I
WHEN THE FIRE ALARM SOUNDED, Abinaash Chandha, a sixteen-year-old seamstress, jumped up from her Singer and ran toward the exit.
“Back to your station!” yelled her supervisor. “It is only a test of the alarm system.”
“Everyone back to work!” yelled the other supervisors, waving their arms and blocking the aisles. “It is only a test! It is just like on Monday.” It was true: There had been an alarm on Monday that had amounted to nothing.
Abinaash went back to the Singer while the alarm continued sounding. She finished hemming the silk pocket square with the embroidered “Pascal” logo in the corner and slid it to the finishes box. She earned ten rupees for every ten pocket squares she hemmed. The hems had to be sewed neat and straight with tiny stitches, which took time. She had been hemming squares for more than a year. On a good day she could earn two hundred rupees, over two US dollars, which meant she could send money home to her family. Abinaash finished another square before she smelled the smoke.
The Kavreen Style factory in Lahore, Pakistan, an immense six-story building next to the mosque a half block from the old Lahore Canal, was on fire. Bolts of cloth stored next to the generator had smoldered for a while before bursting into flames. The factory walls were brick, but the stairs and floors were wood and were littered with fabric scraps that ignited with explosive fury.
The supervisors had disappeared. Abinaash ran with the others to the stairs, but the stairwell was filled with billowing black smoke. You could see flames below and hear the screams of the workers on those floors. Pandemonium broke out on the sixth floor. Women and men screamed and wailed and ran about, first in one direction then the other. One old woman—her name was Safia Atwal—sat at her Singer with her eyes closed, her lips moving, her hands folded on her lap, and her body rocking gently back and forth.
Smoke was seeping up between the floorboards. All the windows were covered with iron bars. Abinaash ran to the farthest window where a young woman and a man squatted on the sill kicking furiously at the bars. A wailing siren came closer and then stopped below. The woman and man continued kicking. When the woman fell back exhausted, Abinaash took her place kicking at the bars. The bars did not move, but the two kept kicking.
Down below, the firemen dropped the ends of their hoses into the canal and turned on their pumps. Great gouts of brown water surged through the hoses and struck the fire with a hissing noise. More fire trucks arrived and soon there were hoses crisscrossing everywhere. The firemen aimed the nozzles into the flames. But the building was an inferno that no water could quench.
The firemen could not go into the building. They could not even get near enough to place a ladder against it. And even if they had been able to, their longest ladder would have reached only the third floor. They could only point the hoses and gaze into the fire with shiny, sooty, despairing faces. Many hundreds of people, mostly women, had come out of the building. They stood behind the firemen, staring into the roaring inferno or looking away toward some imaginary place where this could not happen. No one came out after that.
On the sixth floor the bars on the window, which opened onto a side alley, suddenly came loose and crashed to the ground twenty meters below. The young man screamed at the crowd on the road until someone noticed and began yelling and pointing in his direction. The first person to jump was gravely injured, and people rushed in and carried her off. Abinaash and the young man tried to hold others back while people below piled up debris under the window—old furniture, palm fronds, mattresses, upholstered chairs, blankets, anything they could find that might break their fall. Some women had tried to make a rope from sheets of uncut silk pocket squares, but when they hung it from the window, it went down only eight meters. The heat was terrible. It made it hard to breathe.
People pushed past Abinaash and jumped, sometimes two at a time, landing in the tangle of those who had jumped before them. Abinaash looked around. The sixth floor, mostly empty now, was burning. Through the thick smoke she could see all the sewing stations in flames, like so many pyres, along with the carts that had been used to carry away the finished work. Safia Atwal, the old woman, was still sitting by her Singer. She was on fire and still rocking back and forth, back and forth. Abinaash slid down the silk rope as far as she could and then, after a moment’s hesitation, let go.
Copyright © 2016 by Peter Steiner
