Apr 8th, 2008
REVERED NOT REVILED
Looking at these images, you wonder about the child’s future – that is, if she can survive.
Gradually your thoughts drift to the baby’s parents.
How would they be feeling?
Pretty sad and concerned, you think.
Far from it, the parents of the girl born with four eyes, two mouths and two heads think their newborn daughter is simply a deity incarnated.
It is not just them.
The people in the rural Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, 50km north east of New Delhi, are not ashamed of this extraordinary looking girl.
The villagers claim she is the incarnation of the Hindu God Ganesha – who has an elephant head – and celebrated her arrival with clapping, cheering and offerings of gifts and money.
Her parents are yet to name the girl, who was born three weeks ago. They have ruled out surgery to correct the deformity.
‘At first I was a little bit afraid,’ Mr Vinod Kumar Singh, the 24-year-old father of the girl, told ABC News. ‘But then I accepted whatever God gives.’
This is not the first case of a deformed child being looked upon as an incarnation of the divine in India.
A few months ago, the media reported the case of a toddler born with eight limbs in northern India’s Bihar state.
The girl, Lakshmi Tatma, was born joined to a ‘parasitic twin’.
In November, she underwent a 27-hour operation by 30 surgeons in Bangalore to remove two of her useless arms and legs.
In India’s rural villages where people have low literacy levels, it is surprising that deformed children are not reviled.
Instead, they are revered.
In the case of the girl with two faces, villagers flocked to her home to touch her feet, dance at her bedside and offer the family money.
‘It’s a gift of God. Some people say she is like a goddess. They call the baby a face of a goddess,’ Mr Harsharan Singh, the village math teacher, told ABC News.
Tags: 2, baby, born, faces