MIDNAPORE/KOLKATA: Bank employee Biswanath Das has gone through the last two days in a daze. He was standing outside the gates of AMRI Hospitals, Dhakuria, at dawn on Friday when his 60-year-old mother was gasping her last breaths on Bed No. 2319 inside. He pleaded desperately to be let in, but the guards kept telling him they couldn't allow a patient to leave without clearing dues.

"How can a human being say that to another?" Das keeps asking himself. "How can anyone be so insensitive? If I had been allowed in, I just might have rescued my mother. For all you know, she might have been alive when I was arguing with the guard at the hospital. It was 5am," he said.

Das and his wife were staying near the hospital. "My wife and I rushed from our rented room near the hospital as soon as we heard the commotion. I reasoned with the security staff that I wanted to rescue my mother. Strangely, the guard told me the fire 'had not spread too much' and I would have to first clear my dues. I told him I had already paid 70,000 and I wasn't going to run away with the remaining 15,000. I kept pleading that I first needed to rescue my mother but he wouldn't listen."

Biswanath Das had come all the way from Jira village in West Midnapore's Chandrakona - some 200km from Kolkata - on November 28 to get his mother Pushpa treated in a super-speciality hospital. The surgery to remove a gall bladder stone was successful and Puspa was supposed to be discharged on Monday. Instead , Das brought back her body on Saturday.

It was the promise of super-specialty treatment that drew many from places like Kharagpur. Gyaneswar Rao, a railways employee, who had sustained a head injury in a motorcycle crash, was brought to AMRI Dhakuria for surgery on November 28. He was admitted to the ICU. His elder brother, Tarakeswar, rented a room near the hospital. The surgery went off well but Gyaneswar was yet to regain consciousness when the fire struck.

In the wee hours of Friday, Tarakeswar woke up to a commotion and his heart sank on hearing that there was a fire at AMRI. He ran out in his pyjamas around 5am. He pleaded with the guards to be let in to rescue his brother. They told him that Gyaneshwar had been taken to the emergency ward in the hospital's main building. Tarakeswar panicked because he knew his brother was on ventilator support and did not know if the emergency ward had a ventilator machine. His worst fears proved true when he heard that his brother had died in the emergency.

Seventy-year-old Nilima Palit of Kharagpur was convalescing after a gallstone surgery on November 28 when the fumes choked her to death. She was due for discharge on Monday or Tuesday, said her daughter-inlaw Sumita.