MANGLURU: While India's worst ever air crash to-date may be a distant memory to many, but it is still fresh in the mind of Helen Rita Menezes of Derebail. Her husband Melwyn Kiran Menezes was on board Air India Express flight IX812 that crashed while landing at Mangaluru on May 22, 2010, killing 158 passengers and crew on board. Eight passengers had survived the crash. Kiran was coming to the city to see his son Cleon Keith Menezes, who was not keeping well.Helen, the only family member of any of the victims, who turned up to pay tributes at the memorial park set up by DK district administration to mark the seventh anniversary of the crash, was candid in recalling her memories of the event. With daughter Meghan by her side, Helen said, "Society has helped me become strong." Helen, who works as a teacher at St Lawrence School, Bondel, said she studied to become a teacher by acquiring a BEd degree post the crash."I had come a week earlier to be part of the 50th wedding anniversary of my parents and I was supposed to rejoin Kiran in Dubai on May 21," she said. However, since Cleon fell ill in the meantime, Kiran decided to come down, Helen said, adding that he had tried in vain to do so on Thursday and Friday. But fate willed otherwise for Kiran, working with Dragon Engineering in Dubai and 157-other passengers on board the flight. Meghan was just 22 months old then.Both Cleon and Meghan know about the crash, but prefer either not to talk about it or do not ask (either about the crash or Kiran), she says. Her other lingering memory of the crash was the task of identifying Kiran's body, which she did so by his chain and the diamond ring on his hand. Helen does remember her husband by grieving for Kiran at the cemetery of John The Baptist Church at Permude, where his mortal remains are interred and by attending annual mass.Earlier, B Ramanath Rai, district minister led a gathering of elected representatives and officials in paying tributes to the air crash victims at the memorial park by placing wreaths on a platform. The administration has set up the park at a site abutting the Phalguni river, where unidentified bodies of the crash have been buried. Rai said the accident is one of the saddest moments in the history of the district and it is only apt that the society remembers the departed souls.

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