Making A Difference

Roots Of A Tragedy

Baby Eapen's great grandmom mourns back home in Kerala

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Roots Of A Tragedy
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KOTTAYAM, where Mariam Mathew, 79, resides, is a long way from Chicago, the city where her eight-month-old great grandson was recently 'killed' by his British au pair. Yet, the Syrian Christian Malayali matriarch sensed something was wrong when she made a routine call to her daughter in Chicago. "She told me Mathew had been injured in a fall. But I knew babies don't get badly injured when they fall," she recalls, her voice cracking. The next day, she got the hard facts from the TV.

The baby had been named after its great grandfather, Mariam's husband Prof M.P. Mathew, who had been the principal of the Trivandrum Engineering College for over a decade. Tragedy haunted the family though. Mariam vividly recalls the day, 30 years back, when she received news that her daughter, who had married a paediatrician settled in the US, had delivered a son—Sunil. Within hours, another call arrived: Prof Mathew had died of a cerebral haemorrhage on board a flight.

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Thirty years later, Mariam travelled from Kerala to Chicago to attend Sunil's marriage to Deborah. She recalls the ecclesiastical dilemma that arose at the time: "We belong to the Orthodox Church while Debbie's family are Catholic. So they had a mixed service. But it was decided to keep the bishops on either side out of it because the question of which bishop should be given more prominence came up."

A second generation Indian American, Sunil Eapen is dubbed by Generation-Xers as a member of that in-between club—ABCD, or American-Born, Confused Desi. Leading figures from the Indian American community in Boston, even other Indians working in the same hospital as him, said they had little contact with him.

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Yet, Sunil Eapen made it a point to retain his contacts with the land of his ancestors. "When I was growing up we used to go to India every other year. We went once during medical school and we have been once since we were married," says Sunil. And the couple, both medical professionals in their 30s, had been planning a trip back to his roots in Kottayam with sons Brendon and little Mathew, when tragedy struck.

Eight-month-old Mathew, left in the care of a 19-year-old British au pair, died as a result of being shaken and slammed till his brain turned to mush. The consequent jury verdict at a court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, finding the nanny Louise Woodward guilty of the horrific death sparked off a storm of furious reaction. The British public and press believe the jury was unwarrantly harsh on the English girl, and in the US it has spawned a national debate on 'family values' and the demerits of leaving a child tended by a non-family member.

Strangely enough, while public sympathy mounts for the convicted nanny, the parents of the eight-month-old victim are occupied in defending themselves in out-of-court trials. One of the charges against them is that the death could have been avoided if either of the Eapens had stayed back from work or if they had hired an older, professional nanny instead. "That's ludicrous. It is like blaming the rape victim for being raped. It is ludicrous to tie in our work hours and connect that to someone killing our child," counters Dr Eapen.

The lopsided state of affairs was obvious as the father added defensively: "I don't know why people are angry at us. People have to understand that we didn't bring the charges. I wanted to stay as far away as possible from the trial... We didn't even report the incident to the police."

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Asked about a media report that he paid undue attention to a previous teenage nanny from Europe whenever she was scantily dressed, Sunil Eapen bristled: "That's ridiculous. The defense is trying to dig up dirt. There was nothing wrong with Mathew, nothing at all. Yet the defense spent close to $100,000 on genetic testing to find something wrong. For a while they blamed Brendon (the 3-year-old elder brother). They hired private investigations to scour our neighbourhood."

 The final verdict on the case is expected to come from Judge Hitler Zobel of Middlesex County Superior Court by November 10. In a talk show, to assert that Woodward deserved the verdict given by the jury, Dr Sunil Eapen said: "I hope the judge stands by what the jury has decided. It seems that people have a hard time looking at it as murder because there is a kid involved.... And that doesn't make sense to me."

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