Names I Never Knew.

I wake in Houston,
still blind without my glasses,
eyes half-closed,
still clinging to sleep
and there it is:
“Is your family okay?”

A message like a crack
splitting the morning in two.

Fingers fumbling,
heart ahead of breath,
I call home.
Maa, Pappa.
their voices: steady.
They’re fine.
But a plane fell
from the sky into Ahmedabad.

Into BJ Medical.
Into a hostel where dreams slept.
They say students may have died.
Children of medicine.
Children of hope.

Later, I call again.
Maa says she knew someone.
Knew.
Past tense.
A name turned into a silence.

My cousins — doctors,
with ears to hospital corridors,
speak in tongues of aftermath,
“Pugilistic attitude.”
I google it.
And horror grips me
by the throat.

I can’t work.
I can’t think.
I only imagine.

The woman,
two years away from her husband,
finally flying home.
Gone.

The siblings,
heading to start a business,
building something bright.
Gone.

A family,
escorting a young student,
chasing a future,
now just a line in a headline.
Gone.

And someone,
just minutes into the drive back from the airport,
having dropped off a mother bound for London —
answers a call from her daughter, waiting across oceans:
“They’re saying the flight crashed
right after takeoff.
Can you go check?”

What do you do with a sky
that betrays?

There is only one survivor.
One.
How does he carry
the silence of a hundred stories?

And how do his loved ones
hold him now
torn between miracle
and mourning?

I keep refreshing the news,
as if certainty will save me.
As if somewhere,
the ending might change.

But it doesn’t.
It never does.

And still,
I’ll hold space
for names I never knew.