'She Had No One Here': Suspected Mundka Fire Victim's Siblings Traced in Bihar

Video Editor: Mohd. Irshad

No family member came looking for Geeta Devi on the evening of 13 May when a deadly fire killed 27 people in outer Delhi's Mundka.

No one waited for her to return home the next day.

And there was no one who could give a DNA sample against Geeta's name to match it with the charred remains found on the second floor of the building that caught fire that afternoon.

It took the Delhi Police five days – since she was presumed dead in the fire – to track down a relative of Geeta's in Bihar's Jhikarua village, which is over 1,000 km from Delhi.

Finding Geeta's Brother

"Her husband died in 2018, and she has no children. In all the years that she has lived in this rented room, hardly any relatives visited her," said Anita Sinha, who rented out the cramped room to Geeta and her husband in 2008 in Mundka's Mubarkpur Dabas village.

On 20 May – a week after the blaze – DCP (Outer) Sameer Sharma told The Quint that a relative of Geeta's had finally been traced. "We tracked down her brother on Thursday, 19 May, in a village in Bihar, and asked him to give his DNA," he said.

The Delhi Police tried to track down Geeta's brother Mantu, 30, and their sister Manita, 33, by trying to retrieve call records from her phone and look for an ID.

Anita's son Bhaskar Anand, 21, said that a Delhi Police official asked him to provide some paperwork pertaining to Geeta – a voter ID or an Aadhaar card – so they could begin looking for her relatives.

"When we rented the house to Geeta aunty and her husband in 2008, they told us they are from Bihar. That's all. I rummaged through her belongings in the room and finally found a Class 8 certificate in her late husband's name. I gave that to the police officer who got in touch with me," said Bhaskar, as he sat outside Geeta's room where her belongings remained untouched.

The certificate that Bhaskar found was a decades-old piece of paper with the address of a school located in Gajra village in Bihar's Nawada district.

While this certificate didn't help, Geeta's call record details (CDR) revealed that a number on that list belonged to her brother, said DCP (Outer).

Of the 27 people who died in the blaze on 13 May, bodies of only eight people have been identified so far. The others were charred beyond recognition, said the Delhi Police and the Delhi Fire Service.

The FSL team had collected DNA samples to identify the other 19, and Geeta's sibling's sample was among the last ones to be collected.

Where Was Geeta's Family?

Born and raised in Jhirakua village in Nawada, Geeta fled home in 2006 with a man she fell in love with and eventually married. Her brother Mantu Kumar told The Quint that she was estranged from her family for over a decade because of this.

"Our family did not want her to marry that man as he was disabled but they ran away and came to Delhi. After that, we lost touch with her," he said.

In 2018, months after Geeta's husband passed away, she informed her siblings about the same, and they began talking again.

"Our sister Manita visited her in Delhi six months ago, in fact, and her neighbour Ram Bhagat gave us his number. It was Bhagat who called me up two days after the fire to tell me that my sister was missing," said Mantu.

It was then that Mantu, seated inside his home in Jhirakua, began watching videos of the deadly blaze on YouTube. He had no idea whether Geeta was alive.

"On Thursday, the police called me and asked me and my sister Manita to come to Delhi to give our DNA sample. We are here now," said Mantu.

Where Is Geeta?

It was a routine day and Geeta went about her tasks in the morning as always. She probably watered the plants outside her windowless room before leaving for work. She had joined work at the company in the Mundka building around two weeks ago.

The only family Geeta had were the landlady and her son, and a few neighbours. Her husband was long gone, and she barely spoke about her brother and sister in Bihar.

Bhaskar said, "As soon as we heard about the fire in the building, we called Geeta aunty because she had just started working there. Her phone was switched off."

He rushed to check on her, and instead, saw a firefighting operation in progress, bawling relatives of those stuck inside, and a building on fire.

"I waited there till 9 pm but neither did I see her coming out nor her body being pulled out," recalled Bhaskar.

The next day, he visited the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in search of her.

"I still couldn’t find her. I was told that she inhaled so much smoke that she vomited inside the building. Maybe she is no more, but we are still holding on to the hope that she might be under treatment in some hospital and will be back soon," he said.

Meanwhile, Geeta's friend and colleague, 50-year-old Mamta, who survived the fire on 13 May, told The Quint, "Geeta was with me that day. A meeting was happening, and people from outside had also been called. Around 4.30 pm, as soon as we got to know that the building was on fire, there was chaos all around us. There was so much smoke, we couldn't see anything."

The cut and burn marks on Mamta's fingers narrate the harrowing escape she had. "We tried to break the glass but it was very hard. Finally, I escaped after one glass broke in the frontal façade of the building. I don't know what happened to Geeta, I didn't see her once chaos broke," said Mamta.