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ShareMumbai: Nothing can be more agonising than apathy blurring the contours of sympathy, especially when the victim happens to be an infant. On a day when Bombay High Court hauled up Mumbai police commissioner Hassan Gafoor for failing to trace an infant allegedly stolen from Sion Hospital, another instance of the cops' phlegmatic attitude came to the fore when two police stations passed the buck of onus on each other when a child was found abandoned near Mahalaxmi station on Wednesday.
Amar Singh and Inderjit Singh, residents of Saat Rasta, who chanced to find a lost and crying 18-month-old child near Dhobi Ghat in Mahalaxmi at 7 pm on Wednesday, learnt that being good Samaritans can at times be a pain. Failing to find the child's parents, they thought it fit to approach NM Joshi Marg police station. After initial inquiries, the cops, with indifference writ large on their faces, said that the footpaththe child was found on did not fall under their jurisdiction. The ball (read lost baby) should have instead landed in Agripada police station's court.
Harassed, but good at heart, the sardars closed their little shop near Dhobi Ghat and took the baby to the Agripada police station. There, they went through the rigmarole of relating the sequence of events yet again. Here too, duty officer Suresh S Kamble made them wait for nearly an hour. Had it not been for the DNA journalist, who happened to be there and exhorted the cops to find the baby's parents, the sardars might have hit a blind alley even here.
Providence too intervened at this juncture as the mother of the lost child reached the NM Joshi Marg police station in search of her child. Informed that her child would be at Agripada police station in all likelihood, the beleaguered mother rushed there.
Eventually, at 10 pm, the lost-and-found three-hour drama ended in reunion, with the child cosying up in his mother's arms.
