Chandigarh PG fire: ‘She’d gone to save her friend’

Chandigarh, February 23

Far from nursing his grieving heart or coming to teams with losing his daughter Pakshi, Navdeep Grover sat in the parking lot, leaning against the railing near the mortuary. At 4 pm yesterday, he’d been intimated about the fire accident by Jasmeen’s father. Jasmeen was one of the two girls who managed to escape the burning building. “Pakshi stayed on the ground floor. She’d gone to the first floor to tell Jasmeen about the fire. While Jasmeen escaped, Pakshi got stuck,” sobbed her father, a businessman in Kotakpura.

On learning about the accident, Grover sent his paternal uncle’s son for Pakshi. “He rang me up at 5.30 pm, informing me that Pakshi’s condition was serious. Fifteen minutes later, I was told that she’s no more,” he said.

Grover last spoke to his daughter at 11.30 pm on the day of the incident. “It was her last exam. She called me and said she and her friends were planning to go for a movie. I wish she’d gone for a movie, at least that way, she would have escaped the fateful incident,” shared Grover.

A first-year student of BBA at the University of Frazer Valley in SD College, Pakshi would have left for Canada next year, said her father. Grover is reminded of the bigger things his daughter could possibly have achieved. He said: “She was a topper. She’d scored 97.6 per cent and had refused to take admission in Delhi. She wanted to go to Canada, just like her brother. In fact, she took admission here on December 17, just two months ago.”

Holding the owners of the building responsible for the accident, Grover said: “If there were safety measures here, even if just a fire extinguisher, the damage could have been controlled.” He holds himself guilty for sending her to a PG accommodation. “I decided to send her to this PG. She told me that her friends lived here and that she wanted good food; I didn’t mind at all,” he said. Leaving to sign the autopsy form, he told us what ‘Pakshi’ meant. “You never would have heard this name. Pakshi is an amalgam of two words: ‘pakh’ and ‘she’. Pakh means pure, she stands for girl. It means, ‘pure girl’,” said Grover.