TeaTimeTreats: The Fire Remembers What We Forget

The Fire Remembers What We Forget

Delhi burns in patterns now

Shaheen P Parshad

The sun set on the lives of some people in Delhi even before it could rise on May 3. A spark inside an AC unit in Vivek Vihar became a verdict. By sunrise, nine names were gone. Arvind, Anita, Nishant, Anchal, and eighteen-month-old Akash died on the second floor, a family extinguished in one room.

On the fourth, Nitin, Shailey, and Samyak were found on a locked staircase, their bodies curved toward a terrace they could not reach. The smart lock held. The grill held. The fire did not.

Days earlier, on April 29, Gaur Green Avenue in Indirapuram lit up from the 9th to the 13th floors. Eight homes turned into black skeletons. No bodies this time, only the arithmetic of near-miss: ten rescued, hundreds displaced, and the same PVC sheets on balconies acting as fuses between floors.

The details repeat until they become a doctrine. Single staircases. Terraces padlocked for ‘security’. Exit paths turned to storage. Awnings hung to keep out dust and pigeons, but made of a material that melts at 160 degrees and carries flame like a promise. Ghaziabad’s ladders reach four floors. Noida’s best machine stops at forty-two meters. We build to thirty stories and gamble on luck for the top twenty.

Summer exposes what winter hides. Power loads swell. Wires fray. ACs, the city’s breathing machines, choke and spit fire. And the response arrives late, throttled by cars parked in fire lanes, gardens built over access roads, and systems that were never tested when there was no smoke.

We call them tragedies, as if they fell from the sky. But fire is honest. It follows the path we leave for it. Up the PVC. Through the locked door. Into the room with no second way out.

In Vivek Vihar, a cake waited in Manesar for a boy who would turn five. In Gaur Green, children ask why their books are ash. The city keeps rising, glass by glass, floor by floor. Yet the oldest questions remain on the ground: Where is the second exit? Who holds the key? Why do we seal ourselves in?

The fire remembers our answers. It remembers every bolted terrace, every blocked corridor, every clearance signed and forgotten. It comes back to read them to us, in smoke.

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