Disasters, they say, come in threes. But the resilient Kamal Haasan seems to have crossed all the outer limits of his disaster quota. On Saturday morning, the actor’s bungalow in Alwarpet, Chennai, caught fire. Kamal had a narrow escape but his house is badly burnt, though not irreparable.
“I think it was a short circuit in a refrigerator in the basement that sparked off the fire. I was in my bedroom, which is on the first floor, and woke up to a lot of smoke. I had to climb up to the third floor with my pets and then climb down to the ground floor from there,” says Kamal Haasan, 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 freely and easily and not be responsible for the lives of the loved ones,” says Kamal, trying to make light of a rather grim and scary series of disasters that have stuck his life during the past year.
It started when Kamal had a nasty near-fatal fall which left his foot brutally fractured, an accident that left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Just a few weeks after the accident, his companion of 13 years, Gautami decided to split. Last month, his brother Chandra Haasan passed away. And prior to that, Kamal lost his sister-in-law in January.
“The fire is the latest in my impressive list of calamities. Luckily, I am able to run again after my fall. Otherwise I may have found it difficult to escape the fire,” says the man who seems to be adversity’s favourite child.
