On Monday, the neighbourhood and the city watched in disbelief as a fire reduced it to ashes. Selling everything from crockery and cutlery to clothes, linen and curios, the 52-year-old departmental store had built a reputation for itself and was the go-to store for generations of South Mumbai residents. MUMBAI: For over five decades, Amarsons was where Breach Candy residents went looking for things they believed couldn’t be found elsewhere.
“We did not go inside and immediately called the fire brigade and informed the owner. The structure itself remained safe. “But it is all written. What can we do beyond what God has decided? We will rebuild it.”
Sources from the Mumbai Fire Brigade said the fire was suspected to have started following a short circuit near the door of the store at around 7 am. By 8 am, calls about smoke billowing out of the establishment began coming in. At 8.20 am, the fire was declared a Level I fire. By the time it was fully extinguished at 2 pm, it had gutted the shop’s wares besides electrical installations, office records, lighting fixtures and air-conditioning units. It was confined to approximately 5,000 sq ft of the shop’s 5,500-sq-ft area on the ground floor of the ground-plus-two-storey building. Recalling the store’s experience during the 2005 Mumbai floods, Vohra said it had also suffered damage then, but the present incident was different.
“When we opened the shutter, the place was filled with smoke,” said an Amarsons worker. “It started with a spark,” he said.
“Almost everything has been rendered unusable. For the Vohra family, which established Amarsons in 1975, the damage was huge.
Vipin Vohra, whose father Shamji Vohra started the store, said the structure was safe but everything that made Amarsons ‘Amarsons’ had disappeared. The losses are almost cent per cent,” he said, without specifically quoting the extent of the losses.
