Asmaa Pandey has told the state, so far, that the Indian Navy failed to respond and he says nothing as his family tries to find him. No one on the Indian government’s side has offered to make a complaint against the Iranian navy, but there are signs of the problem. Last year, the I.D.F.’s naval intelligence centre filed a report with authorities with the Indian Navy’s headquarters in India saying that it had lost contact with the two ships, and that its report on them was based on information provided from the Iranian navy. The government, however, has refused to make that report available. This autumn, there were more reports, this time from a senior I.D.F. officer. In March, a joint Indian-I.D.F. exercise near the Indian maritime border with Bangladesh had been disrupted by a submarine incident, and the joint team that headed up the exercise was told that only the Indian side could take on the task.

“There’s been a sense of helplessness on the Indian side”, says Shah. “We are just trying to keep the pace and try to find her”.

The only thing that seems to have done much to slow the search for Reza, is some news from the Indian Ocean: in January, the Australian navy found a 10,000-tonne piece of wreckage on a remote island off the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean that might have come from a Malaysia Airlines jet. And, of course, the search for MH370 has focused in particular on an area off the coast of Western Australia that, as the Australian navy and other officials know, has previously been the site of previous submarine crashes. Even as Indian officials have been reluctant to confirm what might be on Reunion’s island, others in Australia, Malaysia, and other countries in the region continue to search that area with little result.

A long and tangled search

Since the first debris was discovered, several ships have been dispatched to the region—including one of the country’s newest, the INS Sindhurakshak, which arrived in the Indian Ocean this month, reportedly carrying radar and other data. One of our journalists saw INS Sindhurakshak members on patrol on Reunion after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing, and in one video the team can be seen heading out into the water and waving for help.

Indian officials estimate that, since the early 1990s, around 20