Young professionals main victims of Kolkata fire

KOLKATA - From 18-year-old Arati Dhali to 25-year-old Sourav Barik, the main victims of the fire that gutted Stephen Court in central Kolkata were young professionals working in call centres and other private offices in the heritage building.

Sourav, the only son of Kabita and Sailen Barik, had taken up a call centre job in Rawat Engineers sometime back. A resident of Icchapur in North 24 Parganas, Sourav jumped to death from the fourth floor of his office, unable to bear the rising heat and suffocating smoke.

“It was very difficult to breathe. Before our very eyes, our accounts officer Pradip Kumar Chokhany died of suffocation. Sourav may have felt the only way to escape death was to jump out. He did so,” said one of his colleagues at the private hospital where the youth’s body was kept in the morgue.

Sourav’s mother was inconsolable. “Why did he jump? Didn’t he know that no one can survive after jumping from such a height”

Thirty-year-old Vivek Upadhyay, a call centre employee, was one of the first victims of the tragedy. He also took the plunge from his fifth floor office in a desperate bid to escape the flames and died of multiple injuries.

Upadhyay, who lived in South Kolkata’s Panditiya Road, had married only three years back. “Meri munna thik hai na (is my boy okay)?” his aged mother was asking everyone at the S.S.K.M hospital Tuesday as her relatives tried to keep the tragic news away from her.

“No no, he has gone home. Let us also go home,” said one of the relatives, as he hugged her.

It was only late in the night that the news was broken to her.

“Why did she have to join this office? They have a family business. But he only wanted to do something on his own,” wailed Upadhyay’s wife.

Others like Sonali Singh kept moving around aimlessly in front of the building clutching a photograph of her 22-year-old brother Bidyut Acharya who was missing since yesterday and worked in Wiltech Computers, a call centre firm.

According to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation records, there were 128 business establishments and offices in the building that housed the iconic Flurys tea room and restaurant Peter Cat, besides hip eating joints like One Step Up and Caf Coffee Day in the happening Park Street, the city’s most well known address.

Several of the establishments had small, cramped offices and low floors with false ceiling that proved veritable tinder-boxes.

“Our office had no windows. We were squeezed in between beauty parlours, computer training centres, stock broking firms, a heavy engineering company, software companies, doctors’ clinics and transport companies, everything was there, besides several call centres,” said a telecommunication firm employee Tarun Mukherjee.

Among the companies in the building were Highlife Management, Bengal Paper Tube, NextGen Communications and OTS Transport.