CHENNAI: For five nights, Kedar Juanga (43) and his wife have slept on a row of steel chairs outside the intensive care unit on the second floor of Venkateswara Hospital in Tiruvallur district. Their only child, 21-year-old Sima, lies connected to a ventilator, her right hand in plaster and her left tied to the bed frame to stop her pulling free the tubes keeping her alive.
Sima fell victim to the ammonia leak on June 21 at the St Peter and Paul Sea Food Export Private Limited where she worked. She has been unable to breathe unaided since.
She was also two months pregnant at the time of the leak; doctors have warned her family that the pregnancy may need to be terminated if her condition does not improve. On Tuesday, she was rushed to Rajiv Gandhi General Hospital after her condition deteriorated.
Kedar and his wife travelled from their village in Keonjhar district in Odisha to see their daughter with no knowledge of Tamil or English and little cash.
They traced Sima in the hospital only after first visiting the factory and then the relief camp where other workers are housed. Sima had married a man from a different village in their home district — a match he had initially opposed.
Kedar, who farms for a living, said two days of auto fares and food wiped out his savings; he has since asked a friend back home to wire more money. Of the five workers from the leak still in the ICU, Kedar said his daughter’s is the only family to have made the journey.
He believes the others could not afford to travel. In their absence, he has been helping the other patients, including a young worker suffering a persistent cough who has been asking him for chewing tobacco. Kedar claimed neither the TN nor Odisha government had made contact with the family. “We just want to take her home when she is fine,” he said.