January 26, 1987. A mother walks up to the podium at Rajpath to receive the Ashoka Chakra on behalf of her slain daughter. She breaks down before the President of India, Zail Singh. He puts a hand on her shoulder and asks her to look at the huge mass of people who had gathered there for the Republic Day Parade that year. Did any other mother get this award for a child's supreme sacrifice, he says to her.

Till then, Rama Bhanot was a broken woman. Her daughter, Neerja, a Pan Am flight attendant, had been gunned down by the hijackers of a flight from Mumbai to New York in September 1986.

"But this worked like magic on her and she became a proud mother," Rama and Harish Bhanot's elder son, Akhil, recalls. "Later, whenever she used to meet people, would say she was Neerja's mother."

Thirty years after the incident, Neerja is back in public memory. The beautiful woman, then just about to turn 23, was in the news for months after she was killed while trying to shield passengers from hijackers' bullets during a hold-up at Karachi airport on September 5, 1986. A film released this week - with Sonam Kapoor as Neerja - seeks to bring the story back to life.

Rama is no more - she died two months ago, at the age of 86. Her husband, who was a journalist in Mumbai, died after battling Alzheimer's in 2008. But for Neerja's two brothers, Akhil and Aneesh Bhanot, the events are etched in their memory.

"Just 12 days before the hijack, my sister went to London to receive training in anti-hijacking. When my mother heard about this, she was scared and asked her to leave her job and concentrate on modelling in which she had made quite a name for herself. She also told my sister not to confront hijackers if anything ever happened. But my sister was adamant. I will die, but not run away, she had retorted," Akhil reminisces.

The middle-class family in Mumbai's Bandra East was ripped apart by Neerja's death. The first to get the news about the hijacking was Harish, who heard about it at a press conference. He called his sons up, who were in office and rushed back home to be with their mother. The news, however, could not be confirmed.

"There was only Doordarshan which came to 'life' only in the evening those days. A new afternoon newspaper carried a report on the hijack," recalls Aneesh, who has come out with a volume called Neerja I Knew, a compilation of tributes, to coincide with the release of the biopic, called Neerja.

Their father feared the worst. He knew that Neerja was not the kind who'd fall in line with the hijackers' orders. "Had it been so, she would have been the first to jump out of the plane instead of helping passengers escape, thereby incurring the wrath of the hijackers who fired at her from point-blank range," Aneesh notes.

A phone call to Pan Am at 10.30pm confirmed their worst fears. The brothers called up Pan Am again to confirm the news.

Harish Bhanot later recounted the hijacking in detail in a newspaper article. When terrorists rushed up the ladder, Neerja saw them and tried to run to the cockpit to inform the pilot. One of the hijackers pulled her back by her ponytail, but not before she had conveyed the message through a code to another flight attendant.

"It is now known that the three-member cockpit crew - pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer - slipped away, leaving the aircraft, 400 passengers and the 13 member-cabin crew at the mercy of an emotionally charged four-member team of burly terrorists. Since Neerja was the cabin crew leader, she took 'command' as soon as she found that the three seniors (cockpit crew) had deserted them," he wrote.

The power generator, the father wrote, was running out of fuel and the lights had started to dim. Neerja was standing close to the leader of the terrorists. "Suddenly, guns began vomiting fire within the aircraft. Neerja jumped to the emergency exit and threw it open." Eyewitnesses said the terrorists' leader then pumped bullets into her.

She had held the fort till the end, trying her best to save the lives of the passengers, especially the Americans who were the target of the Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Abu Nidal group.

Neerja's mother was traumatised. "There was a special bond between my mother and Neerja. Whenever she was home, she used to take my mother for an ice cream or go to the movies together. They were like buddies and Neerja used to discuss anything and everything under the sun with her. They both had a zest for life, courage and a can-do attitude," Akhil says.

It's this relationship that the film - directed by Ram Madhvani - focuses on. "For me Rama Bhanot was not like any other character into whose life I stepped in. She was a person of flesh and blood," says Shabana Azmi, who plays the mother's role. "Although I met her only once, there was an instant connect between us. She was a person with a zindadili (zest for life). I was conscious of keeping that character alive - of a person who overcomes a personal loss to embrace the larger fact of her daughter sacrificing her life for the nation," Azmi says.

The Bhanots had often been approached by people seeking to make a film on Neerja, but the family was against the idea of her life being turned into a commercial product with a lot of " mirch masala" (spicy exaggeration). Producer Atul Kasbekar and his team convinced them that they would keep the dignity and memories of Neerja alive. The family sold the rights for a token rupee.

In the last few months, the family interacted often with members of the film unit. "My mother wanted to see the girl who would play the role of Neerja. So we set up a meeting at our home in Chandigarh, where we stay now. The moment Sonam entered the room, my mother said ' Eto meri Lado hai' (This is my Lado - Neerja's pet name, the Punjabi word for a loved girl)," says Akhil. "Immediately a positive note was struck and Sonam became a part of our family."

Kapoor recalls the meeting, too. "When Rama ji told me I resembled her daughter and addressed me as Lado, I immediately got goosebumps. I felt whatever I do, I should not let this old lady down for Neerja was a principled heroic woman, a working girl who was very conscious of right and wrong."

Neerja's mother did not live to see her favourite Lado on the screen, and Akhil believes that she wouldn't have been able to bear the pain and shock of reliving the tragedy. For an entire week after she met Sonam, Rama kept on saying, Lado, Lado, Neerja, Neerja, he says.

Rama donated her body to the government-run medical institute, PGI-MER, Chandigarh. She was - like her daughter - courageous till the end.