At six forty-five Shahnaz was climbing the three flights on foot, because the laundry trolleys had taken over the lift and because in any case she never took the lift, and she kept her hand on the banister even going up, a caution her husband, while he lived, called an old woman's business; and in her cloth bag she carried the parathas made at dawn for her daughter-in-law, who had given birth two days earlier and who was not eating in the hospital, wrapped in a page of the previous day's newspaper because newsprint holds the heat longer than foil and does not give it all back at once. On her feet she had the plastic slippers bought at the bazaar expressly for that floor, after she had slipped in the radiology corridor on her first visit and had got up again apologising to the floor.

The guard was sitting on a white plastic chair set crosswise in front of the entrance to the ward. Shahnaz greeted him the way one greets a clerk one will see again, with that half nod of the head that asks for nothing but prepares the ground for the asking, and he answered in the same way, so that for a moment they were two people who had recognised each other in a hospital corridor at six forty-six in the morning. Through the glass of the nursery the cots could be seen in two rows, each with the tag tied to the child's ankle, not to the rail, because rails get moved and ankles do not, a thing a young nurse had explained to her the day before yesterday the way one explains a family precaution.

Then the air changed.

It was not the smoke, at the beginning, and it was not the noise either, for the noise came afterwards, a low noise, the noise of something coming away from the ceiling; it was the smell, which in those corridors had always been the same smell of lemon disinfectant, and which at a certain point, without warning, turned sweet, a wrong sweetness, the sweetness of heated plastic; Shahnaz, who knew about smells from having cooked thirty years for nine people, turned towards the glass before the noise arrived. Behind the glass the second row of cots could no longer be seen: the first could be seen, and behind the first a kind of motionless grey that stood high up and was coming down.

She looked for the young nurse, the one of the tag at the ankle, who was the only one with the key to the ward, and did not find her, because the nurse had gone down to the floor below to sign something which, according to the person who sent her, would take no more than four minutes. In the door there was the wired glass with the diamond mesh, behind the wired glass there was the handle, and from the outside the handle did not go down.

Shahnaz took a step forward and told the guard there was smoke, she said it in the voice one uses to inform, and the guard leaned out to look, then said they had already called. Shahnaz took another step and said the smoke was inside, not outside. The guard said they had already called.

Then the guard got up from the plastic chair, put his forearm in front of her at the height of the breastbone, with the delicacy of a man stopping a relative and not a thief, and said one sentence only, which was neither the regulation nor an explanation but something of his own, namely that the year before, in another hospital he did not name, one had been carried off; while he was saying it he was looking past her, towards the far end of the corridor, where the smoke now stood high. In Shahnaz's mouth the sentence made itself ready, the sentence she had spoken for fifty-two years, the one that begins with the request and ends with the apology (in the queue at the Aabpara pharmacy, at the registry window, at the door of the neighbour who kept the radio loud at night, on which in eleven years she had knocked three times, beginning all three times with the formula of the disturbance), and the sentence came whole into her mouth without coming out, not because she had decided not to say it, nor because the smoke had taken her breath, but because the bag in her right hand weighed on her now like a thing that had nothing to do with any of it, that was there for another morning.

So she set it down. She set it down on the ground, on the linoleum, not on the sill, and with the hand left free she moved the guard's forearm aside.

She did not push it. She moved it aside.

She came out at seven ten, carrying a child that was not her daughter-in-law's son, and the difference was already clear before the stairwell, because her daughter-in-law's son had the green tag tied to his ankle while this one had a blue one; not that a thing like that makes anyone stop, no one stops in a corridor that is filling, but from there on Shahnaz walked with two attentions instead of one, the first for the blue child she held against her left shoulder, the second for the air, which on the second floor was still lemon disinfectant and on the third was no longer.

The guard held the door open for her on her way back, told her to go, that they would see to it now, and he told her so in the voice of a man giving a piece of information to a lady in a corridor. It was seven twelve.

On the forecourt a woman in a white coat took the blue child from her arms, said thank you to her, and no one asked her what her name was, nor whose relative she was, nor why she had been on the third floor at seven in the morning, and no one said sorry to her, which was the thing she knew how to ask for. Upstairs, on the linoleum in front of the glass, the cloth bag lay where she had set it down, with the newspaper paper that had opened by itself from the heat inside. The parathas went cold there.