Onkar Singh

All she ever got out of the experience was some inconvenience and a bit of indigestion. Which makes Manjula Tolia, wife of the principal secretary of Uttaranchal, one of the lucky ones.

She was on her way home, after attending a seminar in Kathmandu, when she, along with fellow delegates Dr Anita Joshi and Iqbal Singh (both from Himachal Pradesh), found herself in the hands of hijackers.

The experience has, says the mother of two teenaged daughters, left no scars. "It is not that I have forgotten the experience," she says. "But unlike many others, I didn't have any unpleasant experiences with the hijackers and, I guess, because of that, I recovered quite quickly."

Whatever trauma she experienced, thus, was at second hand. "The hijackers maltreated this 15-year-old boy who had a kidney problem," she recalls. "They took him to the executive class section and beat him up. Afterwards, when I asked the boy what happened, he said he would tell me later. But once we were released, we lost touch, and I haven't been able to meet him since."

In retrospect, what strikes her most forcibly was that, despite being cooped inside that oversized steel tube for days on end, there was no tension among the passengers. "Even the hijackers were okay, they gave us food when we wanted it, allowed us to use the toilets, even helped us get medical aid. But," she muses, "it was when they asked us to tighten seatbelts and put our heads down, that we would feel tense, because that was when they became most unpredictable."

The experience, she says, has not put her off Nepal for life. Why should it, she asks. "One incident cannot change everything. Anything can happen, anywhere, so why keep thinking about the hijack and worrying about it?"

It's like we said at the outset -- Manjula Tolia is one of the lucky ones.

Series Design: Dominic Xavier

The Hijack: One Year On