Al Ngullie
One late evening last month, after another hectic day hogging every available telephone and torturing the PC keyboard for next morning’s headlines, we guys here in the office settled down for a grateful bout of relaxation. Ahhh! Nothing beats a breather with a mighty dose of heavy metal up your ears, a cup of hot tea and yeah, no press releases for once! Even the day’s stink and dried sweat did little to dampen the hour.
I’d just about settled with my share of tea and of course with a mighty blasting head phone to clear up my ear wax, began my sojourn into the ZZZZZZ. Then out of the blue, screamed in a call from someone about a huge fire somewhere up Half Nagarjan. Only a couple of us were in the office that time and we scuttled who should go. My Editor shot me a You-are-a-journalist-so-sniff-out-what-the fire-is-about Look. I got the drift and scuttled off with the nearest camera available. On the way out one of my colleagues, Peter, too had got wind of another story, and off we went together so that we won’t have to starve our wallets just in case the Auto Rickshaw driver decides to milk us white. We blubbered and babbled excitedly by way of conversing on the day’s events. Some paragraphs into the conversation and he asked me where I was going. I answered there was some fire up Half-Nagarjan and I was headed there. Peter gave me a look that one gives when your belt gives away and the pants fall off in the middle of crowded Hong Kong market. “What? I’m going there too!” he exclaimed in disbelief. Now, now. When the Boss finds out that two of us were covering the same story, he’ll have us in the fire-chamber for wasting manpower.
Anyway swallowing the surprise with a dose of gulp, we screamed off for the site. The initial information was that the fire was raging somewhere a colony around Dimapur Civil Hospital so we took the Auto there. On reaching the place we found out from residents that it was up D-Colony, Half Nagarjan, half a KM up. Scarlet and orange fumes from the fire lit up the night sky. It was a big one. Concluding that rounding through the main town again would take us more time, we decided to take a short cut behind the Railway station. We scurried through dark alleys. The slum, packed tight with decrepit sheds and houses belonging mostly to non-Naga laborers, was also rife with rats, stink, sewerage and human waste. Every turn we took had us ankle deep in stinking Nullahs, feces or garbage. Our Adidas runners were of no help. And yes it was so dark that we kept bumping into walls. No wonder Peter’s face looked like Mike Tyson’s after a happy beating from Evander Holifield. Once, believing to be a passage way out, we walked straight into a kitchen where several men were drinking local brews and singing happy songs. And yeah, my Adidas Runner came out looking like a dangerously colorful Christmas cake-cream covered doughnut after traversing through feces. And we stank like …um… NST public toilets (No malice intended to the NST department).
Anyway, after covering a great distance of getting nowhere and orbiting around like blind planets, we decided it was a hopeless situation and thought better to wind around from towards the town. Oh! Had we taken the auto drivers’ advice to do that in the first place! (Anyway the office will pay for the fare) So after a mighty roundabout we reached the place. The scene that greeted us was of one complete chaos. Hundreds of people were crying, screaming, and rushing in and about. Some were screaming for their children in the darkness, many more hurrying about scurrying to safety with whatever was left of their belongings and an uncountable more people curious enough to push through the suffocating dark throng to have a close up view of the fire. The more enterprising ones thought better to sit quietly and scamper off with a neighbors’ belonging. Fortunately our IRB boys took care of that by squashing the bejabbers out of the looters. The bedlam was almost suffocating that I almost had a panic attack. To add to the confusion, police and IRB personnel deployed there had a hard time making way for fire dousers to pass through. None did until much later – there were hardly any passageway or road between the thickly set hutments that one vehicle got stuck in the main alley leading to the fire, blocking the entire way. The Dimapur DC called in another one which arrived on the scene but only after the fire had satiated itself on the dwellings.
More than 70 hutments razed to ground, one reported dead and many injured while officials estimated about 12 Lakhs in damage. A better chunk of the blame for the extend of fire was placed squarely on poor area planning –almost all the dwellings were virtually knitted to the next that there were no passageways for even a small car to pass through comfortably; ditches and nullahs defined the boundaries; no overhead lights leave alone streetlights (if there were a street, that is) and most consequential of all, the dwellings were all of temporary erections set in split bamboos and thatch.
“Had not the houses been so close to each other and that they were all made up of crude materials” Dimapur DC Nzimongo Ngullie had rued at the site. DMC Chairman Awomi also placed the blame not only on carelessness but poor area planning. “As long as there is no proper town/area planning such things (fire) will keep on happening” he said.
Back in the office Peter and I filed the story super-fast just so that the Boss won’t have our teeth by firing us for blazing...er...lazing around.
