Times of India
MUMBAI, Feb 20: Two sisters, aged five and seven, died on Monday after their mother accidentally gave them a spoonful of massage oil to drink instead of a cough syrup. Both liquids had been stored in identical bottles.
The Ghatkopar police have registered a case of accidental death, but they are awaiting the post-mortem reports of the sisters, Prajakta and Sakshi Khanvilkar.
Until the chemical analysis report comes in in the next two days, the medical assumption will be that some ingredient in the massage oil had had a poisonous effect on the children, who succumbed despite being administered less than 5 ml each.
The girls and their mother, 29-year-old Vanita Khanvilkar, had been living along with her brother and parents in a one-room tenement in Mewalal Chawl, a rundown area in Ghatkopar (W), ever since their father succumbed to a communicable disease a few years ago. On Sunday, both Prajakta and Sakshi insisted that their mother, instead of their grandmother, give them their medication for cough. "I am usually away at work (at an artificial jewellery firm in Dombivli) and my mother takes care of my daughters' needs, including their medication," Vanita told TOI.
She took one of the two identical bottles lying in the tenement's only overloaded shelf and gave a spoonful to each of her daughters. It took the family several hours—in which time the girls returned from play and began vomiting—to realise the costly mistake. "My mother then realised that I may have given them her back ache massage oil instead of their cough syrup," Vanita said.
The girls' grandmother, Vasantha Mahadik, told TOI that she had got her massage oil from Sant Muktabai Municipal General Hospital, Ghatkopar (W). "I added mustard oil as the doctors there had directed me to do," she said. When the girls started vomiting violently, the family rushed to look for a doctor.
"Being Sunday, our local doctors were not around. But we managed to find a doctor who gave them an anti-vomit medication," recalled the mother, adding that, however, it didn't help for long. Prajakya and Sakshi slept for a while before waking up with breathlessness following which the family rushed them to Rajawadi Hospital.
"The girls were brought at 2 am on Monday and were gasping," said Dr Pawan Rai from the hospital. While the younger child passed away within 30 minutes, the older one struggled for another two hours.
A senior doctor from the hospital who didn't want to be identified said the chemicals in the massage oil had obviously spread throughout their bodies in the 12-hour span. "Small doses of chemicals that may prove poisonous to humans normally take longer than 12 hours to act, but given the fact that they were children and had possibly ingested something else that must have interacted with the chemicals, their death seems to have been hastened," a forensic expert said.