Home Alone

Manna is away on a business trip to Chennai, Nasik, Pune. He is going to come back with kids and grandma on 26 th. So I am alone at home. Once in a while it is good to be alone and I really do not miss my family because I am a free bird for a week for the first time in 10 years. He left for Chennai Thursday(19th June) morning.
Friday evening my driver told me a story about how one of the women on the farm used to be scared of staying alone since she used to hear footsteps on the terrace of her house. I said in my mind "Dude, I am not one of those crazy ones.." I go to bed on Friday night thinking about his story.
At midnight I hear someone banging on my door. I wake up and make sure that it is real and not a nightmare. Meanwhile that person stepped into my house. Then I realized that I had forgotten to lock the door. That was my "Oh Sh*t" moment. When I come out of my bedroom I see that it was my neighbor standing there. She was shouting "Are aag lag gayi" (There is a fire!). I looked at their house door which is just 10 feet away from ours, thick black smoke was coming out. The door looked like a chimney emitting smoke. I called up the main gate to let them know that there is fire in the house. I also handed the emergency light to the neighbor since they had turned off their power supply. My neighbor's is a family of 4 with husband, wife and 2 kids, 15 year old boy and a 7 year old girl. From outside I had no idea how widespread the fire was. Everyone in their family came out except the dad. He was busy extinguishing the fire. His wife kept shouting asking him to come out. Finally when he came out he was all covered in smoke. When the security guard showed up with the fire extinguisher and electrician, the fire was almost put out.
It seems the fire had started with the AC unit in their kid's bedroom. The son just happened to wake up and realize that his AC is melting above his bed. He got up carried his sleeping sister in his arms and took her to parents to inform them that his AC is melting. By the time he could wake his parents up, the whole room caught fire. The dad put out the fire with buckets and buckets of water. Now their entire house is damaged from the smoke. Luckily no one is hurt and they had an insurance on houehold items so they did not have at least any financial loss. Good thing is that they have lots of help available on the farm in terms of cleaning, clearing the house and people would start plastering, painting and repairing the house from Monday.
It is really unfortunate that it happened to them but we have learned our lessons from it. Since we shifted to India we haven't bought a fire extinguisher(Thanks to Manna who left ours-2 of them in the Belleville house) and we do not have any smoke detectors in our rooms. Also we do not have the insurance for the home goods. The house is covered by the company but not the belongings in the house. So we are going to take care of those things right away!

And now my driver has one more story to tell about a woman on the farm who hears someone banging on the door at night when she is alone!