An untimely end

When 19-year-old Meher Mogrelia, a resident of Bombay’s Gamadia Colony at Tardeo, went to make payment for sweetmeats ordered by relatives living outside Bombay, as informed to Parsiana by her maternal grandfather Dali Patel, no one could have imagined the tragedy that lay in store. On the evening of June 23, 2007 the teenager was inside the Lookmanji sweetmeat shop at Grant Road, near Novelty cinema, when the decrepit Ali Ahmed Manzil building in which the shop is located caved in. The young girl’s body was trapped under the debris for six hours and retrieved at about 1.30 a.m. She had died of suffocation.

Mogrelia’s mother Firuza, who was also injured in the incident, told Mumbai Mirror (MM) of June 25, 2007 that after the building collapsed she kept on praying that her daughter would come out of it unscathed. She broke into tears the moment the body was recovered. Father Firdaush flew in from Madras where he works with the Standard Chartered Bank and, after a postmortem at Nair Hospital, the last rites were performed, the police said. Mohammad Aslam Khan, an employee of the sweetmeat shop, was also killed in the house collapse. The 40-odd families living on the upper four floors had vacated the premises after the structure had been declared unsafe three months earlier.

Mogrelia, a student of H. R. College, had passed her second year junior college examinations with distinction, scoring 85 percent. An alumnus of Girton High School, her alma mater observed a two minute silence in her memory at a morning assembly.

Bachi Karkaria, chronicling the "sweet life and sudden death” at Lookmanji’s "whose jalebis and khajas marked every (Bombay) Parsi celebration” in The Times of India (TOI) of June 27, 2007 wrote: "Saturday evening’s Grant Road house collapse was not just a routine monsoon casualty. No one should die while buying and selling joyous mithai… Not just Parsis, everyone can feel the family’s grief… How many dreams got buried with the girl? And, once again, I am confronted by my community’s fatal flaw. We either die too young, or live too long.”

The TOI of June 25, 2007 had reported that the chief officer of the repairs board said that the dilapidated structure did not house anything other than the sweetmeat shop, the owner of which had gone to court to challenge a redevelopment proposal for the pre-1940 building. Following the court’s ruling, demolition work had begun on the top two floors. "The shop was kept open even during the demolition work. On Saturday, triggered by the heavy rains, a portion of the first floor caved in, killing the two,” the repairs board official informed the Times.

The police have registered a case against the owner of the sweetmeat shop, the architect and construction company assigned the demolition job.

The TOI reported on June 27, 2007 that the fire brigade visited the building in response to a distress call about falling debris barely four hours before it collapsed. After taking a look at the dilapidated structure, the firemen left without carrying out any evacuations. Chief fire officer Kiran Kadam, however, explained, "What can we do when the occupants show us the High Court order? We do not have the power to forcibly evacuate anyone.”

Community activist Noshir Dadra­wala, wrote in his letter to Parsiana that the newspaper reports inadvertantly stated that Mogrelia was from Madras but she was actually from Bombay.