New Delhi:
As Baby Falak battles brain damage, cardiac arrests and a litany of other injuries inflicted upon her by one or more adults, the two-year-old will be visited today by a young woman who claims to be her mother.
The 22-year-old woman last saw Falak four months ago. She was traced to Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan by the Delhi Police. So far, she does not know that her baby, the youngest of three children, has been subjected to relentless violence; or that she lies on a hospital bed in a critical state, hooked upto a ventilator, with every day that she survives being chalked up as a sort of miracle by her doctors. The baby was brought to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences AIIMS by a teenager on January 18. She was apparently looking after Falak, it's not clear why.
The two-year-old baby, battered and bruised, has been put back on ventilator as she is showing no signs of improvement. She was taken off ventilator on Friday. But doctors say the infection in her blood and improper fluid movement does not allow them to keep her off ventilator any more.
Yesterday, Baby Falak's mother was counselled by an NGO to help prepare her for what she would be confronted with today.
She has told the police that she is from Bihar and got married in 2006, when she was 16. Later she was lured to Delhi by a woman named Lakshmi with the promise of a job and a better future.
As her husband was involved in petty crimes, she moved to Delhi six months ago with the child that nurses at AIIMS have named Falak, her sister, and a five-year-old brother. Two women who she met in the Capital tried to force her into prostitution but she refused. The same women then persuaded her into a second marriage with a man in Rajasthan who promised to look after and help raise her children.
The two women who allegedly separated Falak and her siblings from their mother in September last year, when she was married again in Rajasthan, have been arrested. The police have arrested them to get more details.
What's worrying is that it's not clear yet where Falak's siblings are, or if they're safe.