Sleepless in Bombay

We won a place in the Interior Design competition – Sharada, Parul and I.

We had 3 weeks to prepare and present our design. Like any other college students we postponed it until the deadline was on top of us. We had 2 days to come up with the design and presentation. Sharada and Parul lived in a dorm with many other architecture students. So we decided it would be best if I stayed over with them for a couple of days. If we needed something for a presentation we had a good chance of finding the materials from other students. We started late in the afternoon, right after our last class of the day. We worked through the night discussing ideas and coming up with a design we all agreed on. The next day, we went to our classes and returned to work on our project again. Now we had to finish the presentation. We stayed up all night for this. By mid morning, just an hour before the deadline we turned in our design.

After 2 days and 2 nights I returned home. As was usual I sat down with my family for tea. I told them about our design entry. After tea, I headed off to the bedroom to look for something. I sat on my bed trying to remember what I had come in for and fell asleep.

When I woke up, my bed was surrounded by 6 firemen.

After tea, my Mom had come in to tell me that all of them were headed off somewhere and since I was staying home, they weren’t going to take the house keys with them. Our front door was a self locking door. After a couple of hours they returned home and rang the doorbell. And rang and rang and rang. They rang it so much, that it actually broke down. Now they were really worried about me and wondered if something had happened. The neighbors had come out to see what was going. Someone suggested climbing over the balcony and entering through a window. This wasn’t really much of an option, as our apartment was on the 13th floor.

After some more waiting around and talking with our neighbors, my parents called the emergency number. Soon, a fire engine came, lights flashing, horn blowing and swung into our little compound. Now the whole building was curious as to what was going on. People spilled out of the building, a few were in the landing on our floor.

The firemen charged up, asked everyone to stand back and kicked open the door. By now it was late in the evening, so it was dark in the apartment. Torches on, they barged into the apartment and finding no funny business they let my family in. My Dad came and touched me. I up and found 6 firemen around my bed. Boy, were they cute.

You see, right after I went into the bedroom, I fell asleep. I don’t even remember lying down to rest or sleep. But after 2 nights of no sleep and intense work, I was so wiped out that I didn’t hear a thing until my Dad came in to wake me up.
Later my youngest sister told me how exciting it all was - the fire engine coming blaring through, the men kicking the door in, the whole shebang. She was the only one who thoroughly enjoyed the whole drama.