How else will you describe a miniature Snow White? For that is what she was, an over-sized doll with blood red lips, milky white complexion and delicate black hair same as the narration of a fairy tale. She might have weighed a little over 10 pounds and must have breathed her last some hours ago, when she was alive and born out of real womb.
It was just an ordinary morning, a decade back, of second professional of my Degree in Medicine. Visiting a morgue, at least once, was compulsory part of Forensic Medicine Syllabi. I deliberately delayed and made every attempt to escape the horror till the last day. This isolated building was the most horrid part of the city’s biggest hospital. An eager throng was surging to and fro. Men were crowding and elbowing each other. Few relatives wailed sitting on the tiny platform outside the main hall .Darkness of death was palpable all around.
The odour of formalin and stench of rotten flesh filled my lungs. There were jars, big and small, all around with dust as thick as emulsion coat over them and viscera carefully preserved within them. In the centre was a large examination table which was used for dissection, examination, investigation or whatever. Knives, blades, chisels, forceps, scissors of different sizes and shapes were neatly stacked nearby. Along with my professor and a male colleague we were accompanied by a dark, bare-torsoed, undertaker type person, straight from a late night horror show, a morgue attendant.
My eyes fell on the bodies that were lying on the side tables. One of an old man, a middle-aged male and there was this doll. I could no longer concentrate on the cirrhotic liver or gun shot wounds of the two other bodies. I went closer and made the flies fly that greedily hovered around her. “She will not wake up dear”, my colleague made a callous remark. Oh! She was dead. It was then I noticed her maggot filled wound on her left cheek. The realization of her being a corpse brought me back to my senses. Up till then she appeared to be deep in tranquil sleep.
The Prof started his narration on the next specimen.She was found abandoned, next to a heap of garbage, by ragpickers, who reported to police. She was strangled soon after birth by a pajama string or a thin nylon rope. There was a deep and thin scarlet groove encircling her short chubby neck. The big lacerated wound on the back of her head revealed that she was thrown against a wall, probably to be dumped. Later, while lying over the litter her left cheek was bitten by carnivore or a rodent. Her umbilical cord hung loosely from abdomen like a grown ascaris. I felt my intestines churn.
I gathered nerves to launch my volley of questions to Prof as to what must have been the cause of this and if he was sure about infanticide. He assured me that this was not the first time he saw or dealt with the murder of new born, always a girl. This case according to him was better than the rest as the body and genitalia hadn’t been mutilated and were fairly recognizable. Since in our country pre-natal sex determination is banned some people resort to such barbaric ways to get rid of girl child.
Her body lay cold and defunct before me, now pulverised by autopsy .I remember having read that a millennia and half back in Saudi Arabia baby girls were buried alive. It seems all the scriptures, laws and conventions still haven’t been able to change mindsets of few. My first and last visit to the morgue was from frightening, horrifying to one the most memorable days of my life. The whole episode had a neurotoxic effect on my system. I went into a state of mental paresis not being able to decide whether to rejoice at my survival or wail for a death. Celebrations of International Women’s Day no longer interested me.
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