A Crime Unseen

When I was only 13 or 14 I experienced a darker side of the society. I saw someone left a newborn baby in the dustbin. He was already dead. He was still attached to his placenta. I was on my balcony and saw a little crowd . I was curious. I ran out to the corner and saw the scene. I still remember his dead body. I saw his pale skin and blood. I saw people who were standing there whispering and talking. Some even scolded his mother. Some were wondering who left his? They were kept doing the useless wondering but no one step forward to hold that baby and give him a proper funeral. Why? Because they assumed (It’s quite simple to assume) that baby was illegal and he doesn't deserve to be touched. The most shocking thing was when someone grabbed his feet with a plastic bag and dragged him out from that filthy drain. I couldn't stand that so I left. I was in shock. I felt sorry for that little soul and agony of anger to his birth parents. I was wondering how his mother can pull herself up to it and I am sure she is living somewhere. I still wonder how a mother can leave her child dead and allowing her child to be decayed on a drainage!

Many years have been passed to that incident. This time I think I should have gone there and do what it was needed to be  done.  There is no excuse that I was too young to do that. There is no age to do a good deed.

Another day, after the dead baby incident I was coming home with my mother and we caught up to traffic jam. An ambulance was passing just aside from our car. I saw a lady who was about to give birth, held by her husband (I assumed the way he was holding her) and surrounded by her loved one. All of them were both anxious and happy to welcome a new one in their family. Even I felt the warmth of their love to the child.

These two different approaches to a child birth forced me to think that why the child has to bear all the blame for what two people had done. Both of the mothers had to go through the same pain, the same circle, the same physical changes. If everything was same then why the outcome changed the destiny of a child? Why that one child ended up in a drainage, left with no love and respect? The child should be punished just because of what its mother and father did? Why the one night of pleasure will ruin a baby’s life?

This is just a scene of an area. I am quite sure of the fact that this is not the end of it. There are thousands of newborn babies who are left unwanted,  to die.

Two people will mate for their own pleasure resulting an illegal pregnancy and their sin will come up to that child who didn’t even wanted to be born this way. I am not saying that illegal acts should be encouraged or I do not even encourage it. But why the child has to suffer from it?

In Bangladesh each year an alarming number of children born without the name of their father, and most of them are borne by the sex workers.  Many of them grow up with an unattached family and a very few of them survives. This is only the part of the big number. The most sad part is that another number of children borne by a social crime called “Rape”.  In most of the cases it wound the victim and if she gets pregnant with a child, it is accused to be her fault. In that case not only the mother but the child is being tortured in their whole life.

I believe, no matter how a child is born it never deserves the blame for someone else’s wrong deed. A child should be treated with his/her own identity. May be there is no heaven for that child but all it needs is a little earth to live on.