A trial by fire: How Prothit survived the Bailey Road blaze

"Maa, there is a fire in the building where we were having dinner." 

Nasrin Akter Dina's work was interrupted as these lines floated from the other side of a phone call with her son at around 10 pm on Thursday. Trying to keep his voice calm, her son Prothit Shams said, "I am safe, don't worry. Just let them know I am on the 8th floor and approximately 25 people are stuck with me here."

Earlier, the evening began like any other. Around 8 in the evening, Dina and Prothit returned home from work. Dina works at an NGO. Her son, Prothit, was supposed to help her make a PowerPoint presentation for her work.

But Prothit had dinner plans with a friend at Ambrosia restaurant, located on the 8th floor of Green Cozy Cottage on Bailey Road. Prothit did not even have time to change his new white polo shirt, which he had worn to an office event. 

He joined the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) Bangladesh as a coordinator just last month. He recently graduated from Independent University Bangladesh. 

Prothit completed his dinner. Everything was normal until it was not.

Panicked and unable to stay home, Dina rushed to the spot and saw the fire spreading fast. She was not ready to lose her son so soon. Dina's husband passed away in 2022.

Despite her best attempts, she was denied access. The scene was chaotic, with hundreds of firefighters battling the blaze. Fortunately, Police Commissioner Habibur Rahman, who is a family friend, arrived at the spot. "I tried to stay strong and approached Habib urgently, informing him that my son was on the 8th floor and pleading for his rescue."

She called Prothit and asked him to let the police officer know his exact location. Prothit, on the other hand, was trying to control the situation inside the restaurant's kitchen.

"At around 9:30 pm, I had just settled the bill and was about to head home when all hell broke loose. At first, it was just a slight commotion, but then I noticed puffs of ash-coloured smoke wafting from the balcony," he recounted on Friday, sitting at his home at Segun Bagicha. 

"There was no discernible smell, so I wasn't worried at first. But the urgency in people's voices signalled something more sinister. We opened the staircase door and saw nothing but smoke. There was no scope for us to go up or down."

They saw people coming from the lower floors, saying, "There's fire downstairs; we tried to get out but couldn't, so we're coming up," someone exclaimed as panic rippled through the crowd.

They rushed to the balcony, which was no better as they were greeted with more smoke.

"Then we took shelter in the kitchen. There was a glass wall behind us. The restaurant staff panicked and said similar incidents had happened before. We broke a glass behind us for smoke to get out, but it was a mistake. The smoke rather came through the broken space," said Prothit.

At that time, some people were thinking of jumping down from the opening they made. Prothit warned them that they could not do that because it's not possible to get down just by jumping. 

Still, someone took a wire and got out through the window; his fate remains unclear.

Panic also rose through Prothit's body but tried to be as calm as possible. So he called out, "Please don't do anything like this [jumping]; the fire service will come to save us.

By then, as his mom let him know, the fire had engulfed the entire building, spanning all floors. "Rationality became our only lifeline amidst the mounting panic."

They lost all concept of time as they grappled with uncertainty, trying to keep the group composed. The responsibility fell on Prothit's and another young man's shoulders to calm the scared crowd, especially the elderly. "Despite our own apprehension, we reassured them, promising that following our lead would lead to survival."

But one and a half hours had already passed. So people started panicking and getting sicker. 

Soon Prothit received a call from his sister, who asked him to Google what he could do in such a situation to survive using whatever tools he had around him. "Google asked me to stay low to the ground so we could afford oxygen amidst the suffocating smoke. I asked everyone to do that and it somewhat worked."

But their ordeal was far from over. Soon, they could no longer breathe, even in the kitchen. "All of us were coughing and our eyes started burning."

Prothit and the other man decided they should go to the balcony. In the meantime, Prothit talked to his mother for the third time. "Maa was asking me to go to the roof anyhow." But Prothit urged her to get them out through the broken window if she could ask the firefighters to send a ladder up there.

But it was nearly impossible to get the ladder there as that side was not street-facing. They could not take the stairs either. "The door to the staircase was ajar, I could see red flames blazing."

So they decided to get to the balcony as that was the biggest open space and firefighters could see them from there. "That's our only escape," said Prothit.  

So they took some water from the tap in buckets, made a human chain, and kept spreading the water as they made their way through the thick dark smoke. "We were holding each other because we could not see each other. I could not even see the person right beside me using my flashlight". 

Keeping low, holding hands, and going to the balcony—that was the goal. 

With a lot of effort, we made it to the balcony. One tried to go to the staircase, but he came back as it was a fiery death trap. The sight that greeted us on the balcony was grim—smoke billowed around us, but at least there was a little fresh air.

"Since I am a little skinny, two guys held me from the back and asked me to stick my head out as far as possible and ask for help. Because nothing could be seen due to the smoke, they [people on the road] could not spot us easily. So when I poked my head out, I could see that a crane went up, just one or two floors below us; I shouted at the top of my lungs and they spotted me."

They came up immediately and sprayed water there, and two firefighters got Prothit and his friend and said, "Please get up; we will save you. Don't worry." The firemen were very calm and composed. 

By then, they were at a breaking point. Fire service people somehow lifted them and put them on the crane. "I just cried, hugging a fireman and kept thanking him for saving our lives."

"In that lot, they saved 5 to 7 people, including us. There were 20 people on the floor. I don't know what happened to others." 

When they got down, Prothit's mother raced to him, hugged him, and assured him that he was okay. She was shaking, and Prothit sobbed, hugging her.

"I was checking all the cranes. Just when I saw him in his white polo, which now turned all black, I ran to him," said Dina.

Their fateful evening was nearly at an end. "My friend and I came to my home. It was around midnight by then. I did not have problems with breathing. But my chest was aching and my throat was burning, and my friend's condition was the same, but she was more traumatised."

So they went to the Birdem hospital; the doctors gave them some oxygen and advised them to head to Dhaka Medical College Hospital for more specialised treatment as we inhaled smoke for around two hours.

"When I touched my nose after going there, some black liquid came out. I was scared; I touched the inside of my nose again, and my finger turned black. My lips were all dried up and blackened. I was scared of my nose and lips being like this; what happened inside me?" said a visibly shaken Prothit.

"But what we saw in the burn unit was a nightmare. I saw people were all black and charred. Every five minutes, someone was coming in a stretcher, burnt," he added.

For the first time in this long night, Prothit felt lucky. His nerves had settled down by then but the scenes were making him queasy again.

Thankfully his ordeal soon came to an end as doctors gave them some prescriptions and told them to have more water, and returned home. A long day's night came to an end here.