'Why haven't my parents come to see me?'

Lying in a hospital bed, nine-year-old Sujan keeps asking for his parents and two sisters whenever relatives visit him in the High Dependency Unit (HDU) of the Sheikh Hasina National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery.

"Where are my parents? Why haven't they come to see me? Take me to them," he kept asking.

"They are doing well and will come once they have fully recovered," was the response the relatives always give him.

"We dare not tell him that his parents have passed away," Saiful Islam, the child's cousin, told The Daily Star.

"His condition is already critical and may deteriorate upon hearing the news," he said.

Sujan along with five members of his family including his parents and two sisters suffered critical burns after a fire engulfed their house on the ground floor of the two-storey building on Friday.

Family members suspected that gas from a leak in the cooking cylinder accumulated and caused the fire after Sujan's father Liton Mia, 48, lit a mosquito coil.

Liton, 48, breathed his last around 6:00am today with burns on 67 percent of his body. His wife Surya Banu, 40, passed away around 7:30pm yesterday with 82 percent burns while Surya's mother Meherunnesa, 70, died on Saturday.

As the family members were preparing for the burial of the couple in Cumilla, Sujan was receiving treatment at the HDU unit with 47 percent burns on his body. Doctors said his condition is critical.

Sujan's two sisters -- Liza, 18, and Lamia, 7, -- are also fighting for their lives at the hospital's Intensive Care Unit.

Like Sujan, his two sisters were also calling out for their parents and siblings.

"To console them, we sometimes say that the condition of their parents is much better," said Saiful.

"Liza is old enough to assume that something bad happened to her mother and grandmother, based on our attitude and conversations with hospital staff," her uncle Sohag Mia told The Daily Star.

"Uncle, please take care of my father," Sohag quoted Liza as saying Monday night.

Sohag said the bodies will be buried after Liton and Surya's eldest child, Aklima Akter, who is currently abroad, returns tomorrow.

"The family of my brother was supposed to visit our house at Dighinala in Khagrachhari after Eid. But the fire destroyed everything," Sohag said.