Cameraman Sunil Khandpur and his wife, Pooja, had a miraculous escape from the fire that engulfed their building at Malad (West) in Bombay on 22nd October. The couple was trapped in their seventh floor apartment in Bhoomi Classic Cooperative Housing Society near Inorbit Mall in the early morning hours when there was a huge fire that broke out in the building.
Sunil and Pooja were woken up by the smell of smoke around 4.30 a.m. When they opened their front door after seeing smoke in their bedroom and hall, they saw that the corridor was similarly filled with smoke. It was unbearably hot and so they went back running into their house. The two then crawled into their children’s room, which had relatively lesser smoke. They scremed for help through the window, but no one was in sight at the early morning hour.
Since the window grills could not be broken, they moved to the bathroom, shattered the glass and pushed the grill. After clearing the broken glass pieces, Sunil slipped out of the window to look for a way to escape. He could hear explosion blasts and the sound of glass shattering outside, and realised that this was the only way out. Using the torch light from their phone, the couple crawled out of the bathroom window and carefully climbed down the pipes to the sixth floor. As the heat there was intense, the couple felt that the fire may have started from there. Therefore, they continued down to the fifth floor. Luckily for them, some crossed pipes provided them space to stand on them. “Luckily,” revealed Khandpur, “a water pipeline from the seventh floor above us burst, and water starting pouring over our heads. We believe, it was Ganpati Bappa’s grace as it gave us relief from the heat until the firefighters reached us.” The Khandpurs were also lucky as their younger daughter was out celebrating Diwali with friends. Their elder daughter is married, and their pet dog had been taken by her for the night.