New Delhi:
For nearly two weeks, a baby girl has given her all to fighting for her life. She 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. But today, her care-givers say her chances of survival have dipped, and that the infection has now spread from the chest and brain. "Chances of her survival are diminishing everyday, but we are trying our best," said Dr Deepak Agarwal of the AIIMS Trauma Center.
Three people have been arrested by the Delhi Police today. The main accused, Rajkumar, is still missing.
India's introduction to Baby Falak, named for the sky by her nurses, was a brutal one. 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.
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. 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.
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.
The police has yet to identify Falak's biological parents. 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. For days now, this is the only information the police has been able to offer. 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.