Relatives participate in a candlelight vigil outside the burns ward at Safdarjung Hospital on Tuesday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Feb. 20: Late last night, 15-year-old Harish Mohammed’s organs started failing one by one as the infection from the burns suffered in the Atari Special inferno spread through his body.

By early morning, the Karachi teenager, brought yesterday to Delhi’s Safdarjung Hospital, was dead.

Two beds away from where Harish lay, sleeps Aksha, one-year-old and untarnished by the brutality of the world till yesterday but now fighting for her life.

Her face, say doctors, is severely burnt and her brief moments awake are spent crying in pain, but the 8-kg “miracle baby” from Faisalabad in Pakistan appears likely to survive the battle between life and death being waged at the hospital.

Dr Anil Sharma, one of the many doctors attending to the patients here, has been working virtually non-stop since noon yesterday. He is entitled to a break, but the one time he tried, visions of Aksha’s sobs came haunting.

“Yesterday, about 10 at night, I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue any more. We have a coffee machine in the adjacent ward and I thought I would take a 15-minute break. I came back in five minutes,” he says.

“The thought of that baby fighting for her life made everything else so insignificant.”

Aksha has 10 per cent burns and has inhaled gases and particles that could damage her organs internally, the doctor says.

Five older siblings — Aisha, 15, Bilal, 13, Meer Hamza, 11, Abdul Rehman, 6, and Aasma, 4 — failed to escape alive from the fire.

Aksha’s mother Rukshana and father Rana Shaukat Ali are on adjacent beds, similarly fighting to survive. They, too, were asleep this morning.

Sharma explains that the victims, with burns ranging from 10 to 55 per cent of body surface — need regular doses of anaesthesia to dull the pain, resulting in frequent sleep.

“We had to change the dressings on the burn victims every hour or so through the night, just to ensure that the wounds don’t get infected. In such severe burn cases, the infection spreads very fast,” the doctor says.

Which, adds hospital superintendent R.L. Salhan, was what happened with Harish.

“He had 55 per cent burns. The heat had also singed some organs internally, and the infection spread fast. He died around 6 am,” the superintendent said.