Dreamt of returning to Kerala, move to new home

Forty-year-old Ranjitha G Nair, who was on her way to London for the last time with the aim to finally return home in Kerala, was one of the 241 passengers who died when the Air India flight crashed seconds after taking off from the Ahmedabad airport on Thursday.

- Coovercolly Indresh

KOCHI:

"I cannot come to terms with her death because she was with me at every stage of my life. To accept that her voice and her presence at the other end of the phone won't be there anymore is going to be extremely difficult," Dhanya T Nair broke down into tears as she remembered her best friend, Ranjitha G Nair.

A resident of Pullad in Kerala's Pathanamthitta district, Ranjitha had boarded the Air India AI 171 flight from Ahmedabad to return to her nursing job in the UK that she was planning to leave soon and return to her government job back home in Kerala.

Ranjitha, said her friends and family members, received job appointment of a nurse in the Kerala health services in 2019 while she was working abroad in the Gulf. She joined the service, but subsequently went on to take a long leave and joined the NHS in the UK in September last year. Recently, owing to problems adjusting with the cold weather in the UK and some personal health problems, Ranjitha decided to return to Kerala for good and rejoin the government service.