Wrapped in a blue towel, a month and 10 days old Yash half-opened his eyes for a moment as his mother kissed his cheeks and pulled his chin at a city police office on Friday afternoon -- almost 36 hours after a drug-addict relative tried to abduct him to meet his drug expenses.
Twenty two-year-old Sumit tried to abduct Yash in the early hours of Thursday from their house in Sunder Nagri area of east Delhi and was arrested the same night.
Police said that during interrogation, Sumit said someone had told him that selling babies would fetch him good money. So, he tried to steal the baby to buy drugs.
With Yash in her arms and an end of her red saree over her face, Yash's mother told IANS that she was breast-feeding the baby at around 3 a.m. on Thursday when Sumit tried to snatch the baby from her.
"Everyone else was sleeping in the house and my husband had gone for 'Kanwar' (a Hindu pilgrimage). As I was feeding the baby, he (Sumit) sneaked into the house and tried to snatch the baby from my hands," she recalled.
But as she started screaming and crying, sensing trouble, Sumit left the baby on the bed and ran away.
With his one hand held tightly by a police officer and perched on a chair hardly two meters away and facing the shocked mother, Sumit was quick to counter her.
"I didn't do anything, she is lying," the youth with partly brown streaked hair and sporting a worn out blue denim shirt said.
But when asked why he went to the house so early in the morning, Sumit failed to offer a satisfactory explanation.
"Ganja, smack...whatever you give, I'll have," the scraggy-bearded, 22-year-old told IANS when asked about his drug choice.
As Sumit continued insisting that he did not try to abduct the baby, Yash's mother retorted: "If you didn't come to take my baby away then why did you sneak into the house? It's your house, too. Why did you try to hide when I saw you?"
As he tried to interrupt her, the angry mother now shouted back: "If my husband was there, he would have killed you." Her mother-in-law now intervened to calm her down.
Police said Sumit used to work as a daily wage labourer and had no criminal history.
When asked why he tried to abduct the baby, Sumit denied doing it and said mockingly: "Why only this, call the video people (journalists) also."
Safe in his mother's hands, Yash had no idea that all the shouting was about him: he would just open and close his eyes every now and then.
