Noida duo leaves chickpeas on burning gas stove overnight, dies due to suffocation

It was supposed to be just another Friday night for Upendra, aged 22, and Shivam, aged 23, who shared a rented house in Basai village in Noida's Sector 70. But as fate would have it, the wee hours of Saturday, January 11, 2025, turned out to be the final moments in the lives of the two young men.

Upendra and Shivam made a living out of selling 'chhole bhature' and 'kulche' - two of the most popular dishes of north India. Every day, the duo would wake up in the morning to run a food stall near their house.

Before going to sleep on the night of January 10, 2025, Upendra and Shivam left a pot of raw chickpeas to be cooked on a gas stove, which they would need for the next morning. Unfortunately, both of them forgot to turn the gas off, keeping the stove burning overnight.

In a tragic turn of events, the two men were found dead the next morning by their neighbours. An NDTV report mentions that according to initial probe by the police, their deaths are believed to be caused due to asphyxiation as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.

With the chickpeas continuing to be cooked by virtue of the burning gas stove, their room got filled up with hazardous amounts of smoke, said Rajiv Gupta, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Noida Central Zone. "Since the door of the house was shut, it led to a shortage of oxygen in the room. This combined with the smoke from the burning food resulted in a large amount of carbon monoxide in the house," he added.

In the morning, when neighbors became aware of the smoke, they smashed the door of the house and immediately took them to a local hospital. However, when they arrived at the district hospital in Noida Sector 39, doctors pronounced both of them dead. Their bodies have been sent for a post-mortem by the authorities.