New Delhi:
Baby Falak, the two-year-old who India was introduced to in a hospital bed in Delhi, has developed new complications. "Apart from her chest and brain, there are more infections now," said Dr Deepak Agarwal.
"The chances of her survival are diminishing everyday, but we are trying our best."
For nearly two weeks, the baby girl, christened Falak or "the sky" by the nurses looking after her, has fought to overcome the horrific injuries inflicted on her by one or more adults. Her biological parents have yet to be traced. The Delhi Police has arrested three people in connection with her case.
"We have arrested three persons -- her father and a couple, who forced her into prostitution. The father has been charged for cruelty and abandoning her while the couple were charged with forcing her into flesh trade," Ajay Choudhry, Additional Commissioner of Police (South-East), told reporters.
The arrested have been identified as Jitender Gupta, her father, and the couple Sandeep Pandey and Pooja.
The two-year-old was brought to AIIMS on January 18 by a young teen girl who claimed to be her mother. Her account of the baby's fall in a bathroom and a bed was so incongruous with the child's injuries that the teen was detained and placed in a juvenile home. Her father, according to sources, has now been arrested for inflicting cruelty upon her.
The police began the search for who Baby Falak really belongs to, and who hurt her head so severely against a wall that she has brain damage that doctors say they may not be able to reverse.
In the photographs that have accompanied her headlines, a black strip runs across her eyes, designed to protect her identity in a country that failed completely at protecting her when she needed it most. Baby Falak is on a ventilator; her arms are bruised, and are still healing from fractures; the human bites all over her face have faded a little, tattoos of the negligence by those who ignored her and abuse by those who didn't. She has survived two cardiac arrests.
"Battered baby syndrome" is among the many diagnostic conclusions of her condition. But amid the terminology and sterile equipment that is wheeled in and out of the third floor where she lies in the Intensive Care Unit, the sight of her little bare chest, hooked up to different machines regularly moves the most stoic of doctors to tears. "I have never seen a case like this," said one, who is used to dealing with trauma patients in a hospital that pretty much sees it all on a daily basis.
Why Falak was abandoned by her parents, who they are, and who assaulted her with such brute force remains unsolved or unshared by the police. A woman named Munni arrived with her at the house of a woman named Laxmi, then left the baby behind. Laxmi gave the baby to a man named Manoj who in turn passed her onto an acquaintance named Rajkumar who had left his wife and son to elope with the teen who brought Falak to AIIMS. An assembly line of first names with little or no background; nothing to establish why each one was able to shelve the baby when she became an inconvenience.