Patna: During a strange incident on Saturday morning, a 16-year-old girl allegedly took out her eyes to offer them to Hindu goddess Durga. Before anyone from the scores of other devotees present at the temple could intervene, she had already started bleeding profusely.
After Komal Kumari had dug out her eyes, she was rushed to Baheri primary health centre (PHC) from where doctors referred her to Darbhanga Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) due to her serious condition. Times of India quoted DMCH superintendent Dr Santosh Kumar Mishra, who attended the girl after she was brought at DMCH, as saying that the girl had taken out both her eyes simply with her own fingers.
“Some of the women, with whom she was observing the Navratra rituals, witnessed the incident but till the time anyone could interrupt, the girl had taken out her eyes,” one of the officers at Baheri police station said.
Residents of Darbhanga’s Baheri block’s Sirua village told police that Komal had been an ardent devotee of goddess Durga for the past ten years. She also often told her friends that goddess Durga had appeared in her dreams multiple times and asked her to offer her an organ. The girl had failed twice in her matriculation exam.
Meanwhile, Hanuman temple priest Bhavnath Jha said that according to rituals, on the seventh day of worship of goddess Durga, ‘eyes’ made from seeds of golden apple (bel) are offered to her. “What the girl did is a psychological ailment and it can’t be justified,” he added.
“Such thinking and action are clearly an act of delusion, which could originate from a distorted perception of reality. What this girl did is an extreme case of superstition,” News18 cited Dr Binda Singh, a Patna-based clinical psychologist as saying.