Accountant survives 21-hour ordeal in Kalbadevi building col

“It was like an earthquake. I had just begun putting on my clothes when the building crashed,” Jain recounted from his bed at the G T hospital. When he opened his eyes, coughing through the dust, he discovered that the steel cupboards used to store cloth in the shop had saved him. “The cupboards took the full force of the falling beams, leaving me a tiny space, about the size of a bed,” he added.

Jain who arrived in the city 20 years ago, worked throughout the day and night to be able to save up enough money to send to his aged parents, wife and three children. During the day he tallied accounts of a cloth store in Kalbadevi and by night toiled on the accounts of the M Hitendra Kumar cloth store on the second floor of the ill-fated building.

“I kept shouting through the day but no one heard me because the rubble blocked my screams,” Jain added. He then slept for four hours under the concrete beams in his constricted haven, waking up only to yell for help or to recite prayers from Jain scriptures.

At around midnight, a hole was exposed through which a weak and sweat-caked Jain shouted and attracted the attention of fire brigade personnel. In an operation lasting over three hours, gas cutters were used to slice through the steel cupboards and the iron beams, before Jain could finally be pulled out.

He was later admitted to hospital with only a few scratches on his hands.