Endowment of Starvation

Story of a mother selling her child for a meal (25 October 2006)

Sun couldn’t get hotter that day. Travelling at this peak time through the streets of Kochi can be a real challenge to dare.

It was an afternoon. Murukan was serving as a child line worker those days. The clock stroked 2 and a call came to child line toll free number. The information received by him could make the humanity question its existence; A mother bargaining on her own child at Ambedkar stadium. On hearing this Murukan along with other child line workers started their journey towards the mother.

As they stepped out on the street, they saw a woman holding an infant in her hands, bargaining with a person nearby. As Murugan got closer, their conversations were getting clearer,

“500 for this child”, cried the mother.

As they got closer, the man who stood near the mother saw them and started to run, as of escaping. Without wasting time, Murugan contacted the nearby Police Station and passed on the information.

After few minutes, women police, SI Parvathy and her team came to the rescue place. It was a struggle, trying to save the infant from his mother as she hesitated to handover the child to them willingly. They tried their best but she fought physically with them, trying to escape. In the middle of this entire crisis that few months old baby boy started to cry.

This entire resistance of the woman didn’t take much time to capture the attention from the public. They gathered around in groups observing everything. Finally, the police officers succeeded in saving the infant from that woman. While guiding them to the rescue vehicle, Murugan heard some of the people whispering among themselves in crowd, “See another child is crying over there.”

Suddenly that woman cried and said aloud, “that’s my child.”

Murugan found the child nearby, he was crying watching everything. He guided that child to the rescue vehicle along with his mother and the infant. They were taken to Pallithuruth Agathymanthiram. Later it was informed by the officials at Agathymanthiram that the woman, Vijayamma, had some mental instability that caused her to behave as such.

‘It was difficult seeing a mother selling her own child for a meal that day’, Murugan sighed. Cases like this are many only some of them are exposed to the society.