Two minutes before 25-year-old air-hostess, Tejal Kamulkar, was to board her flight, she was giggling on the phone with Ahmedabad girl and best friend, Pooja Sharma, about finding a good guy to marry.
It was to be the last conversation. Two minutes before 25-year-old air-hostess, Tejal Kamulkar, was to board her flight, she was giggling on the phone with Ahmedabad girl and best friend, Pooja Sharma, about finding a good guy to marry. "If I knew how to get them, wouldn't I have managed one for myself?" Pooja remembers telling Tejal and the girls burst into peals of laughter.
"I had wished her safe journey," Pooja recalls. "We decided to catch up on this again as soon as possible."
Little did Pooja knew that this was going to be her last conversation with her best friend. Kamulkar, who had fulfilled her aspiration of becoming an air-hostess only four months back, is no more. One of the crew of the ill-fated Air India Express IX 812, she perished in the crash in Mangalore on Saturday morning.
Pooja, a resident of Bopal in Ahmedabad, trained to be an air-hostess from a city-based institute and then joined Air India in Mumbai where she and Kamulkar, a Mumbai-girl, became good friends. "We were roommates, and really enjoyed spending time together," Pooja told DNA. "We got posted to different places - Tejal in Mangalore and I in Kochi - but we kept in touch. It hasn't yet sunk in that the last call she made was to me."
Just before Kamulkar boarded the IX-812 flight to Mangalore, she had phoned Pooja. "Tejal said she just had two minutes but she badly wanted to talk to me," Pooja said. "We had the usual girlie chat, and then she hung up, saying she'd call later. When I was told this morning that she is no more, I was too stunned to react."
At a time when she and her colleagues want to reach out to Kamulkar's parents and comfort them, Pooja has to go on attending to her professional responsibilities. "It makes it worse for us to know that we can't even take a break from work after a tragedy like this," Pooja said.
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