This 16-year-old was born in a family of fairly comfortable means in a Palakkad village. By the time she took her first steps, her young mother had developed tell-tale patches on her body. It was leprosy.

Lalitha's father took his wife to Kozhikode, promising to get her treated. He left her at the Government Leprosy Hospital in Chevayur and went away.

That was 14 years ago. As time went by, Lalitha's mother gave up the possibility of ever seeing her husband and little daughter again. She met a patient in the adjacent male ward. They got married and had two children.

Lalitha's father, meanwhile, had remarried and she grew up in Palakkad with them.

Two years ago, Lalitha, who was then in Std 10, picked up apost card and wrote to her biological mother who she only knew by name, begging her to come to Palakkad and see her. The letter reached her mother at the hospital.

Her mother hid her disfigured hands in swathes of cloth and boarded a bus to Palakkad. She was not let into the house she had lived in 14 years ago, but she managed to talk to the daughter she had left as a toddler.

A few weeks later, Lalitha left home for school as usual, but took the bus to Kozhikode instead.

Her shocked mother tried her best to make the girl go back to Palakkad. Lalitha refused and stayed on in the hospital, tending to her mother's disfigured body.

She shared the hospital meals her mother got, because hospital regulations would not recognise Lalitha's existence as she did not suffer from leprosy.

The girl was finally persuaded to make a better beginning a few days ago. Poetess and Chairperson of the State Women's Commission, Sugathakumari, arranged for her stay, training and employment in Abhaya inThiruvananthapuram.

Lalitha hopes to take her mother and new family out of the hospital when she can afford to support them.

Lalitha was lucky. There are dozens of children born in this hospital's wards. Some of them go to school from the wards, do their homework under their parents' beds, and try not to let their classmates know the truth about their backgrounds. Others have been taken away by a missionary body to Tamil Nadu.

For the many left, not having the disease is hardly a consolation. Because the stigma of being born to leprosy-afflicted parents can be even worse, in literate, progressive, God's Own Country.

Ask the daughters of inmates who are awaiting suitors in the vain hope of starting an normal life out of the hospital's wards.