Says Hemant Agarwala, Gunjan's father, ``Luckily she realised something had gone wrong and came to the children's mother of what she had done. My brother Mahendra's children were luckily saved. Gunjan was crying and said she was afraid her patients would die.''

Agarwal, who was at his dairy products shop on Sunday, when this happened, rushed to the house, and took the children to a private hospital. They came to on being treated.

The children, who live together in a joint family, decided to play on the second floor of their three-storeyed house in the Wadi area and avoid other family members, who keep to the first floor.

The second floor is occupied by their aged grandmother. As the woman went off to sleep, Gunjan and her cousins began their `doctor' game.

``They were just playing and the little kids did not realise that they were actually taking the sleeping pills,'' recollects Agarwal.

Things would have taken a more serious turn if Gunjan would have delayed informing her mother downstairs about what had happened. Agarwal said, ``Thank goodness she realised something was wrong.''

The panicked mother rushed to the second floor, where she was shown the bottle from which the medicine had been taken out. ``She called me up at my shop informing about the episode. I immediately rushed to the spot and by this time the kids had started developing signs of unconsciousness. We took them to a private hospital where the doctors administered timely treatment and the kids were saved,'' he says.