To many the adage that truth is stranger than fiction is nothing more than a nebulous conception. But when it appears in all its magnificent or malignant uncertainty or disbelief to an individual, life changes forever. The individual concerned can feel how true the truth is. Some cannot be blamed for saying that it happens only on the silver screen.
But if the country's hospitals are concerned, the strangest of things is not strange at all. A doctor unhurriedly stitches a mother with one of the twins inside the womb. The lady doctor has the confident answer ready that inside there is a tumour.
After a month or so when the mother sees a doctor with complaint of pain in her lower abdomen, the truth comes out. After an operation a baby long dead is pulled out.
What happened recently in a government hospital has all the making of screenplay as shown in Bangla serials on the other side of the border and on the celluloid on this side. Unfortunately, week scriptwriters and filmmakers deal in cheap sentiments. Hardly can they delve deep into the core elements of tragedy that parents confront when they are asked to take a baby girl instead of the baby boy its mother gave birth to.
It is intriguing that the newborn boy was exchanged for a girl when the former was treated in the incubator with breathing complaint. If this can happen in a government hospital in the new millennium, the obvious question that arises is, if the country is one like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
People still cannot rule out suffering the ordeal of a journey through the impregnable darkness. This incident has brought to the fore one inescapable crude and harsh truth that there are parents here who can easily give up their claim to a baby girl of theirs in exchange for a boy who is not their blood and flesh.
At a time when a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) test can confirm a baby's natural parents, those who exchanged their newborn girl for a boy took immense risk, if of course they did so knowing full well or if they belong to a class quite unaware of such medical science.
Usually the records of newborns should be a good enough tool to trace a baby. But if parents come to a hospital with an ulterior motive beforehand in an arrangement with some members of the hospital staff, such things can happen. Parents alone cannot exchange babies only a few days old. In this case, the baby boy was nine days old when he was replaced by a baby girl of similar age.
Both the hospital authority and the police on receiving a complaint from the baby boy's parents have started investigating into the matter to know how the exchange of babies took place. Clearly, the parents who accepted the baby had no qualms about the exchange. This shows that they might have expected a boy. Ideally, if they were mistakenly given the boy, they should have complained and protested for not giving their daughter. It is not the question of gender preference of a baby, it is what is their own progeny. They should have been equally protective and fiercely defensive of the little one born out of their union. How the problem is unravelled will answer to many of the questions people have in their minds but perhaps not all the questions unless it is a simple case of accidental exchange.
The hospital in question, however, may complain why the exchange of babies has been made a big issue when the country's largest hospital has a record of newborn disappearing from its wards. Often there are reports that babies go missing or are lifted from the hospital.
In some of the cases, such babies have even been recovered from the baby lifters. In a few other cases, it was reported that abandoned mothers sold their babies to childless couples. Indeed, at a level of society, babies brought to the world either have to be thrown out most likely because they are unwanted by an unwilling mother.
She would rather be spared of the shame of giving birth to a baby not out of wedlock and with the father denying any responsibility either for the mother or the baby. Then there are poor couples who know they cannot feed another mouth because they already have too many of those. Such couples may try to get rid of a newborn.
Of them some fathers leave the family and his wife does not even know the permanent address of the man she married. But now that she already has a number of children to bring up, it is impossible to take responsibility of yet another. In such cases, babies are handed over to interested childless couples either formally or in a dubious manner.
Admittedly, this is not a child-friendly country. The interest in a boy child stems from a patriarchal society. Girls here are more vulnerable and need extra-care for their upbringing. Among the poor and uneducated, the problem is acuter.
Society's adaptation to the most advanced technologies has not followed the gradual transition step by step. So the new-found technological advantages have sent the heads of the uninitiated spinning. Thus the innocent and unsuspecting fall victim to all kinds of intrigues. And it begins right at birth for some.