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32-year-old Mala Kashyap, a marketing professional, luckily escaped unhurt from the fire which broke out at the ‘1 Above’ restaurant and spread to the ‘Mojo’ pub and bistro at the Kamla Trade House building inside the Kamala Mills Compound on Thursday night. The blaze, which has claimed 14 lives till now, started at around 12.20 am past midnight and was only brought under control at 6.30 am in the morning.
Speaking about her near death experience, Mala says that she had gone with her friends for a night out at the ‘1 Above’ restaurant but couldn’t find a place there, since it was packed with customers.
Mala who was dining at Mojo when the fire broke out isn’t clear about how or where it started. “I was facing the other way, a friend on the table literally yelled saying ‘Dude, what the hell!’ and we immediately got up and in a spur of a few seconds captured the video thinking again that it was something really small but within 6 seconds we rushed out of that place.”
Mala and her friends rushed to exit via the elevator which was at a distance from there area which had caught fire. “We were packing almost 15-16 people in the elevator for a single trip,” recalls Maya. “A friend who couldn’t get to the elevator, used the stairway but it was much closer to the where the fire was because he could feel the heat of the blaze. So using the elevator, though dangerous, seemed to be a safer option at the time.”
Mala says the that the Mumbai Fire Brigade was quick to respond to the incident. “The fire fighters arrived by 12:34 am, literally within 10 or 11 minutes of this happening. One of my friends had also called one of the emergency numbers. As soon as we got down in the elevator, we rushed out of the building, and were literally about 5 steps away we heard the fire brigade enter the compound,” she recalls.
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