Ruchika’s mother Lata Shah with items salvaged from Stephen Court. A Telegraph picture

Ruchika Shah wrote her ICSE mathematics paper on Monday thinking not about the theorems she had practised solving but about a girl screaming for help from a fourth-floor window ledge before jumping to her death.

“She can’t sleep, she can’t eat, she can’t concentrate. That horrible scene plays itself again and again in her head. It’s killing my girl,” rued mother Lata Shah after her daughter returned from the examination hall even more depressed than she was in the morning.

Ruchika, a 16-year-old student of Jewish Girls’ High School, was studying for last Friday’s economics paper in her fifth-floor residence at Stephen Court when she heard people screaming “fire…fire” and ran down the stairs with her mother and siblings.

“Once we were safe, I looked up and saw the girl on the window. I can’t get her out of my mind, I can’t focus on anything,” the teenager said.

If Ruchika has sunk into depression, fellow survivor Saika Shafiq, 23, has stopped speaking since Tuesday’s fire tragedy.

“She is in shock. She can’t even hold a glass of water properly because her hands start trembling. She’s been almost bedridden since the incident,” said Saika’s employer Samannay Chowdhury, the proprietor of Turning Point job consultancy, whose office was on the gutted fourth floor of Stephen Court.

Saika, a resident of Ripon Street who had joined Turning Point a year ago, was trapped in the towering inferno along with two male colleagues. The trio saved themselves by climbing out of a window and using the parapet to reach Block I, from where they used the staircase to reach down safely.

Ganeshri Devi Golcha, at 98 the oldest resident of Stephen Court to escape the blaze, has been undergoing treatment for trauma in a Bhowanipore nursing home for the past six days. “She has hardly uttered a word other than to ask for something,” said Sanjay Chaudhury, a relative.

Chaudhury’s two children, aged 12 and 7, were also in the building when the fire broke out. Both escaped with their mother but are traumatised. “They keep asking us about the incident. You can see the fear in their eyes,” said the worried father.