Girl with 4 arms, 4 legs: reincarceration of gods or congenital disorder? Recalling Sonu Sood story

In June of 2022, a Bollywood actor and philanthropist Sonu Sood posted a series of before and after pictures with a kindergarten child. The girl, from Bihar, named Chaumukhi Kumari was born in 2019 with four legs and four arms, and her additional limbs were attached to her stomach.

As her parents couldn’t afford to pay for her surgery, Sood, who earned worldwide praise for helping migrants during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, stepped in to help the child.

Sharing a few pictures of the girl and himself, Sood informed fans that she underwent surgery, and it was successful.

Many such cases have been reported in the past in India and the latest one is from Siwan in Bihar. A woman gave birth to a baby with four arms, four legs, and two hearts. The baby, however, did not survive.

The child became a topic of discussion among the people present in the hospital and the staff and the story of childbirth has gone viral. In India, such infants have been hailed as the reincarnation of the gods, but science describes such cases as polymelia, where the Greek poly- means ‘many’ and melia refers to ‘limbs’.

Doctors say the congenital disorder results in additional, unusable arms, legs, hands or feet that commonly appear shrunken and misshapen.

Some cases arise out of conjoined twin scenarios in which one twin’s development fails and is largely consumed by the surviving one, leaving only a few limbs behind.

The case reported from Siwan, where the infant also had two hearts, could be due to the failure in the development of another twin.