The morning chill of a Kashmiri* February clung to the wooden floorboards, thick enough that getting out from beneath three layers of heavy quilts felt like a mistake. I was cuddled up in my comfortable bed in the humble homestay I was staying right across the Dal lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. It was just past nine. Outside, the Dal lake was muted under a pale winter sky, and I lay staring at the ceiling, turning over in dilemma: should I bundle up and catch a cab with the guys downstairs for a day trip to Gulmarg, or surrender entirely to another pot of afternoon coffee and a slow morning of reading?
My silent dilemma was shattered by a loud scream that came from downstairs.
It was followed by shouting, what I thought was a heated family feud, coming from the ground floor where the family lived. This was quite a contrast to the gentle cadence of their usual morning banter. Heavy footsteps hammered against the wooden staircase, two, three steps at a time.
I threw off the blankets, crossed the floor in my wool socks, and burst open my bedroom door.
The son of the family, a young man no older than twenty or twenty-one whose easy smile had welcomed me two nights earlier, vaulted onto the second-floor landing. He didn’t glance at me. His focus was locked entirely on the wooden door immediately adjacent to mine.
He gripped the brass handle and pulled.
The door gave way to an explosion of black, suffocating fumes that blasted into the hallway like a dark cloud of doom. The heat followed a fraction of a second later, stinging my face. Before my brain could comprehend that the room next to mine was on fire, the young man did something that defied every law of self-preservation. He dove headfirst into the smoke-choked blackness to smother the source before it reached the ceiling.
My fight or flight response kicked in too. Run, I told myself.
I bolted down the wooden stairs, hitting the frigid outdoor air in mere seconds. My lungs, only partly suffocated, welcomed the clean mountain wind. Only then, patting down my wool pant pockets, did I realize.
Nothing.
No phone. No wallet. No passport.
A cold panic seized me, far sharper than the fear of the flames. In my room, perched on my little bedside table, was my Uniqlo bum bag, the canvas bag that held all my identification, my wallet, and my phone, the connection to the rest of the planet. And beside it was Mr. Blue, my battered forty-two-liter Cotopaxi backpack.
Before I started this world travel adventure in May 2023, I had either sold off or donated all my belongings that filled my Denver apartment to add to the funds of my open-ended journey across the globe. Everything I owned in the world, the entirety of my material existence, was in Mr. Blue, who now faced the very real possibility of becoming extinct in the flames of that wooden building.
Reason evaporated. Too full of smoke and stupidity to think straight, I turned on my heel and sprinted back inside.
The staircase was already an endurance test. The air had thickened into a grey blanket that stung my eyes and coated my throat. Covering my nose and mouth as best as I could with my t-shirt, I stumbled onto the upper landing, coughing violently, and shoved through my bedroom door.
Smoke was already curling through the baseboards shared with the neighboring room. I grabbed the bum bag, slung it across my chest, and lunged for the bed. Mr. Blue was only half-packed; his zipper was wide open. I couldn’t hoist him down on my back without choking halfway down, but through the haze, the balcony doors offered an immediate exit.
I hauled my backpack to the balcony rail. Below, in the courtyard, half a dozen neighbors who had arrived at the sound of the shouting looked up, their arms waving wildly, their voices rising in a frantic chorus: “Get out of there!”
I didn’t leave, not just yet. I hurled the half-empty pack over the railing, watched it hit the dirt, and then grabbed the stray packing cubes still scattered on the mattress. I tossed them down like nylon sandbags, one after another.
Only then did I finally turn and flee.
I stumbled out into the courtyard, my chest heaving. I bent down to my knees, coughing out thick black soot mixed with my sputum, staring blindly at the frost-covered grass while the adrenaline slowly receded. My chest remained painfully tight for the rest of the day, a constant reminder of how close I had come to absolute recklessness.
When I finally stood and looked up, the left half of the second story was charred black.
The room directly next to mine had been completely burnt, but the fire was gone. The son had somehow smothered the base of the blaze with heavy blankets and buckets of grey water, preventing it from consuming the dry cedar rafters that linked our rooms together. He emerged soot-stained, hacking, his eyelashes slightly burnt, but intact.
By the time the fire truck made its arrival, the emergency had already passed. But it was what happened next that has been one of the most beautiful lessons I’ve learnt.
The homestay was this family’s main source of livelihood. They’d built it by hand on their ancestral land, carved wood, hand-painted trim, embroidered drapes hung in every window. The mother stood near the garden gate, overwhelmed, weeping uncontrollably into her pashmina as she stared at the blackened facade of her life’s work.
Within minutes, the alleyway flooded with people. Neighbors, distant cousins, shopkeepers from down the road, an unspoken network of survival that required no formal invitation or coordination.
The women immediately surrounded the mother, guiding her gently away from the rubble toward a sunny corner of the courtyard. Someone went into the kitchen and started moving around the kettle and tea cups. Soon, the aromatic steam of fresh chai rose against the smell of damp char, grounding the family in sustenance before the grief could settle.
The men moved without hesitation. They formed a line, hauling the half-scorched rugs, blistered walnut tables, and ruined bedding into the yard. A couple of men with electrical experience already started hunting down the short circuit wiring that had sparked the mess in the first place.
There was no pause for despair. Before the blackened wood had even lost its heat, there was wet cement being prepared across the courtyard. The house was still smoking, but they were already building it back. And every person in that courtyard just picked up a tool. Rebuilding wasn’t a decision that needed a spreadsheet guided meeting. Contractors did not need to be hired. The community came together and had each other’s back when it was needed the most.
*Kashmir is part of a union territory, Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India.