An endearing smile little Hiba Jan beamed while waiting to been seen by a doctor on Wednesday belied what had befallen the 19-month-old a couple of days earlier when metal pellets fired by government forces pierced her eye.
Hiba’s parents had brought her to SMHS Hospital for a check-up of her right eye, ruptured by a pellet on Sunday at her home in Kaprin Shopian.
Three days after the injury, the padding on her eye had been removed, revealing swollen lids and a bloodshot eyeball. Red streaks ran all the way from her pupil to the corner of her eye. The pain seemed to have gone.
Waiting for her turn in ophthalmology OPD at the hospital, Hiba was surrounded by many attendants who had seen her on Sunday inside the ward where they accompanied other pellet injured people from Shopian.
“She is the one, the youngest pellet victim,” they whispered to each other.
Gradually, the dark waiting area started filling with people with their eyes bandaged, or wearing dark glasses. Unlike any of them, Hiba smiled, chirped, played with a 10 rupee note she had crumpled in her hand.
But the check up did not bring around the hope Hiba’s parents were waiting for.
After keen examination by a group of doctors, the parents of the little baby girl were told that Hiba’s eye was “not responding much” to light.
“They said she will have 50-50 chances of recovering vision when they operate upon her eye,” Nisar Ahmed Bhat, Hiba’s father said, as he sobbed choking on welled up eyes.
“My world has darkened with her injury.”
A senior ophthalmologist, who also carried a round of tests on Hiba’s injured eye said the pellet was lodged in the globe of her eye, and it had done “everything that pellets do”.
“There is vitreous haemorrhage. First of all, that needs to be taken care of,” the doctor said.
Vitreous hemorrhage is a condition where blood leaks into the clear fluid (vitreous humor) that fills the eyeball, making it murky and causing vision loss.
The doctor said that in the two years of his working with pellet victims, he had seen even after vitrectomy, the procedure where the blood stained fluid is taken out of eye ball, “complications of all kinds” crop up with pellet injury.
“We have seen retinal detachment, cataracts, prolapse and worse in pellet victims,” he said.
However, the doctor tried to reassured Hiba’s poor parents that she would be fine.
“We need to wait for sometime before another surgery,” he told them, before directing a “short stay” for the infant in the hospital.
“Let us do some more checkups before we send her home,” he instructed a junior doctor.
Hiba had been discharged from hospital on Monday. At home, the parents found her “a little quieter than usual”.
“Her brother, who she plays with at home, was unwell too. The smoke from teargas shells had made him sick,” Hiba’s mother Marsala Jan said.
On Sunday, the smoke and fumes from shells fired by government forces near her house had started choking the inmates.
Marsala tried to save Hiba and her son, when pellets were fired on them at the metal wire mesh door of their house, she said.
“I wanted to give my children fresh air. They were choking inside,” she recalled, her face sullen with grief.
A gunfight between militants and soldiers had raged in Batgund village of Shopian the night before, followed by protests and clashes in neighboring areas including Kaprin where the family lives.
At least 17 people injured during these clashes were brought to Srinagar hospitals for specialised treatment, eleven with injury to their eyes.
On Wednesday, while doctors at the hospital were examining these victims of the indiscriminate pump action pellet guns, freshly injured people from Budgam started arriving in the hospital.