After a week of convalescence, Bhattacharjee went to the medical college. Strangely, nurses refused to let her see her son. They took tumblers of her breast milk to feed the baby, but for a week told her she couldn’t enter the intensive-care nursery. Finally a nurse handed her a female infant. “I screamed and said it was not my baby,” says Bhattacharjee. The Calcutta police failed to solve the case. So Bhattacharjee’s husband, Anup, filed a habeas corpus petition in the Calcutta High Court, which called in the federal investigators to trace the missing child.To take their appeal to a court of law, Bhattacharjee sold off her wedding jewelry. Anup, who used to earn barely 60 cents a day, now earns $1.50 working 16-hour days to pay for the legal bills. “I just want my baby back,” says Keya. “Even if only the bones are found, I want them.”
The case has shocked Calcutta residents, especially because the behavior of the hospital staff was so strange. The police arrested two nurses who were on duty that evening; both claimed their innocence and insisted that Anup had handed over a baby girl. But Anup had presented a “discharge slip” from the first hospital clearly stating that the baby was male. How did they explain the fact that an M had been scratched off, replaced by an F in the nursery records? The nurses insist it was a clerical mistake. But DNA tests of the female baby don’t match Keya or her husband. Hospital authorities won’t discuss the case. Investigators believe some baby boys have been stolen from the hospital and sold to parents as far as 200 kilometers away from Calcutta. One Calcutta baby was sold to a couple in Bangladesh.
Investigators say the Bhattacharjees are victims of one of the baby rackets that prey on an Indian cultural preference for boys. Investigators say at least five male babies disappeared from Calcutta’s hospitals in the past year–and more have gone unreported. At the height of the Bhattacharjee case, a baby girl was found abandoned outside the nursery. Last month police arrested a doctor and his wife at their Delhi nursing home for allegedly selling male babies born to unwed mothers. The doctor denies the charges. Sometimes baby boys are stolen from poor rural parents who are shown unclaimed dead newborns as theirs. The babies are sold to childless couples for $150 to $1,500. “Many Indians think only a male child… is a dependable investment,” says social scientist Manmohan Sharma of the Voluntary Health Association of India, which is studying the status of girls. “Couples get desperate enough to do anything, including stealing, to get a male child.” The Calcutta High Court will hear Keya Bhattacharjee’s case this spring; but that won’t get her little boy back.
