Am flight that was hijacked in September 1986 in Karchi.
Life has come full circle for Shirin 30 years later, with her daughter Tanya serving as an assistant director on Ram Madhvani’s film based on the incident, Neerja.
Tanya was studying Communicative Designing at a Pune institute and looking for internships in her final semester when she came across an opportunity at the production house Equinox and applied there.
“They asked her a few questions and then told her about the feature film they are making, which was Neerja,” Shirin recalls. “She asked them if it was about the Pam Am flight that was hijacked in Karachi. They were surprised and shocked because not too many from her generation know about it. So she told them, ‘My mom was on the same flight’. The moment she said that, they told her, ‘You’re hired, you’ll be helpful to the project’.”
Shirin muses on how “terrorism” — the word, the concept — is used so commonly now. But this wasn’t the case when the Pan Am incident took place. “Life was easier then,” she says. “We were heading to the US (when the incident happened). I am a folk dancer and our group was travelling abroad. That was the first time we were going to the US; it was a big deal at that time. This was in 1986 when lifestyles were totally different. The entire family would go to drop us off to the airport. Our flight was routed via Mumbai-Karachi-Frankurt and then New York. Our seats weren’t confirmed initially so were had scattered seats throughout the plane, although we were the highest number of travellers in that flight. When we landed in Karachi we all got together and started talking at the door. In front of us, Neerja was accompanying every passenger to his or her seat. There was some spark in her, which wouldn’t go unnoticed,” Shirin adds.
Shirin tells us that looking at Sonam Kapoor take on Neerja Bhanot’s role in the film she couldn’t hold back her tears. Even in ’86, Shirin remembers being struck by Neerja’s beauty: “(A friend and I) were talking that how beautiful she is and then someone told me that she (Neerja) was a model also...”
Shirin says she exchanged her seat with a friend and sat towards the back of the plane. At some point of time she fell asleep and remembers being woken up with a pat on the shoulder. “The guy must have been between 22-25 years of age and was wearing a Pathani. He pointed a gun at my shoulder and asked me to put my hands up and move,” Shirin tells us. “My costume designer was sitting next to me, she told me that do what the man said as the plane had been hijacked, so I moved. They had made everyone sit together so that they could keep a close watch on all the passengers.”
When Tanya sent her photos from the Neerja sets, Shirin was shocked at how authentically things had been replicated. “When my daughter sent me pictures from the set, I spotted a guy who exactly looked like the hijacker who had pointed the gun at me, and I was shocked for five minutes,” Shirin says. “My daughter told me that it’s Ali Baldiwala, who plays (Mansoor) the hijacker in the film. I met him later when I went to the sets There were some other similarities also in the film. The radio operator scene was exactly the same as has been depicted. The scene where the air hostesses collect all the passports as well ”
Switching back to her memories of the hijacking, Shirin tells us that over the course of the 17 hours they were on the flight, the passengers relaxed a little and were seated a little more comfortably. “But by evening, the lights went off and it was dark outside. We could see the frustration on their (the hijackers’) faces. At night it was pitch dark in the plane and they asked us to sit cramped up again. They were talking to each other in their language and before we knew it, they started firing. We could see the sparks from their machine guns. Everyone started shouting. There was blood splattered on my clothes. The airhostesses opened the emergency door and we were asked to run. We didn’t know which direction to run in. I reached towards the emergency door, which was located at the wing, and then I saw a lot of people who couldn’t even walk. Everyone was running and I also started running towards the airport.”
The resulting gunfight was chaotic, to say the least, Shirin recounts that commandos at the airport were also firing at the hijackers by this point, and one of the hijackers who had been running behind the passengers fell. “We told the authorities that he was among the hijackers and he was arrested. Then we received medical assistance. Two of the people from our group had been killed; the friend I had exchanged my seat with had also died We were in Karchi for two days and then a chartered plane brought us back to India,” Shirin says, the catch in her voice very evident.
Since Shirin had exchanged her seat, her name was on the list of missing persons. Her family assumed the worst, and thought she was among the fatalities in the incident. Her uncle was the attorney general and present in Karchi, so he received a barrage of calls from family members anxious to know Shirin’s fate. It was a cousin in the US who saw an image of Shirin seated in a wheelchair, on television, and phoned the rest of the family to let them know she was safe.
“I wasn’t engaged to my husband at the time, but our families had spoken, so he had come to drop me off at the airport. He stayed at the airport for three days. I wasn’t able to speak to my family and then I reached India,” Shirin says.
For the longest time, Shirin has avoided any news/references to the hijacking. When she watched Neerja, she was fine for the first 10 minutes, then started crying. “I was inconsolable throughout the film,” she says. “It created such a tumult of emotions within me. But I am very proud that Tanya’s first project was the one that is very close my heart. In a way, it’s been like reliving all those emotions (the hijacking had aroused in me). I start crying all of a sudden while talking about it.”
On a parting note, Shirin says that the efforts of director Ram Madhavni, producer Atul Kasbekar and actress Sonam Kapoor need to be lauded. She says they have managed to depict the incident very realistically. “They have actually have kept the essence of the story, as it happened,” she concludes.
