Rinku with her son in the Purulia hospital. Picture by Mita Ray

Purulia, Oct. 7: Call it providence or a pleasant surprise, but it was horror that made Rinku Devi Rai leap out of a running train last night.

Horror because the 30-year-old woman from Orissa had just delivered a child in the train toilet and it had slipped through the hole and fallen on the tracks.

The pleasant surprise?

The mother survived after the leap, with a few scratches. Her child survived too, without a scratch.

Rinku, in her final month of pregnancy, was travelling with her husband on the Tata-Chhapra Express.

The couple from Sundergarh district in Orissa were going to Jhajha in Bihar to visit relatives. Their four-year-old daughter was also with them.

Around 10 last night, Rinku went to the toilet in their general compartment to relieve herself.

In what seems to be a case of precipitate labour, Rinku delivered a child sitting in the toilet.

Lying in a hospital bed, Rinku recounted that as she squatted in the toilet, “there was a mild pain”. To her surprise “the baby came out, chord, placenta and all”.

“But before I could realise what had happened, it slipped through the hole. I became hysterical, came out of the toilet and jumped from the train,” she said.

She was shouting incoherently as she jumped, husband Bhola said later.

Co-passengers thought Rinku had committed suicide and began shouting.

A scared Bhola pulled the chain.

By then, the train, though travelling at a slow speed, had already moved almost half a kilometre.

Bhola and the other passengers got off and ran down the tracks.

They found Rinku, sitting by the tracks, the baby in her arms.

“Much later she realised that we have a boy,” Bhola said, laughing.

The engine driver, in the meantime, had sent a radio message to the nearest signal cabin.

The message was passed on to the control room at Adra as the train was about to enter that division. The control room informed S.P. Majumdar, the station master in Purulia.

“We were ready with a doctor and a nurse at the station when the train came in at 11.15pm. After preliminary examination and first aid, they were taken to the Deben Mahato District Hospital in Purulia,” Majumdar said. “The mother had a few scratches on her left arm. And the baby, nothing at all. Really fortuitous.”

Majumdar later said the train was moving at a slow speed, about 15kmph as it was passing a halt between Gamaria and Birajpur stations in Jharkhand. “This increased the survival chances of the baby and the mother,” he said.

Hospital superintendent Swapan Sarkar said cases of delivery like Rinku’s are called precipitate labour. “It is not common. It can happen even while the mother is walking. Rinku’s baby was not pre-term. She said her date of delivery was October 21.”

The mother and the child were doing fine, Sarkar added.

Purulia station master Majumdar asked Rinku: “After all this, what will you call your boy?” Then he himself suggested: “Call him Duronto (restless). Look how he scampered off immediately after birth.”

At the Purulia hospital, a nurse suggested another name: Mrityunjay (one who conquers death).

Rinku and Bhola haven’t made up their mind yet.

But will they take the same train again?

Bhola, a small businessman, smiled and said: “We plan to take the same express to Bihar after the eventful break in our journey.”