Kamal Haasan escapes fire tragedy

Disasters, they say, come in threes. But the resilient Kamal Haasan seems to have crossed all the limits of his quota. On Saturday morning, the actor-filmmaker-thinker-atheist’s bungalow in Alwarpet caught fire. While Kamal had a narrow escape, his home has been badly burnt, though not irreparable.

“I think it was a short circuit in a refrigerator in the basement that sparked off the fire. I woke up to smoke everywhere in my bedroom in the first floor. I had to climb up the stairs to the third floor with my pets and then climb down to the ground floor from there,” says Kamal, speaking exclusively, hours after being whisked away to safety with his pets.

“I am fine. The advantage of living alone and not having a family, is that when a disaster like this happens, you can run out easily and not be responsible for the lives of loved ones,” says Kamal, trying to make light of a rather grim and scary disaster.

Kamal’s series of disasters started when he had a nasty near-fatal fall, leaving his foot brutally fractured — an accident that left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Just a few weeks after the accident, his companion for 13 years, Gautami, decided to call off their relationship. Last month, his brother Chandra Haasan passed away. Prior to that, Kamal lost his sister-in-law in January.

“The fire is the latest in my impressive list of calamities. Luckily, I was able to run, otherwise, I may have found it difficult to escape the fire, and I wouldn’t be here to talk to you,” chuckles the man who seems to be adversity’s favourite client.
“You can pray for me. I can’t, because I don't know how to,” ends Kamal with a sigh.