CHENNAI: Six-year-old Banumathi attends a Montessori school, loves to play with dolls and recites Humpty Dumpty with action. She looks like any happy-go-lucky kid at the children home, Shanthivanam in Thiruverkadu.Three years ago, the situation was different. An emaciated baby Banumathi was left to fend for herself on a pavement at Langs Garden Road in Pudupet, while her mother, who was reported to be a rag picker or a domestic help then, left for work. All the baby did at that time was give a blank gaze, unresponsive to the happenings around her.The turnaround happened thanks to the efforts taken by our Chief Photographer, Shibha Prasad Sahu, and our reporters, who worked together to ensure that baby Banumathi got a better life. A special thanks to city-based NGO, Udavum Karangal, and its founder, S Vidyakar, to have taken the efforts to rehabilitate the baby.“When we took the baby in our care, she was severely malnourished and suffered from a condition called Battered Baby Syndrome,” recollects Vidyakar. “She was hospitalised in Apollo for a month. Our medical team then worked on her to develop her cognitive skills and boost her dietary needs. And, see now, the baby is like any other normal child.”It was on this day (August 8) in the year 2008 that Express had carried a report, ‘Banu has a mother, but she’s nobody's child’, which detailed the plight of this child languishing on a pavement on Langs Garden Road. A call by one of our reporters to Udavum Karangal saw an ambulance from this NGO reaching Pudupet.Once on the spot, Vidyakar and his team had a discussion with the child’s mother, Vairum, who did not object to the child being taken away to a children's home in Thiruverkadu run by the NGO. Later, Vairum too joined the child at her new home. But two days later, Vairum left the place leaving her daughter in the care of the Udavum Karangal. “She was a commercial sex worker, and was suffering from substance abuse,” says Vidyakar. “She was not emotionally attached to her daughter. She just wanted to leave the daughter with us and go back to her old ways.”Banumathi is too young to recall anything about that sordid past, possibly a blessing in disguise. She has a new home now and new friends to play with. She calls Vidyakar papa, like every other child in Shanthivanam. She is now known as Banumathi Vidyakar, a far cry from the days when she was deemed as a ‘nobody’s child’.
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