Dinner was over and Jinil Mathew was sitting outside his house when he heard the cries of his neighbours. He ran to the gates of their house and asked what had happened. His neighbours, parents of a one-and-a-half year old baby, told him frantically that a snake had bitten the child. The family had recently returned to their home in Kasaragod from Bihar and was in quarantine for COVID-19.
No one else came to the house, hearing their cries. But, the moment he heard that a baby’s life was at risk, Jinil ran into the house, killed the snake that was still coiled in the window, took the baby in one hand and made some calls with the other.
In moments, an ambulance came to the house and the baby and Jinil were in it. An hour-and-a-half later, the baby was admitted to the ICU of the Pariyaram Medical College Hospital in Kannur. Two hours more and the parents joined her.
The child recovered from the snakebite but tested positive for the coronavirus. The next day, Jinil promptly went into quarantine at an institutional facility nearby.
“He didn’t just come running into the house, he did everything to save our child. The snake which bit the baby through the window was still coiled in the grill, and Jinil took a stick and killed it. He took the baby and called the ambulance and was out of there in no time. He proved to be a godsend to us,” says the father of the child, who is in home quarantine now.
He and the baby’s mother had both been working as school teachers in Bihar for a few years. The baby is their third child. The mother is in the ICU with the baby while the two elder children are in quarantine elsewhere.
Jinil too has three children at his home – the eldest has just finished Class 10, the middle one is in Class 5 and the youngest is in Class 1. “It’s difficult not seeing them, but I can’t risk being at home now,” says Jinil, who has been in institutional quarantine for four days now.
He is the Communist Party of India (Marxist) branch secretary at Vattakayam and also the secretary of the Head Load and General Workers Union, Panathoor.
“I'm a head load worker. I had earlier helped the family go into quarantine when they came home. But there is a stigma against people who are in quarantine. Some people were murmuring that I should not have gone and picked the child up. But at that moment, do you think about getting COVID-19 or saving a child’s life?” Jinil asks.
Taking the parents along in the ambulance would have further delayed proceedings. Luckily, Binu, an ambulance driver on COVID-19 duty, was close by when Jinil called him. Binu rushed to the spot and they drove to Kanhangad District Hospital first. “But the hospital did not have facilities for COVID-19 treatment and we had to go to Pariyaram,” Jinil says.
The Pariyaram MCH confirmed to TNM that a child had come to the hospital from Kasaragod due to a snakebite. But the official confirmation of the child having contracted COVID-19 can only come through the Health Department.
However, the father of the child confirmed that she was infected but was recovering. The test results of the parents are awaited.
Jinil is not the only hero of this story. After he left in the ambulance with the baby, the parents had to fight two anxious hours before they were able to follow them. No one was ready to take them since they were in quarantine. That’s when two young men in the neighbourhood – Vaishak and Albin – came by with a car. “Jinil ettan (brother) had called when the baby was bitten by a snake. We realised that the parents had no help in going to the hospital and took a car and drove them there. We are also now in quarantine,” says Vaishak.