From the ashes and tears of Tuesday night’s fire emerged the story of a family that braved the flames and stood on a fourth-floor cornice of Rituraj Hotel for nearly an hour, patiently waiting to be rescued.

A couple and their teenage nephew, part of a larger group who came from Odisha to watch the IPL match on April 26, stood on the fourth-floor cornice of Rituraj Hotel until they were brought down one by one by ladder.

Akash Agarwal, 39, and his family were to catch a train home on Tuesday night. Akash’s two sons, Sarvesh, 13, and Ayansh, 8, along with their cousin Mayank, 18, were already downstairs with most of their bags.

Akash, his wife Neha, 37, and younger nephew Lokesh, 16, were still in Room No. 405, getting ready to check out, when the fire broke out and they were trapped.

“My elder nephew, Mayank, called to say there was a fire in the building. We immediately started to move out. But the moment I opened the door, thick black fumes hit me. I closed the door immediately. The power went off, and we started to look for an opening through the windows,” said Akash, a resident of Bargarh in Odisha.

All the windows were sealed.

Luckily, Akash managed to open a slice that was not sealed.

He broke open the pane to make room for his wife and nephew to slip out of the room and slide onto the cornice, a few feet below.

“I was the last to leave the room. By then, smoke had filled the room. We had no option but to get out of the room at any cost. But the next hour was like the longest hour of my life,” Akash said on Wednesday morning, recalling how he, his wife and nephew managed to stand side by side on the small slab of concrete, trying not to fall.

Lokesh, who wrote his Class X exam this year, said he tried not to focus on the commotion on the ground.

“I did not look down. I was not scared,” said the teenager whose elder brother and cousins were all on the road, looking up at them.

Neha was mostly silent through the period.

“She told me about her breathing problems and her anxiety only after we had been rescued,” Akash said.

The family returned to the hotel on Wednesday to get their luggage. The process was delayed because of an ongoing forensic examination, during which no one was allowed inside.