Sameer Garai after the operation. Picture by Prasun Bhattacharya

A 13-year-old boy from a Birbhum village, with a whistle stuck in the windpipe for four days, finally breathed easy on Monday.

A team at Medical College and Hospital operated on Sameer Garai during the day and removed the black, plastic whistle, more than an inch long.

“The boy is now out of danger. Had the whistle gone a little deeper, one of his lungs would have collapsed and the boy might have died,” said I.N. Kundu, an associate professor in the ENT department of the medical college.

Sameer got the whistle free after buying a lozenge from a grocer’s store near his school in Babuijore village on Thursday afternoon. “On my way back home, I was blowing the whistle when it suddenly got stuck in my throat,” recalled Sameer on Monday, after the surgery.

Sameer managed to reach home despite the pain and asked mother Pratima for water. “Instead, I heard a whistling sound coming out from his mouth. Horrified, I asked him what was wrong with his voice. But more such sound came out,” said Pratima.

Fearing an evil spirit had possessed her son, she ran off to a field nearby and narrated her experience to husband Nimai, a farmer. “She was crying uncontrollably, thinking our son was possessed,” recounted Nimai.

Since then, the boy could not talk, eat or breathe freely. The couple took him to a village quack, who “got scared on hearing the whistling sound and referred him to a Burdwan hospital,” said Nimai.

The doctors in Burdwan, too, could not diagnose the problem and asked the parents to take Sameer to Calcutta. “As the boy could not speak properly, it was difficult to detect clinically what was wrong with his throat or voice,” said professor Kundu. A bronchoscopy revealed that a whistle was lodged in the windpipe.