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Culture

2 funerals and a dead soldier

By: Santosh :+: Under: Culture, Desi Ishtyle, It Happens Only in India
On: ⋅ August 21, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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This is a sad story but kind of neat.

Cremated 39 years later
img: via DNAIndia.com

Mahendranath Phukon, was among 100 or so, soldiers and air force personnel killed in a plane crash on a glacier in Himachal Pradesh. The wreckage was never found in the mountains and presumably his body was frozen solid in those sub-Himalayan conditions.

Then in 2003, the Indian Army discovered the wreckage buried deep in the glacier under decades of ice formation. The painful recovery process took over 3 years because summer was the only time recovery conditions were favorable. Mahendra Nath’s body was among 3 recovered and identified from the documents on his person.

In the meanwhile Mahendranath’s family performed his funeral and moved on. When the body was recovered, his parents had already passed away. So his body was brought back to his village in Assam, where his 2 brothers, Tuben and Durganath, performed the last rites.

Here’s the sad part, being that Mahendanath died in 1968, his family did not even have photos of him.

‘Unfortunately we didn’t even have his photographs to show our children. At least now they got a chance to see him,’ Tuben said.

The neat part? The very fact that they found the body 4 decades later, giving the grieving family some sort of closure.

‘It was like a dream. We feel happy that we were able to perform the last rites even after 40 long years and sad as it was a tearful reunion for the family,’ Mahendra’s elder brother Tuben told IANS

On a tangent, with temperatures rising worldwide and melting glaciers because of global warming, such stories will become increasingly hard to come by.

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