Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

The first time the fire alarm went off, we shot out of our beds, I fumbled around for our landing papers, while our elder son, still disoriented but very determined, was undoing all the wires of his video game machine.

It took us a while to get organised and by then the alarm was on its final warning, the duration of siren blasts getting shorter and more urgent. We learned later that the alarm tones change as the fire gets more severe. Usually if you are not out of the building by the time of the final warning, you are toast.

As we were traipsing along the stairwell, trying to get down into the open from 15 floors up, the wife suddenly screams and we come to dead halt. Apparently we had forgotten our four year-old back in the flat.

We had just come into Canada, and during all the long years in Saudi Arabia we had never heard a fire alarm in an apartment building, so this was a shocker.

It's also usually not advisable to be in the open in Toronto at 3 in the morning, in mid-October, only in your pyjamas. And for some reason our two apartment blocks are built in such a way that the wind gets funnelled right between them. So, here we were, new immigrants in the country, freezing our butts off, because someone was careless enough not to butt out.

The second time the alarm went off, we were more organised. I had put all our important documents and the wife's jewellery in a briefcase and placed it where it can be reached in a jiffy.

And our son was warned that heavy objects will not be allowed to be laboriously carted off from the apartment all the way down. And the younger son was told not to hide under the bed.

For the rest of the month, the fire alarms went off intermittently, the firemen came within two minutes from the time the alarms went off and we decided to put our important stuff in a bank locker. (My wife said I was looking ridiculous, dishevelled, rumpled clothes in slippers, but with an officious-looking leather briefcase late in the night).

We found the reason why the alarms were going off all the time was because all this new multicultural crowd was conjuring up exotic dishes in their apartments and the sensitive fire alarms just couldn't understand what was happening.

The Chinese were stir-frying their noodles, the Indians were having fun with the hot-oil mustard -laced fish curries (the smell of which lingers on in your curtains and in your clothes for days).

The East Europeans and the Arabs were also adding to the culinary fireworks, till the fire chief decided to lower the sensitivity of the alarms. But it still went off from time to time as East Indian-Canadians fried their very smokey 'papadams'.

If you dropped into the apartments of your friends at lunch time, you would usually find the husband standing on a chair and fanning the fire alarm, trying to dissipate the smoke away. Then we learned that you could disable the alarms by pulling out the batteries. (Not a good idea, because that was enough to send you to jail or a massive fine, but we needed our peace of mind).

Summer time is apparently a busy time for firefighters in Dubai. Checking out our apartment building after a fire in a residential complex, I found that we will be blissfully fried in our beds.

There are no fire extinguishers and a small buggy, or a supermarket trolley as it's called here, is parked at the exit near the stairs. If you are running for your life blindly, I am sure you will go down much faster after tripping over this.