KOLKATA: A south

faced the unprecedented situation of a woman delivering a baby and then not one, not two, but three men walking into the hospital, all claiming to be her husband and the baby’s dad.

The flummoxed

management had to call in the police, who finally resolved the delicate issue of the woman’s marriage and the baby girl’s parentage.

The drama started on Saturday evening, but not so dramatically. A 21-year-old pregnant woman came to IRIS Hospital with her mom and a man and was admitted around 6.30pm. The man accompanying her filled in the hospital form, claiming to be the woman’s husband and the yet-to-be-born child’s dad, and paid the advance. The woman was wheeled into the operating theatre on Sunday morning for the routine delivery.

It was at this point that things started deviating from the routine. A second man walked into the hospital and wanted to meet the woman, claiming that he was her husband.

Hospital staffers, who had never faced such a situation in the establishment’s six-year history, told the second man that he was late; there was already another man who had signed the form as the mom-to-be’s husband and the woman herself was in the labour room. They then guided him to the “family”. (TOI has opted not to disclose the identity of any of the persons involved in what is, essentially, a family drama.)

Man one and Man Two immediately got into first an argument and then a scuffle. “We called the police who took both men outside the hospital. We then restricted the woman’s visitors,” hospital operations manager Tirthankar Ghosh said.

Even as all this was going on, the woman became the mother of a baby girl.

Cops outside asked both men to furnish a marriage certificate to prove their claims. Man Two came back to hospital late on Sunday evening with a marriage certificate. Man One immediately backed off, admitting that he was the woman’s “friend”.

But the young woman’s mom, who was present all along, refused to acknowledge Man Two — the proud owner of a marriage certificate — as her son-in-law, adding to the confusion. Cops then decided they would wait for the still-drowsy young mother to regain full consciousness (after the general anaesthesia-aided delivery) to pronounce who her real husband was.

Accordingly, on Monday, cops called Man One and Man Two to the hospital to record the woman’s statement in their presence. On Monday evening, however, another problem walked in — in the form of Man Three. He had a slightly different claim: no, he was not the woman’s husband (the woman had never married); but, yes, he was the child’s dad.

The cops, like the hospital, were at their wit’s end. They waited for some more time before doctors allowed them to talk to the woman after midnight.

“The woman did not hesitate. She immediately told us that Man Two, the one with the marriage certificate, was both her husband and her daughter’s dad,” a police officer told TOI on Tuesday. The two got married this April but the husband’s family refused to accept her as their daughter-in-law. The relationship was “complicated”, officials said; the man initially refused to accept her as his wife and married her only after spending some time in prison when she filed a complaint of rape against him.

“We met in a club and entered a relationship but, when she got pregnant, I asked for some time as I thought both of us were too young to start a family. But she got upset and lodged a complaint against me,” the woman’s husband said. “We finally got married but our families never accepted the marriage and so we started living separately,” he added, confessing that he came to know that he had become a dad — and his wife a mom — only from her WhatsApp status.