Lucknow: Shailendra (24), a trainee from Pauri Garhwal, Uttarakhand, who was among 11 who survived the fire in Aliganj, said that when the fire broke out and suffocating black smoke filled the corridors, he thought it was his last day of life, but the will to survive eventually won.“Despite being choked and blinded by smoke, I gathered all the strength and kept moving along with some of my colleagues. We came across a window pane. Luckily, an iron rod was lying there. We used it to break the glass. As the smoke rushed out, we could breathe and our brains started working. We found several cable TV wires hanging from the building. We tied them and climbed down one by one. The blaze was just inches away,” he recalled with a trembling voice.Several survivors also recalled their ‘near-death’ experience.As “Bhaago aag” echoed through the corridors, thick, suffocating black smoke swallowed our floor. Within seconds, the lights blurred, then disappeared. Desks, doors, exits — everything dissolved into a dense black haze, they said.“It was like a stampede inside a closed box. People were running blindly into each other. I thought I would not make it out. I saw a colleague collapse. One moment she was standing, the next she fell unconscious. Nobody could reach her because we could not see anything,” said Mohd Asif (32), an employee.Pankaj Goswami, 24, from Almora, Uttarakhand, said even breathing felt like survival was slipping away. “My throat was burning, my eyes were full of tears. I could not see the stairs, so I held the railing and moved step by step, afraid I would fall into nothing, but then I saw the opening caused by the shattering of glass and climbed down,” he said.One of the survivors said, “It was totally black. Not even shadows. People were crashing into me from all sides. I took the risk to jump from the first floor, injuring my back, because staying there meant death.”
