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New Delhi: An eerie
silence shrouded the Gupta household in north Delhi's Rohini where
two sisters had locked themselves for the last over six years.
Traumatised and frightened to face the world since their father's
death, the sisters were "starving and smelling" when a medical
emergency team rescued them from their home Saturday.
Rescued by a team of Centralised Accident and Trauma Services
(CATS), Mamta (40) and Neerja (29) were found in tattered clothing
and with dishevelled hair, wounds seen all over their body,
doctors said. The sisters, who lived with their 60-year-old mother
and Mamta's teenager son, were not fed properly for months
together as they battled financial and emotional crisis after
their father passed away 10 years back.
"They were never seen outside for last six-seven years. We used to
hear them screaming inside their house and could gather little
from Mamta's son Shubham who came to play with children,"
neighbour Archana, 20, recalled.
"Their relatives often came to take them to the doctor, but they
asked to be left alone. There was hardly any engagement," the
Delhi University student told IANS.
Their sorry state was revealed only after the sisters' cousin
Neeraj, who came over to visit them Friday evening, decided to
call the CATS Saturday on seeing Mamta's condition deteriorate.
While Mamta mumbled "mujhe nahin jaana (I don't want to go)",
there was little she could do to resist with her bony frame,
sunken cheeks and inability to get up from her bed.
Mamta and Neerja were rushed to Delhi's government's Ambedkar
hospital where they were brought at 11.40 a.m. and 1.10 p.m.,
respectively.
"It appears they have not been fed for months together. Mamta has
bone deformity all over her body which confined her to bed, so she
had been defecating on the bed only," said a senior doctor from
the hospital.
Clad in tattered salwar-kameez, both the women were shaggy-haired
and had long nails when brought to hospital. The Gupta sisters
suffered from "flexion deformity" caused due to restricted
physical movement, the doctor said.
"We have known from Neerja that they were in deep emotional
trauma. Elder sister Mamta was divorced 16 years back, and that
added to the family's problems," the doctor said, adding "their
only outlet to the outer world was their mother and son".
According to doctors at the hospital, the women were in such a
state that "medical staff distanced itself due to the smell". "We
had to call in our special doctors as they were too weak. It was
difficult to measure blood pressure as the women had grown too
skinny for the pressure-measuring band," said Kaustuv Kiran, chief
medical officer at Ambedkar hospital.
"We will be keeping them under complete medical observation for
the next few days. They are not critical, but are grossly
malnourished," added Kiran.
Soon after they were forced to the hospital, their locked house
gave telltale signs of their condition. A dysfunctional desert
cooler lay outside their two-storey house in Rohini's Sector 8 and
gathered neighbours talked in hushed tones of their confinement.
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