Woman opens door for husband, finds abandoned baby instead

A woman expecting her husband's return home was flummoxed to see a baby boy lying abandoned on their doorstep instead.

When Mukta Bai opened the door of her home around 6 am on July 8, she presumed her husband, Bhemrao, 63, had returned from work. Bhemrao, a security guard at a private college, usually did the night shift and returned home in the early morning. The family lives in New NGEF Layout, Mallathahalli, West Bengaluru.

According to Mukta Bai, she was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. She hurriedly rose to her feet and walked to the door. To her surprise, there was no trace of her husband. She stepped out to check who rang the doorbell. She found the infant lying on the doorstep.

Clueless as to how the baby ended up there, Mukta Bai and her son searched for the person(s) who had evidently abandoned the infant. They didn't find anyone. Mukta Bai called up her husband and told him what had happened. She also broke the news to their landlord. The matter soon reached the police.

Patrolmen from the Jnanabharathi police station arrived at the house soon after and questioned Bhemrao's son and others. But nobody knew whose baby it was and how it landed there.

Bhemrao told DH: "We have two doors - one wooden and another made of grille. Whoever abandoned the baby must have noticed the two doors and decided to leave it in front of our house because it takes time to open the doors."

A police officer said the baby was at least a month old and most likely born from a premarital affair. "The baby is healthy. Baby boys are not usually abandoned if they are healthy," the officer added.

The mother and her family must have waited for the lifting of the Covid restrictions to abandon the baby because police extensively patrolled all the places during the lockdown, he surmised.

This is the second incident of its kind in the last three weeks. On June 23, a physically abnormal male infant was found abandoned in a grove in eastern Bengaluru's HRBR Layout.