Hyderabad fire accident: A day after, only memories remain
HYDERABAD: A day after the horrific fire that consumed the lives of 17 members of a single family in Gulzar Houz, grief hangs heavy in the air.
At his home in Attapur, Govind Modi, son of Prahlad Modi—who led the ill-fated family—remains locked in a silence that words cannot break. Shock has settled over him like ash; the horror of that Sunday morning plays repeatedly in his mind, an unrelenting echo of what was lost.
The house, once filled with laughter, conversations and the hum of daily life, now survives in memory. Those moments, once ordinary, now haunt the emptiness left behind.
When TNIE met him, Govind was seated in quiet devastation, unable to articulate the sorrow he bore. His eyes were dry, his voice strained. “No one should experience this kind of nightmare,” he finally said, after a long silence. His voice faltered as he spoke of the children—nieces and nephews—who had once climbed onto his shoulders, whose lives were folded into his own. “Oh, my kids...” he whispered, before emotion overtook him.
Recounting the moment he heard about the fire, Govind said he rushed from Attapur to Gulzar Houz, desperate and helpless. “I reached there before the fire engines did,” he said, with a voice brittle with anguish. “If they had come earlier… maybe some of them could have been saved.”
His words carried the weight of quiet despair. “I don’t want to accuse anyone,” he said. “But no one should have to go through this.”
Govind now faces a silence that no comfort can fill. The house is gone, but it’s the voices, the lives and the memories it held that he mourns the most.