Her name is Nazia and she is 25 years old. She sits on a dirty mattress near a Muslim sanctuary and guards the shoes left by the parishioners at the entrance - this is, as it were, her duty. In fact, someone else's shoes are guarded by her companion - the dwarf Nazir. She herself collects alms, like thousands of other beggars
The city in the north of Pakistan, in the Punjab province, where all this happens, is called Gujrat - dusty, almost always covered with smog and pungent wastewater fumes. The population is almost a million, but by the standards of Pakistan, where there are megalopolises for 5-10 million inhabitants, this is not so much. But beggars in Gujrat are a dime a dozen!
However, Nazia is more fortunate than others: she is considered a female rat, and if a person does not throw a coin into a wooden box next to her, luck may turn away, and most importantly, she will not be lucky with children, because, according to an old belief, rat people bring abundance and, which is especially important for many, fertility. And in this sanctuary, dedicated to a Sufi saint of the 17th century, rituals are held, designed to give the desired children to a barren woman. Nazia is a beggar with a privileged position, since she has been living at a church since childhood. She looks strange: an excessively large nose protruding forward, large ears and protruding teeth - well, just like a rat! People-rats like her are considered “God's children” and are revered, and therefore they have long been given them to this sanctuary - in the hope of appeasing fate. Little Nazia was planted here 20 years ago.
“From that day on, we have been taking care of her, for us she is like a member of the family,” says 56-year-old Ijaz Hussain, the temple caretaker. - No one has ever looked for her parents. We are proud that we have the opportunity to patronize her. People are always respectful to her. They come here to pray and make a request, and then wait for the fulfillment of their desires …"
According to local legend, the barren women who pray in this sanctuary, and in the very
deed will be gifted children, but at what cost! The firstborn will be born as a rat child and must be given to the temple. If a woman does not do this, all subsequent children can also be born with the guise of a rat.
WHERE ARE SO MANY DEAD FROM?
Although the government has long banned temples from accepting rat children, there is always a “guardian” for them to help them (and cash in on them). The "masters" do everything. To perpetuate the myth and support the belief in the special miraculous power of the rat people. In Pakistan they are called "chua" (in Urdu it means "rat"). Rats, as you know, are very fertile, and therefore in some temples in India and Pakistan they are revered as a symbol of fertility, they are not chased away and even fed - with milk, for example. As Dr. Armand Leroy of Imperial College London wrote in the British newspaper The Telegraph, “these days most Chua are wandering beggars. Wandering along the main highway in accordance with the seasonal calendar of religious holidays and festivals, they earn their living by begging. Each chua has its own owner or. maybe the tenantoften - in the face of a dissolute vagabond. He seems to take care of his ward, but in fact he makes profit from him like, say, a peasant out of his donkey. Together they can earn up to Rs 400 per day, i.e. approximately £ 4 ".
Promotional video:
Pakistan is generally called the country of the rat people, and it is estimated that there are about 1000 chua in the Punjab, but no one knows the exact statistics. It is rumored that priests, chua owners, or perhaps even the parents themselves deliberately mutilate healthy babies by putting pots or metal clips on their heads, and thus, achieving deformation of the skull and slowing down the development of the brain, the child becomes mentally retarded. This, however, has not been proven, as well as the fact that homeless children are their "guardians"
deliberately break arms and legs and cause other injuries. But there is a widespread opinion in the country that cripples are closer to God, and therefore their value as beggars is enormous. Since many of these unfortunates are used to make money, some researchers of the problem believe that the original legend was simply invented to force parents to get rid of their babies.
WHO ARE THEY, RAT PEOPLE?
A specialist, looking at Nazia's photo, would immediately say that this is a typical victim of microcephaly of the "small brain" - a developmental defect associated with mental impairment of varying degrees, from imbecility to idiocy. Nazia has the mind of a two-year-old or maybe a three-year-old child. In general, for people like her, the brain, being 3-6 times inferior to a normal human one, sometimes weighs no more than 300-400 g and refers to body weight as 1: 100, even as 1: 250, whereas in a normal adult this ratio is 1:33. The frontal and temporal lobes of the brain are especially reduced. Hence the narrowing of the head upwards, a low sloping forehead, protruding brow ridges, large, protruding, low-set ears, a flat nape. But the facial part of the skull is overdeveloped, and therefore the facial features, especially the nose and jaw, seem to be too large. Microcephalics can be born to healthy parents and often have normal siblings. However, even from microcephalus, a completely normal child can be born. It is now known that the cause of microcephaly is a gene mutation.
A child will certainly be microcephalous if he has inherited two copies of the recessive gene, one from each parent who carries it. But the question is why there are so many of these unfortunate people in Pakistan and especially in Punjab?
This question has long been a “bone of contention among scientists. Recent medical research has shown that the most likely reason lies in the tradition of concluding "kindred" marriages here, more than 60% between cousins and siblings. By the way, consanguineous marriages are common not only in Pakistan or India. There are entire villages in Italy and Greece where marriages are made between close relatives. “But finding the causes is easier than eradicating the exploitation of 'rat children,'” says 70-year-old Pakistani professor Pir Naziraddula. And he's right.
PAKISTAN MAFIA
Microcephalic children are often a source of income for enterprising mendicant gangs. In Pakistan there is something like a mafia that “protects” and exploits the poor. And officials say many of the chua were sold to the mafia by their parents themselves. The government has repeatedly tried to end their exploitation. But members of the mafia, as well as some religious groups, roam the villages, and if a Chua is born somewhere, they give his family some money and take the child. Most likely, the baby will be willingly sold, because for the family he is a heavy burden: after all, he needs to be fed, but there is no benefit from him.
Rahshan Soheil of the Punjab Provincial Child Welfare Bureau told Agence France Presse that his department plans to establish a special center and shelter for microcephalics in Gujrat.
The department has already dispersed in Punjab more than 30 gangs involved in the exploitation of homeless children (in Pakistan there are up to 100,000). “The rat child problem is full of drama,” Sohale said. "When people live on less than a dollar a day, they are more likely to push their children out onto the road and force them to beg."
WHAT HAS CHUA LEADED TO US?
Diseases caused by recessive genes are generally quite rare. But not in Gujrat, Lahore or British Leeds, home to a large Pakistani community. With the discovery of genes for microcephaly, we realized something very important: how the brain became human.
Over the past three million years, the human brain has approximately tripled. This change, remarkable in its essence and speed, should have produced beneficial mutations that would
swept through the populations of our ancestors as they roamed, generation after generation, across the African velds. The problem these days has been how to find the genes in human evolution that make us different from apes. It would seem that the way is simple: compare our genome with the genome of our closest relatives, chimpanzees. We kind of lay two genomes side by side and look for differences. But genomes are huge. Chimpanzees and humans have allocated about three billion nucleotides, and 99% of them may be identical, but there are still about 30 million differences.
Most of them are like background noise from genomic evolution. But some differences are important. The question is what?
It was then that the meaning of microcephaly became clear. The discovery of the genes that control the development of the brain immediately suggested that they, too, may have changed in the past six million years since our last ancestor shared with chimpanzees. And so it turned out: of the four genes for microcephaly that have been found, three carry the features of rapid evolution. Yes, chimpanzees have these genes too, but the human version is different.
Now to the question of what distinguishes us from animals, we can answer: this gene, and another …
and write a “recipe” for a person. There is a bittersweet irony that discovering the genes underlying microcephaly has helped us get to know our brains better. And at the same time it showed the way to prevent disaster. No, no, microcephaly, alas, is incurable. But it can now be prevented. If the fetus has two copies of the recessive mutant genes, the pregnancy may be terminated. Some will find this use of genetics disgusting. But let's not be so categorical.
In Pakistani Lahore, for example, there is a family with two microcephalic children. Their mother Rubina speaks passionately of her joy when it was precisely these genetic tests that allowed her to give birth to a healthy baby girl. But she feels sorry for her disabled children: “God, what will happen to them when I leave this life? - says the woman. - Who will look after them? They will become … chua."
Vera HOFMAN
Based on materials from the network.