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His voice filled with emotion and his eyes welling up, a distraught Shivkumar Mali said his daughter had promised to speak to him ‘tomorrow’.
Pinky Mali, who was one of the five persons to have died in the Baramati plane crash, had promised her father that she would call him after landing in Baramati. But that moment will never come. Pinky Mali was the flight attendant who had accompanied Ajit Pawar on the Mumbai-Baramati flight. The plane crashed while landing at the airport, killing all the occupants.
His voice filled with emotion and his eyes welling up, a distraught Shivkumar Mali said his daughter had promised to speak to him “tomorrow”.
“Pappa, I am flying to Baramati tomorrow (Wednesday) with DCM Ajit Pawar. After dropping him, I will go to Nanded and will speak to you once I reach the hotel,” Shivkumar, a resident of Prabhadevi in Central Mumbai, recounted his conversation with Pinky.
The flight, Learjet 45, was operated by Delhi-based VSR Ventures, that crash-landed at the Baramati airport.
Pinky Mali had flown with the President, chief ministers and several political leaders, Shivkumar said, adding that she was flying with Ajit Pawar for the fourth time, according to her father.
With his eyes moist, Shivkumar said, “I spoke to her last evening, and she told me that she would be going to Baramati with Deputy CM Ajit Pawar and would then proceed to Nanded. I told her ‘let us speak tomorrow after your duty’. But that tomorrow will never come.”
The father, who is also an activist of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) that Pawar headed, said a local politician named Samadhan Sarvankar informed him about Ajit Pawar’s plane crash.
“I switched on the television. The news left me shocked,” he said.
Their last meeting
Shivkumar had met Pinky on January 16 when she visited Prabhadevi from Thane to cast her vote. Pinky had been working as a flight attendant for the last five years. She started with Air India and moved to private chartered flights after a couple of years, he said.
“During a recent flight with Ajit Pawar, my daughter complained to him that he was travelling across Maharashtra but was not paying attention to NCP activists. When Pawar asked her why she felt so, Pinky told him that I have been an NCP worker for 35 years,” Shivkumar said, adding the interaction had elicited a call from the deputy CM’s side.
“As I was driving a car, the call went unanswered. Then I got a message that Pawar wanted to speak to me,” he said. Even that call will never happen, he added.
After learning about the accident, Shivkumar and his family rushed to Baramati. Besides Pawar and Pinky, the other victims have been identified as Vidip Jadhav, Captain Shambhavi Pathak and Captain Sumit Kapur.
(With PTI inputs)
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