I knew the front door of the house was behind me but no one had left, and now I could see them bashing at the closed door with their shoulders. They ran short bursts and struck it so hard they grunted but it did not move. It was barricaded from the outside. A mad jangling music rang out in the half-light as three men hauled a piano from its position against the far wall. I hadn’t noticed it there as I passed through earlier but now I could see it was the Howrah’s piano: the one the girl had been playing the day we arrived.

Where was my father?

Men threw chairs out of the way as the piano came through, and others got behind it and used it as a ram while its timbers squealed and its unseen hammers struck in discordant protest. There was splintering the first time it struck, but the piano was more damaged than the door. They dragged it back to run up again, and its varnished timbers hung from its damaged frame. A fine thing, a thing that spoke of beauty, torn down like everything else.

I needed to find my father. Or I did not. He was dead; I did not know what to risk.

The second ramming succeeded. The door broke at its hinges and the night air billowed in, fanning the blaze. But the piano had crashed nose-downward, half-in and half-out of the doorway, and now its diagonal height blocked the door: they tried rocking it back and forth but its feet had caught somewhere outside. Men squatted down and heaved at the great instrument. Already some of them were falling. One lay across the back of a chair beside me, in every respect a tumbled drunk but for his clawing to find air.

The piano would not move, not for all the effort applied to it. I watched a man try to squeeze between it and the doorjamb, only to wind up stuck there himself as the flames feasted on his hair and he screamed. I could not tell how many of us were left in the room now. The air was so thick with smoke that shapes were hard to discern. I had remained low, on my knees and my blistered sticking hands, and down there I touched random limbs, boots, items of clothing discarded in desperation. Such things would glow momentarily in the f lare of that hellish fire, but none of them connected to anything that might be a person, because the blackness was so deep. There were dead men around me already.

I rose again to search for the door. I sensed that the men had given up on the piano and the doorway and had left it, were circling in the smoke for another option, calling to each other, cries of desperation: no plan. Time was at an end.