As Adam and Hasina Taju grew older, they worried over who would pass away first. Married for over half a century, they’d each save money so that the other was financially taken care of, just in case.
“Who knew that God would take them both at the same time?” their son-in-law Wasim Musa told the Sun-Times from London. “They couldn’t live without each other, everywhere they went, they always went together.”
“And they went away together,” Musa, 42, added.
Londoners Adam Taju, Hasina Taju and Altaf Hasuian Patel were three of the more than 240 people killed when an Air India passenger flight bound for London crashed into a medical college and burst into flames after takeoff Thursday in the northwestern city of Ahmedabad.
Musa and his wife were asleep at their Des Plaines home when they got a call from Musa’s sister-in-law around 4 a.m. Thursday about the crash.
“Is this really happening?” Musa told the Sun-Times he thought to himself as he, his wife and two children scrambled to get from the Chicago area to London to be with family. “It’s a very strong shock where somebody just gets hit with something and doesn’t realize that this just happened to me.”
Adam and Hasina Taju, the parents of Musa’s wife, were both roughly 70 years old. Patel, a realtor who was about 50, was married to one of their three daughters and is survived by a son, Musa said.
“We are really devastated at the loss of three family members from one household,” Musa said.
Adam and Hasina Taju were in Ahmedabad for a month to see Adam’s father for Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holiday marking the Day of Sacrifice and the end of the Hajj. Patel joined them for a week before all three were scheduled to fly back to London, where they all live, on Thursday.
“He was the breadwinner of the house and he was living his life as a senior,” Musa said of his father-in-law, who was a retired cancer survivor. “It’s really heartbreaking.”
Musa described Hasina Taju as a “housewife who had great talent in how she did things around the house.”
Patel owned a property business in the United Kingdom and was “very knowledgeable.”
“He was very, very known in the community, very quick person to approach and have an open conversation with,” Musa said. “We’re definitely going to miss him.”
Musa and his family last saw his in-laws in London at the end of March for the last 10 days of Ramadan.
“They were happy because since COVID we didn’t get a chance to go to London,” Musa said. “When we went before, [my children] were little kids so they didn’t know who [their grandparents] were, but now they definitely did connect.”
Musa still hasn’t figured out a way to break the news to his 7-year-old daughter or to his 10-year-old son. The connection between his daughter and mother-in-law was so strong.
“She’ll be wondering, ‘How come grandma hasn’t called?’” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
