Kaushik Chatterjee was outside Readymade Centre on his motorbike when he saw smoke.

“Where’s Rana?” he thought to himself before making a dash for the entrance of Readymade Centre.

Kaushik found his childhood friend, the son of the co-owner of the store, Narayan Saha, just across the winding stairs leading to the first floor. He was holding on to a wooden plank and barely able to stand while his father tried to extricate people trapped inside.

“The smoke was not thick and black at first, but I instinctively knew what to do. So did the woman standing a few paces away. She alerted other people on the road while I rushed inside,” Kaushik, a resident of Agarpara, said.

It took a while for people on the ground floor of the store to realise what was happening. When they did, there was instant chaos.

Some darted out while the braver ones chose to play saviours.

As Kaushik and others who had jogged up the stairs helped remove people from the gas chamber that the second floor of the store had turned into, news of the disaster spread as fast as the flames. Groups of youths from parts of the nearby Railway Colony and other localities immediately converged on Sodepur’s largest garments store.

Inside, the heat and the smoke were becoming more unbearable by the minute. “Some of those trapped inside turned pale and lay on the ground, almost lifeless. A few could hardly breathe. It was scary and the smoke billowing out of the room made my head spin,” Kaushik recalled.

By the time the first rescue team had carried some of the injured to the safety of the ground floor, two ambulances arrived.

“I realised that the local youths had already started working. A few of them and I escorted some of the injured to the Panihati State General Hospital. As for Rana and meshomoshai (uncle), I made arrangements for them to be taken to a private nursing home,” Kaushik said.