What survived when everything burnt down?
There is only one
thing that survived the fire. It is a fragile little Chinese teapot, so small you can cup your fingers around it. The lid is lost, but the pot is intact
Radha Chadha
It is a surreal visit. It is still my home, but I am surrounded by the mangled metal innards of the apartment. The floor is covered with debris, a potpourri of burnt furniture, burnt books, burnt sculptures, burnt everything. The metal frame of the ironing board somehow survives, curving floor-ward like a Salvador Dali clock. The bedsprings, charred coils, rest comfortably on a bed of black ash. The walls have vanished, and I see through into the next bedroom. Clumps of electrical wires dangle from the ceiling, stiff, burnt. I cannot enter the kitchen, for it has transformed into a dense forest of angry metal rods branching out in haphazard directions. The pot, in which we cooked meatballs for New Years Eve, peeks from behind. The smell of spent fire is everywhere, thick, clawing.
The Address Downtown Dubai was our home for the last five years, until the New Years Eve fire burnt the front face of the building and scores of apartments like ours. It was our little love nest, a small haven of peace, high up in the air, away from the fires of work and life. Children grown and flown, my husband and I rebuilt our life here. It was lovely. A home full of memories, of my daughters artworks on the walls, of dinners eaten on the sofa while watching House Of Cards, of weekend lunches on the balcony table. Of waking up in the morning with the Burj Khalifa soaring up outside the window, of the mid-morning beam of sunlight it magically directed on the painting of a Syrian seamstress. Of working on the dining table, our laptops lined up, with a glass of wine for company. Of silly games of cricket played with a rubber ball and a Moleskine notebook, hoping we wouldnt break anything.
As I stand among the ashes, I try to absorb that it is all gone, every last bit of material possession, and I am surprised to feel neither regret nor anger, but a strange sense of liberation. It is as if the fire has given me a clean black slate to write upon, light and easy, unencumbered by all the assorted baggage that I have been carrying around for decades. Baggage, I now realize, sucks up time, it needs tending to and looking after. I am suddenly free.
And I am blessed to have intact what is most precious, my family and dear friends, who had gathered to celebrate the new year. We relive and retell the story of that evening over and over again, and with each telling realize how lucky we are to be alive and well. We discovered the fire by flukethere was no fire alarm, there was no public address, there was no phone call. My husband and a friend stepped out on the balcony, leaned to look down and saw a huge wall of smoke rising up towards them. Thats it. We were out of the apartment quickly, and then the long slow climb down the stairs, 35 floors, along with hundreds of other residents, all surprisingly calm and orderly. Out on the road, I looked back at the building and the fire had marched up, well past our 35th floor, gigantic orange flames dancing with massive black plumes of smoke. I knew it was game over.
How did I feel through it all? Surprisingly calm, almost meditative calm. A feeling of surrender to forces you have no control over. It suddenly doesnt matter whether you live or die, you just do the best you can.
Life since then has taken on a back-to-basics mode. We walked a couple of kilometres to The Oberoi hotelthey gave us shelter that night, food, clothes, comfort, love, bless them. The next day we bought a set of clothes for each family member and found that it is more than enough to manage comfortably. The marathon of forms and documents that are needed to apply for lost passports. The meetings with Emaar (the company behind the building) to figure out the next steps they have been extremely helpful, moving us to one of their hotels and taking care of us. The police station visit for FIRs, so efficient and friendlymost unlike an Indian one. We even took selfies with the policemen.
Stranded without passports and visas, there has been unexpected time for family bonding. Our children and their partners have been with us longer than ever before, an unhurried expanse of time ahead of us with ambiguous departure dates. We are creating new common memoriesof late night dal-chawal and gobi-aloo from room service, of hanging out at crowded passport offices, of driving together six of us in a hired car, of buying contact lenses for the girls, of eating hot falafels from a tiny Palestinian shop in Deira, of hurriedly purchasing Nike shoes so we can visit the burnt apartment, of chatting with the fire-fighting chiefa wonderful Emirati man with mischievous eyeswho takes us up to our ravaged home. We three girls have been bonding over shopping, buying the same stuff to save precious timethe same pink pyjamas, the same orange T-shirt, the same white cotton bag from Muji, and we are sharing a weird green lipstick which magically turns bright pink on your lips.
There is only one thing that survived the fire. It is a fragile little Chinese teapot, so small you can cup your fingers around it. The lid is lost, but the pot is intact. It is almost comicalthis powerful fire, that consumed every inch of the apartment, couldnt hurt this defenceless teapot. The reason, of course, is simpleit had already been through fire.
The writer is one of Asias leading marketing and consumer insight experts
