ChrisandCin

This was in the local paper today, scary to think thats this is the way people think…

KOLKATA: Around 9.30 am on Friday, 18-month-old Moumita crawled out of her hut near Kalikapur, off the EM Bypass, and disappeared. After frantic searches with neighbours, Moumita’s mother spotted her little feet in the murky waters of the canal that runs along the shanties. The body was promptly fished out and sent to the nearby Ruby General Hospital, where the baby was announced dead on arrival. But local residents refused to believe that. They brought the lifeless body back to the accident site, convinced that the girl could be revived, and determined to do so. What unfolded after that could only be termed a theatre of tragedy.

With the parents inconsolable and immobile with grief, relatives and friends launched a thorough search for the child’s “soul. When this correspondent reached the spot, young boys had climbed a tree and were shaking its branches as if participating in some sort of a ritual; others were giving the baby a hot oil massage in the belief that it would revive circulation. An elderly woman poured milk into the child’s open mouth. It went through clean. “She is still warm to touch. When she was pulled out, she twitched her face and vomited. They’re trying to bring the spirit back to her body so that she recovers, a youth said. Another woman made a fish-like gasping gesture to claim the baby had indeed tried to breathe.

In the meantime, children jumped into the water armed with twigs and sticks. “Her soul may be inside a fish now, said an elderly woman. The body was then taken to a Kali shrine in the area, where wails and prayers filled the air. The children stayed close to the ‘ghat’; some waded in thrashing the surface of the water to “help free the spirit while some youths ventured farther into the canal on a boat. As the search yielded nothing, reality seemed to be sinking in.

“She shouldn’t have been taken away from the water. Earlier, two-three kids had fallen but survived. If only there was a gunin (witch doctor), said a local. The area is a few hundred metres from Ruby hospital and a few kilometres from Peerless.

What it really needs, though, is civic infrastructure. Going by the evidence of the slippery and fragile wooden/bamboo steps of the makeshift ‘ghat’, this, perhaps, was a tragedy waiting to happen. “We have to think of something to stop this, said a local.

Surely, he isn’t too far to be heard.