Foetal mission

I have always had a fascination for hospitals. So when I was given the health beat, I was thrilled. I certainly looked forward to witnessi...

I have always had a fascination for hospitals. So when I was given the health beat, I was thrilled. I certainly looked forward to witnessing the constant battle between life and death. But I realised soon enough that it had its own hazards when I was sent on a strange hunt.

I was sitting with an Iranian student, whose son was administered an antibiotic injection which was over the expiry date, when I got a beep on the pager: contact the DRE (deputy resident editor) immediately. I called him from the hospital. “The thing is,” he said, “somebody has tipped off the office about a six-month-old foetus lying near the waterworks behind the PGI. Just go and see. I have asked the photographer to be there. Let us see, we may have a story.” The seriousness of the assignment did not dawn on me until I reached the spot. For I was too engrossed with that expiry date story which had serious ramifications. Or maybe, after spending many months in the hospitals, mostly in the emergency section, I had been somewhat desensitised.

Anyway, I dashed off to the mentioned spot. The municipal corporation’s waterworks lie just behind the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, a premier health institution of the region, The area is full of bushes with garbage strewn around. I circled around on my scooter, scanning every bit of land. No trace of anything suspicious. Then I went into the compound where workers were busy laying pipes. When I told an old man there about the phone call and asked whether he had seen an abandoned foetus, he shook his head and quipped, “These days the media has forgotten about the living and is instead chasing the dead.”

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I felt I had shrunk in front of him. Without saying a word, with a lump forming in my throat, I just turned my scooter away from the scene of that terrible crime. Oh, my God! I was hunting a foetus. I realised there must be stories in the very act of abandoning a foetus… terrible, terrible stories. And difficult choices. This was surely more than a race to trace a mere object.

I just could not forgive myself for the shameless way in which I had startedmy search for the foetus, which was just another story for me initially. What could have led this woman to throw away an integral part growing within? Or could it be that she was one of those young Harpreet Kaurs, whose child (and maybe she too) had been sacrificed at the altar of family honour and social status?

I told my folks at home about my morning assignment over a hastily gulped down cup of hot coffee, as I could not bear to eat lunch. “Some animal must have eaten the foetus for it is soft meat for them,” was the general comment on my failure to find it. Which sickened me further. Somehow I managed to reach office and told my DRE that I could not spot it. “I got an eerie feeling while searching for it.” That tiny life had become an it’ for us.

But hawks as we are, the newspapers carried a two-paragraph item the next day about a six-month-old foetus found at the exact spot where I had been on the prowl. And the reason for its disappearance was that the cops had taken it away.

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Even as I am penning down these lines, I cannot fight that sinking feeling. Was it Wordsworth who sang these lines, “trailing clouds of glory do we come,/ From God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” But for many like this foetus, we arrange a hell on earth.