“I Escaped Unhurt With My Pets,” Kamal Haasan’s Home Catches Fire

….Actor’s Disaster Binge Continues

Disasters, they say, come in 3s. But the resilient  Kamal Haasan seems to have crossed all the outer limits of his disaster quota.

On Saturday morning the actor-filmmaker-thinker-atheist’s bungalow in  Alwarpet, Chennai caught fire. Kamal had a narrow escape.But his home 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 woke up to smoke everywhere in my bedroom in the first floor. I had to climb stairs to the third floor with my pets and then climb down to the ground floor from there,” says KamalHaasan 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 for 13 yearsGautami decided to  quit their relationship.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, and I wouldn’t be here to talk to you,” chuckles the man who seems to be adversty’s favourite client.

“You can pray for me. I can’t because I don’t know how  to,” endsKamal with a sigh.

Not to  put too fine  a point on it, b