2 am, Wednesday. A fire breaks out at the Taiba Hotel on Mirza Ghalib Street, one of those narrow central Kolkata lanes packed with budget guesthouses, cheap eateries, backpackers. The West Bengal Fire Services headquarters is practically around the corner, which is a detail nobody's going to find comforting right now. Five fire tenders got sent in. Nine people ended up dead, six injured, some seriously. An AC unit exploding somewhere on an upper floor is the leading theory, though police still haven't nailed down exactly what happened.
What makes this worse, if it can get worse, is who was staying there. Most of the dead were Bangladeshi nationals. A few had come across the border for medical treatment, parked in one of the cheap hotels near the hospitals because that's just what people do when treatment stretches on for weeks and money's tight. The smoke got into the stairwell before anyone downstairs even noticed. One firefighter said afterward that the smoke was so dense they could barely see the steps, let alone climb them fast enough.
Monday morning. A fire tears through Hotel Bideshini in Tarapith, a temple town in Birbhum, roughly 200 km from Kolkata. Nine people died there too. Several were pilgrims from Meghalaya who'd traveled hundreds of kilometers to visit the Tara Maa temple, the kind of trip people plan for months.
The emergency exit was locked. That's not speculation, that's what survivors told reporters. So people got out however they could. One family climbed down a 47-foot tree. Others used drainpipes, in the dark, while the ground floor entrance was already burning below them.
Birbhum police, to their credit, didn't sit on this one. Fifteen hotels around Tarapith got sealed within a day for fire safety violations. Two co-owners of Bideshini were arrested, and one reportedly tried to feed investigators a false story about how people had died. The main owner, Tapas Paul, is still on the run as far as anyone knows.
And now Kolkata has an owner problem of its own. Whoever was running the Taiba Hotel took off the moment the fire started. Two of them have since been caught.
We have. Last April, actually.
The Rituraj Hotel, six storeys, Burrabazar. A fire killed fourteen people, some of whom jumped from windows trying to get out. When investigators went through the wreckage, the fire safety clearance had lapsed back in 2022 and nobody had renewed it since. Alarms were dead. Sprinklers didn't turn on. There was one staircase for all 42 rooms, and part of it was blocked because someone had hired an interior decorator who was using flammable material during renovations. Nobody stopped him at the time.
Eventually the owner and manager got arrested. Days after the fact, which is a bit late for the fourteen families who were still trying to identify bodies.
Line these three up and it stops feeling random. It's the same handful of failures showing up again and again: buildings that were never meant to hold this many guests, one staircase standing in for a real evacuation plan, safety certificates that quietly expire and nobody chases the renewal, owners who vanish the second things go wrong and only resurface once the story's already died down.
Modi sent his condolences over Tarapith and announced compensation for the families, which is more or less the standard script by now. Mamata Banerjee ordered a probe into the Kolkata fire. Meghalaya's chief minister Conrad Sangma announced separate aid for the five families from his state who lost someone at Tarapith.
Politically, it's gotten messier too. Congress's Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury accused the state government of letting Tarapith get overbuilt with almost no oversight. Suvendu Adhikari of the BJP has been hammering the government over how slow emergency crews were to respond.
Whether any of this leads somewhere is genuinely unclear. Birbhum's fire department says it's inspecting every lodging in the district now, which is good, if a little late. Kolkata police haven't said if they're planning the same sweep across the city's hundreds of cramped budget hotels. Given the last two fires, maybe they should.
Two hotel fires in West Bengal within three days have killed at least 18 people combined. A blaze at the Taiba Hotel on Kolkata's Mirza Ghalib Street on Wednesday killed nine people, mostly Bangladeshi nationals who had traveled for medical treatment, with police suspecting an AC explosion as the cause. It followed a fire at Hotel Bideshini in Tarapith on Monday that killed nine pilgrims, including several from Meghalaya, after guests found the emergency exit locked and had to escape via a tree and drainpipes. Both incidents echo last year's Rituraj Hotel fire in Kolkata, which killed fourteen people after fire safety systems failed and a blocked staircase trapped guests. Authorities have arrested hotel owners in both recent cases, sealed more than a dozen properties in Birbhum for safety violations, and announced compensation for victims' families, but questions remain over why fire safety enforcement in the state's budget hotel sector keeps falling short.
