PANAJI: Fifteen minutes. That's all it took for Bhavana Joshi to lose her husband and three sisters inside a nightclub that was supposed to crown a holiday in Goa with music and laughter for the family of five from Ghaziabad and Delhi. Flames tore through the club moments after they had stepped into Birch by Romeo Lane in Arpora late Saturday.
Bhavana lived. The other four didn't. Her husband Vinod Kumar pushed her through the main entrance as panic broke loose, police said. She stumbled into the open, coughing, burning-eyed, alive. Then he turned back. Inside were Bhavana's three sisters, Anita, Saroj and Kamala, who had travelled with them for a short break that began on Dec 4. He went after them. Fire swallowed them all.
Outside, Bhavana waited. She kept dialling Vinod's phone. It rang. Again and again. When the body was carried out, her phone was clenched in her hand, still calling out. The family of five had been staying at a hotel in Baga.
What began as a leisure trip ended at a police barricade outside a blackened club, with hotel staff trying to comfort a woman who no longer had a family beside her.
Relatives rushed to Goa through the night. "Their children are waiting at home. All their relatives are waiting too," a family member said. "We haven't told them that all four have died. We have only said two sisters are dead and the other two are missing. We want to take their bodies back." Another relative held up a phone, trembling.
"Look at this picture of my sister-in-law. She is completely charred. She has no skin left."
For Bhavana, the holiday ended in a circle of police tape and silence - saved by a man who walked back into fire so that others might live. Now only she remains to tell the children how their parents' last night together ended in minutes, and how love chose the flames.
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