Wails wafted out of the cluster of a archetypal cottage as a military truck chugged into Deodhai, a tiny hamlet in Sivasagar district of eastern Assam.
On board the truck, lying in a tricolour-wrapped coffin was Mahendra Nath Phukan – a soldier of the Indian Army.
Deodhai mourned for Mahendra on Tuesday, almost four decades after he died in a plane crash on the South Dakka Glacier of Himachal Pradesh.
He lay frozen on the icy heights of Himalayas for 39 years till an expedition team of the Army found his remains early this month.
As the soldiers placed the coffin in the crowded courtyard of Phukans, tears rolled down the wrinkled cheeks of septuagenarian Jatin – the eldest of the four brothers of Mahendra.
“I still remember my brother waving at me from the window of a moving train. He was leaving for Chandigarh after the last holiday he spent with us in the village. I went to the station to see him off,” Jatin recalls. “That was in 1967. A few months later we came to know about his death.” Mahendra – a jawan of the Army’s 715 TPT Workshop – was on board an Antonov-12 aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF) that took off from Chandigarh on a routine logistic sortie to Leh on February 7 in 1968. There were 102 personnel of the Army and IAF on board the aircraft, which was caught in a ‘Western Disturbance’ – an extra-tropical storm– and crashed near the 6264-metre high Chandra Bhaga - 13 peak.
Despite an extensive search operation for six months, the IAF and Indian Army found neither the wreckage, nor the corpses of its passengers and crew.
A few weeks after the crash, Phukons performed a symbolic funeral and last rites of Mahendra.
“For me, he was almost like a character from a storybook. I never saw him, but grew up listening from my father about the uncle who went missing,” said Jatin’s son, Deben. But over the years, the soldier was being consigned to oblivion.
Two weeks ago, an expedition team of the Army’s Dogra Scouts found and retrieved the mortal remains of Mahendra and two other passengers of the ill-fated AN 32 from the 16500 ft high crash-site.
“We had given up hopes to see his corpse long back,” said another brother, Tuben. “Leave no man behind. That’s what we were taught in the Army. By retrieving my brother’s body, the jawans of Dogra Scouts kept alive the spirit of the Army,” said Tuben.