When I called Imtiyaz Ali to ask if we could meet, nearly a year after a plane crash killed his brother Javed, his sister-in-law Mariam, and their two children, we first decided to speak at his home in Mumbai. Hours later, he changed his mind. "Let's meet at the hotel instead," he said. Later, beneath the dim lights of a business hotel in Mumbai, he explained why.

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Javed and his family had built a life in the UK, but they returned often to Mumbai to see Imtiyaz and the rest of the family. But after the crash, the house no longer felt quite the same. Something in it had shifted irreversibly. "It feels," Imtiyaz said carefully, "like Javed is still there." For a year, the families of the victims have lived with unanswered questions: what happened in the cockpit, why the aircraft lost thrust, whether the disaster was human error, mechanical failure or something else entirely.