A mother tends to her twins. Another set of twins in Umri. Telegraph pictures

Allahabad, Nov. 1: When Nasir emerged 10 minutes after saying he would show his newborn twins, he just walked past. Without even a cursory look.

?Didn?t you promise to show me your twin sons?? he was asked.

Nasir stopped. ?Me? My twins?? Then his face cleared. ?Oh no, my brother might have told you. He is coming.?

Minutes later, Bashir appeared with his newborns.

Visit Umri, on the outskirts of Allahabad, and the comedy of errors unfolds. But visitors are not the only ones to have been taken in.

Abdul Adud, so goes the story, once challenged a passing sweet seller he would eat up 2 kg of gulab jamuns the man was carrying. If he failed, the 16-year-old said, he would pay him Rs 1,000.

The amused sweet seller accepted the challenge. In 10 minutes, Adud finished half the sweets and then excused himself saying he would be back in two minutes. His twin brother Rohan, who was at home, changed into his brother?s T-shirt and then cleaned up the rest of the gulab jamuns in six minutes.

With its high population of twins, Umri has made it to science and medical journals across the world. Better known as Mohammadpur Umri, the sleepy village on the fringes of Bamroli airport in Allahabad is home to about 200 families. Nearly all have twins.

The last one year has seen frequent visits by geneticists and specialists in DNA mapping, though residents say the birth rate of twins was high even 10 years ago. Today, go to the village any time and there is talk of a doctor from abroad who came knocking.

But if the phenomenon ended Umri?s anonymity, it has brought sorrow, too. ?Last month, a woman died while giving birth to twins. The babies, however, are alive,? said Rehan Farhan, a father of two children.

There is also the financial strain of feeding two mouths. Most residents are either farmers or sharecroppers, while some have dairies which they run from home.

?Most of the families here lead a hand-to-mouth existence and often twins born unexpectedly to a couple become a nightmare. We just don?t have enough money to take care of the twins and bring them up properly,? said Rehan Ayesa, a 34-year-old housewife who gave birth to twins recently.

According to the villagers, there are about 60 couples whose twins are between two and 12. While the older ones have shifted to other cities for business, some of the young twins are knocking on Mumbai?s film industry for jobs as extras.

Scientists who visited the village and took blood samples have focused their research on the genetic make-up of the residents.

?The only comparison of this village that I can make is with a Scandinavian village that reported large number of twins about three decades back. But the rate of twins produced in Umri is almost three times more than the village in Scandinavia,? said Dr Lalji Singh, the director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad.

According to a survey by the institute, Umri?s population of 800 has nearly 120 twins. The oldest twin met by the CCMB team was 38 years old.

Chandak, another researcher from the institute, said blood samples are being analysed to understand the DNA background of the residents.

The researchers said village elders may have given them a clue when they revealed that most residents marry within the village.

Normally, scientists say, there is only one chance in 80 that a mother gives birth to twins. Besides, only one in 240 are identical. But in Umri, the number of identical twins is also high.

During its survey, the CCMB team also found one family with 10 children, four of whom were twins, all of them girls. This also, Singh said, was ?a very rare event?.