Back to India Voyage - Blackness of Smoke

This is another one of those incidents that happen to the chosen few, which would unsettle and unnerve most frail hearted.

We are slowly getting into a rhythm, and it is one of those beautiful Hyderabad evenings, when I came home. Geetha and Kids have gone out, and having not taken the key, I was walking outside and enjoying the cool breeze. I found out that, Geetha went to take Dhruva for his chess class. We have someone in the complex giving chess classes and wanted to take advantage of that (I liberally use the word We here, but Geetha is the one who found it out and took Dhruva there. Give credit where it is due I say). Dhruva is also getting enrolled into a Tai-Kwondo class and I am beginning to believe that there is a sense of belonging here in this complex.

Walking outside the walking rail (I don't know if I mentioned this, but there is a 1 KM walking trail round the perimeter of the buildings in the complex, which I should say is very nicely maintained and pleasant) for the first time, I was catching up on my phone calls. Around 7:30 I realized that Geetha has reached home, I stopped my walk and entered the house. Nothing out of the norm.

Preparing the kids for dinner, we asked Dhruva to go upstairs and get dressed in his pajamas. He goes up and in a flash comes running down saying "There is smoke and fire upstairs". I did not believe him and went along with him. That is when it struck me. The entire upstairs is pitch dark, could not see a thing with lights on, and as I walk I could see my steps in white on the floor. I came down stairs and see my legs, clothes already beginning to turn black. Pranavi starts yelling out "call the fire people".

We called the building maintenance right away and told them that it is an emergency and they have to rush. To their credit, they showed up in less than 5, and went upstairs. They were literally choking whilst trying to find the problem area. I myself went and looked at potential problem areas ( clothing iron, electric geyser etc) and could not find any. But, the professionals quickly found it out and told us that it was the electric geyser in the common bath room that got burnt beyond belief and shut down that part of the electric circuit and told us to stay away from upstairs and left.

This is when I went upstairs to assess the situation. Off late, I am coming across more situations that are truly ineffable. One has to see the room to understand the gravity of the problem. I could go on an on explaining how we felt or what we saw, but, it would surely fall short of reality, but, that does not mean that I am going to give up. I feel that a little (I mean very little) detail would help put things in perspective. So here it goes.

When we rented this apartment, we did it in a rush. We liked more features in this apartment and complex, but were some nagging issues that are still making us regret our hastiness. This apartment had 3 bathrooms and all of them fitted with electric geysers, of which we were using 2 regularly. The one in the common bathroom upstairs, was disconnected. So, we had it checked by electrician who simply connected the wires and said it is working now. When it was turned on, there was some issue with plumbing and it started leaking steam like a cooker with a blown safety valve. So, we called the plumber and he turned the water connection off. What we did not realize in this process is that we had a left a hot plate with nothing to cool it, had some one switched the geyser on.

Dhruva was asked to clean himself up that evening, and quite unusual for him, he used the common bath room and in trying to turn the light on, he turned the geyser on, but did not turn it off. The unit was on for 2 hours without any water to heat. Perfect recipe for disaster. Now lets get back to the situation at hand.

What once was a geyser is now a black cylinder (red hot) and all the plastic surrounding it is completely vaporized into soot. I am looking at a 2-3 mm layer of black soot on the ground, on the bed, and what I saw earlier as my foot prints in white are the clearing of the soot my my feet. The walls over 3 feet from ground are all black including the false ceiling. There was a 1mm of black coating in the closets (housing our clothes) that were locked shut. Few tiles in the bath room were cracked due to heat. The false ceiling in the bath room is charred and had to be replaced. The said Geyser is now a carcass waiting to be dumped.

The thing that made the situation complex was our mosquito nets on the windows which contained all the smoke and soot indoors as opposed to letting it out. We opened all windows and took out the nets thinking even the mosquitoes have some code of ethics and would not encroach an environment so inhospitable (little did we know their tenacity and hunger for human blood).

We were in panic mode, and I decided to take control of the situation as opposed to the contrary. We called for the cleaning crew and this being almost 9 PM at night, they said they could only come in the morning. Being a veteran of cleaning jobs owing to my janitorial training and work experience in school, I decided to take a first crack at it. I slowly but surely collected my wits and along with it cleaned up the soot on the ground. Being so light weight, it flew off into air when I tried to speed up the process. On this occasion my mind was wandering if the choice of marble for the floor should be white or black. If it is black we would not notice much of a difference, but on the other hand, we would not even know how big the problem was. After about half an hour of this clean up, I dared call Geetha upstairs to take a look. Now that both kids are asleep, We could not leave it in that shape and decided to give our best shot to the floor at least.

Good old bucket of soap water and a cleaning rag was the call of the day. So, we started that way. A clean bucket of water is pitch dark by the time we finished one block of marble (2ft X 2ft), and realized that we could not work in that manner if we have any plans of finishing before dawn. So, we went the professional way, dumping the water on the floor and cleaning with a huge mop and it took both of us 4 back breaking hours to at least see the spots of white marble under the black coating.

By the time we were done, we both resembled the coal workers of South Africa. We decided to call it quits as that point, as we were exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally. Even after showering for an hour the blackness did not go away.

We hired professional cleaners next morning and they were scared to start the work. Halfway through, they gave up and said they would only continue after painting the walls and ceiling. I kept thinking, how would they have reacted had they seen the house the day before.

We had the house repainted, and it took a complete scratching of the surface with emery paper, a coat of primer and in some areas up to 5 coats of paint to cover the blackness underneath. All in all after 3 days of that painting job, the cleaning crew gained courage and started to clean the floors and the bathroom which is marked "Enter at your own risk". Another 2 days of that, and now we could hardly imagine how the house was. The painting crew and the cleaning crew have done a superb job turning a disaster area almost back to its normalcy. Every now and then I see a small forgotten spot, a switch with a smoke mark, an overlooked corner of a tile etc that reminds me of the fact, but otherwise, we are back to normal (or whatever you want to call it).

What is surprising to me to this day is through all this, we did not have even the faintest of idea or the stench of something burning downstairs.

On hind sight, it is one of those things, one would think, "It could have been worse" and leave it at that.