The teapot was left over the gas oven since hours now. The water swelled up trembling in the heat with overflowing urgency, spilling here and there, and finally disappearing into vapors of silken white fumes. She looked up towards him with eyes engorgement with grief and disbelieve. The little diamonds from her eyes tracked the trajectories of her soft cheeks, meeting somewhere below the chin. He looked down, the sagging shoulders of a once haughty man, making gloomy silhouettes on the wall behind him. Shafts of dusty sunlight trickled in, unhurriedly, nearly dragging itself into a room that smelled of stifled sobs and deafening sound of silence. She held up the thick dark sheet of black and shadowy-white x-ray plate against the reluctant sunrays to see two small brinjal shaped vague structures. “Grave basilar opacities in the lung,” she repeated to herself. Words that the doctor told her that morning. Advanced ‘pediatric pulmonary proteinosis’ is what they saw in front of them, against the reluctant dusty sunlight and lucklessly vaporized water in a tea pot... against the sagging shadows of a once lofty shoulder. A small girl slept, breathing noisily, the colour of her body slowly turning into the colour of the white bed sheet she lay on. She was dying. We all owe death a life. But the little angel paid her debt a bit too early. The empty red and white cigarette packets lay neglected inside drawers, under mattresses, around the house. He thought about his uncontrolled smoking habit and his insides filled with the ghosts of the fumes, which were taking away his daughter slowly. The angel was dying of passive smoking. The vapour from the teapot, still on fire, made faces and said, “you always were a heartless man.” It sighed and then turned back into smoke again, sticking its tongue out at him.

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