Class XII student Nairita Samajpati has a board examination to write next month but losing her books and notes in the fire at Gurudas Mansion early on Sunday does not bother her family as much as the thought of what might have happened if she hadn’t been awake past midnight to study.

Nairita was in her room when she smelt smoke and alerted her parents. “It was close to 1am. My father (Rathin Samajpati, a doctor at SSKM Hospital) stepped out to find the hawkers’ stalls and shops on the ground floor of the building on fire,” the teenager, a student at Delhi Public School Ruby Park, recounted.

She, her elder sister and their parents evacuated their second-floor apartment in the building that houses two landmark garments stores and a jewellery showroom on the ground floor minutes before the flames leapt up to ravage a large portion of the structure.

“I have lost most of my practical sheets and also some books. I have to prepare the practical sheets again,” Nairita said.

But according to her father, that was a small price to pay for averting a potential tragedy. “We are lucky to be alive. We could at least run out to safety just when the flames were advancing towards the upper floors of the building,” he said.

Nairita’s parents and elder sister Rishita, who is a second-year MBBS student, had retired for the night when the fire started. After she woke them up to say that something might be amiss, the family spent the rest of the night outdoors watching flames swallow the building on Rashbehari Avenue.

Rishita and her father Rathin also lost some of their medical books in the blaze. “Once we knew that the building was on fire, we just locked our apartment and scurried down. There was no time to salvage anything. The wind fanned the flames,” Rathin said.

When the Samajpatis were allowed to enter their apartment in the morning, the sight of their gutted study left them with a feeling of anger rather than shock.

Nandita, Rathin’s wife, said the fire was waiting to happen. “We had long feared such a blaze. We had lodged written complaints with the police, the municipal corporation and the fire services department, saying that our building could catch fire any day. We had mentioned that hawkers use plastic sheets and store inflammable articles, but none of these agencies took corrective action.”

Rathin said an open space on the footpath in front of their building was encroached only eight months ago. “This portion of the footpath leads to the zebra crossing,” he pointed out.

Officials of the fire services department said residents of the building escaped the fire through the three exits to Rashbehari Avenue and Gariahat Road.

Madhususan Pal, who lives in a room on the terrace, ran down the stairs in a shirt and lungi. “I couldn’t even grab a sweater. People were screaming from down below, ‘Agun…agun (Fire….fire)’. I was so afraid that I got up from bed and ran down without a second thought,” he said.

Nairita’s neighbour Subhradip Ghosh, a college student, was inconsolable at losing his three pet budgerigars, a parakeet species that is popular among those who keep caged birds. “The air was filled with thick, black smoke. As the flames appeared to be spreading towards our first-floor home, I unlocked the cage in the balcony so that the birds could fly away. But all three choked to death,” he said.

Tanusree Mukherjee, who lives on the fourth floor with her husband and daughters, escaped to the terrace with her family when they found smoke barrelling up the staircase. “We realised taking the stairs down from our side of the floor was risky; so we went to the terrace and took another staircase to come out through the rear of the building,” she said.

For Nairita, whose spirits were lifted by a visit from her friends on Sunday afternoon, the three weeks leading to the start of the CBSE Class XII exams on February 15 would be more testing than she had imagined they would be. Framed by the burnt wooden truss of a door, her pensive face mirrored myriad emotions.

The gutted remains of the room where Nairita was studying when the building caught fire early on Sunday. Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya