In Hemda village, Warsaliganj block, Nawada district, Bihar, a girl named Chaumukhi Kumari was born in 2019 with four arms and four legs. The extra pair of limbs grew from her abdomen, a few inches above the navel. Doctors describe the condition as a parasitic twin: an incomplete twin that stopped developing in the womb and remained attached, drawing blood and nutrients from the surviving child.

Her mother, Usha Devi, and father, Basant Paswan, are from a poor Mahadalit household. Usha herself lives with a withered right arm from childhood polio. An older son, Amit, was born with a twisted foot. They had no money for the complex surgery Chaumukhi needed. The extra limbs did not move, but they pulled on her spine and abdomen and threatened her growth. She could stand and use her primary arms and legs; the unused pair hung as a medical and social weight.

In May 2022 a video of the two-and-a-half-year-old reached local officials and then the internet. Hospital staff at the Mescaur public health centre had given her the name Chaumukhi—“four-faced”—at birth. Crowds came to look. The family appealed to the sub-divisional officer. Within a day, actor and philanthropist Sonu Sood saw the footage, called the village mukhiya’s family, and promised treatment and later schooling.

Sood sent the child first toward Patna and then to Kiran Hospital in Surat. On June 8, 2022, surgeons completed a roughly seven-hour operation to remove the parasitic limbs. Sood posted afterward that the journey had succeeded and that Chaumukhi was ready to go home. By early July she was back in Hemda. Local reports described her as able to live “like a normal child.”

Parasitic twinning is rare—on the order of one in 100,000 births or fewer. India’s best-known earlier case was Lakshmi Tatma of Bihar, operated on in Bangalore in 2007. Chaumukhi’s story is smaller in scale but follows the same arc: a rural family without cash, a viral image, a donor who paid for a city hospital, and a child whose body no longer had to carry a twin that never lived.

Solidarity did not invent the diagnosis. It paid for the operating room. The extra limbs are gone. What remains is a girl from Hemda who can grow without that burden—and a public record of how quickly a village video can reach a surgeon when someone with resources decides to answer.

Sources

• Times of India, “Actor Sonu Sood comes to rescue of two-year-old Nawada girl with 4 hands, 4 legs,” May 29, 2022
• News18 / India Today / Firstpost / Times Now coverage of the Surat surgery, June 2022
• ETV Bharat, report of Chaumukhi’s return to Hemda after surgery, July 2022
• India.com, viral-video report naming Nawada / Hemda family, May 2022
• Sonu Sood social posts, May–June 2022 (“treatment has been started”; “journey has now proved to be successful”)