New Delhi, April 9 (IANS) As a fire broke out in a four-storeyed building here in the early hours of Monday -- trapping over 20 people inside, 55-year-old Jyoti Verma, who was among the dozens of onlookers, suggested using an old ladder as a bridge between two buildings. And, it worked!
"God gave me the idea to use the ladder and we were able to save more than 15 people from the building," Verma told IANS.
When the fire broke out at around 6.00 a.m in the ground floor of a shoe-making factory, located in a densely populated residential area in Sultanpuri of west Delhi, Verma was still sleeping in her second-floor house behind the factory, separated by a narrow lane.
"My neighbour came and informed me about the fire in next building. When we came out, there was black, thick smoke everywhere," Verma recalled.
"From the building which was on fire, seven to nine faces were peeping through the windows. They were calling out for help," Munna, 40, a neighbour said.
"By that time, one of them mustered courage and jumped from the window and landed on our terrace," he said.
But the distance between the buildings, separated by a narrow lane, and the height difference between the two made the jump difficult and risky.
"We were thinking about using a saree to join the buildings among other options and that is when aunty (Verma) said that there was an old ladder lying behind the house and we could use it to join the buildings," Munna said.
In no time, Verma and others fetched the about eight-foot-long wooden ladder and kept one end of it on the tin roof of the toilet on the terrace and the other on the window of the building on fire.
"I was holding one end of the ladder while one of the workers (of shoe factory) was holding the other end at the window of the burning building," Munna said. "There was a lot of smoke as the fire raged in the ground floor."
"As the workers started walking one by one on the ladder from their building to ours, faces of people appeared at their first floor window. They cried 'Bhaiyya humko bhi bachao (save us, too)'," he said.
Verma, Munna and others hurried the workers on the second floor and then took the ladder to first floor of their building and saved around eight more people in a similar way.
Munna and Verma said as soon as the workers reached safety, they ran away.
"They didn't even wait to say thanks and ran with their lives. We couldn't even count them," Verma said.
"She's from the village that's why she thought about the ladder. People from the city won't have such ideas," a woman who had gathered at the spot said with a smile.
As the woman said that Verma will live long for saving so many lives, the 55-year-old said with a smile: "I don't want anything apart from their blessings. I won't even identify them if I meet them again."
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