Dear Lakshmi

Here are the facts: in 2005, a baby girl with four arms and four legs was born in rural India. There were only about 500 other people living in her village and the news of her birth spread quickly. Her parents named her Lakshmi, after the four-armed Indian goddess of prosperity, and her community regarded her as a reincarnated goddess.

At a year old, her parents refused a sum of money offered by a circus to display her in their “oddities” show. At two years old, a doctor heard about her and traveled to her village. He offered to perform a surgery that would relieve her of the extra limbs, and then moved her (and her family) to the hospital where they would stay for two months until she was deemed strong enough for the procedure.

In interviews, both her mother and father revealed that they were worried about changing their daughter, but ultimately they were more worried about her long-term health. They consented to the surgery. Since I heard about this baby, just days before her surgery, I have spent a lot of time thinking about her. I’ve even spent a fair amount of time following her progress online. My imagination has traveled to India and back as I’ve pictured the sequence of little Lakshmi’s life.

I’ve wondered what it was like to be the village midwife who received Lakshmi from her mother’s womb. The head emerged, and then the shoulders. The chest came into view. The baby’s right arm appeared, and then the left. With the mother continuing to bear down, the baby was born to the umbilicus, and then the legs came. But the baby didn’t stop there, the way they usually do. There was still more torso, and the midwife must have been confused, maybe even panicked as another pair of legs was born, still more torso, and finally two more arms. I would have seen that this baby was special and that my response to this situation would impact not only the baby, but the parents and perhaps the whole village. I would have to decide to revere rather than revile this new being. I can see myself wrapping the baby in a soft cloth and passing the infant to her mother’s arms. Yes, perhaps the midwife was the first to declare that India’s most loved Goddess had been reincarnated in this child.

I’ve also pictured myself as Lakshmi’s mother. Proud of giving birth to an absolutely beautiful baby. Immensely worried as I unwrapped little Lakshmi and saw the abundance of limbs. Would I have recognized the resident deity in this child? Would I have recognized that my daughter would need medical attention? Imagine being a mother and feeling torn like that, between heavenly perfection and potential incompatibility with terrestrial life.

Occasionally, I think of the chronically poverty stricken villagers who viewed the birth of this girl as nothing less than a miracle. She brought a great deal of hope to the people of her community; they had plans to build a temple for her, to worship and care for her. Imagine knowing that the Goddess had chosen your village as her new Earthly home. The pride, the honor, the delight – it would be enough to sweep an entire village along on a celebratory wave that could profoundly change the way those 500 people think of themselves.

I’ve even imagined being the doctor who made the trip over hundreds of miles to evaluate Lakshmi personally. What was it like to find her? Or, more accurately, to find them? Lakshmi was a set of twins gone very wrong, medically speaking. There were actually two bodies. One complete. One headless, partial. They were joined at the pelvis, fused in the spinal column. The medical term is Ischiopagus Parasitic Twinning. Much harder to pronounce and to understand than “reincarnated deity.” I would wonder if I could save this beautiful girl, lead a team of respected surgeons, perform a procedure that would bring renown to my hospital and increase my standing in the medical world. This is what is known as a win-win situation.

Though Lakshmi’s family refused to sell her to the circus when she was a year old, the medicos still managed to make her into a sideshow by widely publicizing her upcoming surgery in the days before the operation. There were interviews and press conferences. Portions of her medical records were released over the news wires, including CT images. Her beautiful, smiling face was splashed across television sets, newspapers and websites all over the world.

It was an amazing coincidence (perhaps even a miracle) that she was born on the feast day for her namesake, the Goddess Lakshmi. It seems less coincidental (perhaps even contrived) that her surgery took place almost exactly two years later, again over the festival celebrating India’s most beloved Goddess. In the end, I look over all of the players in this story and I wonder most what Lakshmi herself wanted. Did she want the 27-hour surgery that would allow her to lead a life more like that of the girls in her village? Or would she have chosen a sacred life of prayer and religious study as the embodiment of the Goddess Lakshmi? I know there’s no way to know that now, but it’s a question I come back to again and again. As will she, in time. VS