No hatred for pilot, the real villain is war

“Most of all, I remember the little kaleidoscope,” she says. “When he lifted me to his lap and put it to my eye, I entered a wonderland.” Farida Singh, the daughter of aviation legend Jehangir Engineer, adored her father. She was 16 when his plane, a civilian aircraft caught in India and Pakistan’s 1965 war, was shot down by a Pakistani pilot, Qais Hussain.

Farida is in her sixties today, a wife, mother and grandmother, strong, successful and vibrant. She treasures memories of her father, triggered by the smallest things. “I still have a fascination for the glitter of glass,” she says, linking this to the enchanting kaleidoscope. “Even today, when I see anything that gleams beautifully, I think of him.”
Growing up with her elder sister Shireen and younger brother Noshir, Farida’s youth was shaped by the optimism of modern India. She remembers outings on Juhu Beach, where her father, a champion swimmer, would take them into the sea on his back. “If we quarrelled about whose turn it was, he would take us all,” she says. Otherwise her mother, a delicate five feet against her father’s strapping six, but much more the disciplinarian than the indulgent Jehangir, would have stepped in. Afternoons on the beach ended with coconut water, warm spicy chana and bright balloons.
Sparkling times continued as the Engineers travelled from Mumbai to Chennai, Calcutta, then Delhi with Jehangir working as a pilot in Indian Airlines. Farida was 12 when they came to the capital. “Dad created his children’s lifelong romance with Delhi ...I call Delhi home, no matter where I may be.”
Farida feels no animosity for the nation — or person — causing her father’s death. “As I wrote to Hussain, there was never any hatred for the pilot who shot the plane down,” she says. “But there was certainly a villain of the piece. That was war itself. How do you explain to the victims of war that it’s necessary to kill to get things sorted out? When peace is shattered, thousands of families look desperately for answers... Can we overestimate the work campaigns like Aman ki Asha and organisations like Women Without Borders do today? If the clock could be wound back 46 years, everything would have been different if those in power had only said, ‘Let us look for other options’.”
24/08/11 Srijana Mitra Das/Times of India/The News.com

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Categories: Foreign Aug 2011