Amravati: The father of a two-day-old baby who died in the devastating fire at Amravati’s District Women’s Hospital never got a chance to see his son’s face as he was out of town on the day of delivery. Now, even as he grapples with a loss barely 48 hours after becoming a father, Swapnil Borge faces an agonising task of telling his wife, who carried their child for nine months, that the baby she gave birth to is no more.With tears in his eyes, Borge struggled to come to terms with a tragedy that struck barely two days after his son was born. “Chehra pan pahila navhta mi ajun. (I hadn’t even seen his face once),” he said.His wife, Pooja, remains admitted to the hospital and, according to Borge, is still unaware that their son has died. “I don’t know how to break this news to my wife,” he said, fearing how she would react to the news.For the couple, the joy of childbirth turned into grief almost before the first chapter of parenthood began. Their son was just two days old when he became one of three newborns killed in the fire that swept through the hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in the early hours of Monday.Though the matter is under investigation, according to preliminary information from officials, a technical fault in a ventilator may have triggered the blaze. Officials pointed to an earlier incident involving similar equipment at the hospital. In 2022, a minor blast was reported in one of the ventilators, though nobody was injured. The equipment was subsequently replaced. Officials said it was one of those replaced units that caught fire this time.As authorities investigate the cause of the blaze and whether it could have been prevented, the questions for Borge are far more immediate and personal. He never got the chance to see the face of the son he had just welcomed into the world. And inside the same hospital, the baby’s mother is recovering from childbirth, unaware that the child she carried for nine months will not be going home with her.
