As several others raced to the few windows that were not enclosed and jumped off in a desperate bid to save their lives, Bootwala was trapped at a window. Witnesses said he made several attempts to grab a rope and slide down a pipeline, but couldn’t make it. He died due to suffocation and burns.

The grim picture of Bootwala stuck on the window, one leg dangling, as the building was going up in smoke (published in The Indian Express today) was yet another reminder of the tinderboxes that dot Mumbai’s landscape, where fire safety procedures are more an exception rather than the norm.

The fire claimed seven other lives of people working in the industrial estate and injured 66. The Mumbai police booked the owner of an aerosol packaging unit in the building for negligence, with the Fire Department suspecting that the explosion may have occurred there.

Bootwala, a senior manager at a leather accessories manufacturing unit in the building for the past four years, is survived by a 14-year-old daughter and his 48-year-old wife.

“Fate drove him to his death,” said his uncle Firdos Karachiwala. Bootwala had skipped his routine visits to other units of the leather company on Monday to make it to Byculla in time to attend a meeting called by his boss.

“Even though he had his office on the third floor of the Retiwalla estate, he visited it only when his boss, who has his office on the fourth floor of the same building, scheduled a meeting,” he said. “He was a perfectionist and that reflected in his work too. He was always out for inspection at other sites,” said his brother-in-law, who did not wish to be named.

Before the burial on Tuesday, Bootwala’s grieving wife was heard asking her husband’s friends and colleagues if they knew what really happened minutes before the end. She even read what the newspapers had published.

Bootwala’s wife was informed minutes after the fire started, and rushed to Byculla on finding his cellphone unreachable. At the site, after varying reports on where he might be from friends and colleagues, it was only at 7 pm that somebody told her to check the morgue at JJ Hospital.

All those present repeatedly described Bootwala as a very helpful person who would go out of his way to help others. Some reports said Bootwala had helped others escape from the window where he breathed his last, although they could not be independently confirmed.

While family members accepted the accident as fate-ordained, they blamed the fire officials for not reaching on time and for being poorly equipped. “Had the fire officials come on time, today he and many others would have survived,” said another relative.

Originally from a coastal village in Saurashtra, Gujarat, Bootwala was working hard to purchase an apartment. The family lived in a rented home in Versova.

“He was a complete family man. Whenever he was away from his home, he’d always yearn to be with his daughter,” Karachiwala recalled. “However bad their work schedule was, the family made it a point to meet for dinner and a night walk. When his father-in-law’s shop at Dahisar was demolished for road-widening, it was he who gathered all the goods and stored them in a garage.”