People with gold in their veins

Thirty strangers from a mosaic of lives and backgrounds, united by the rare blood group they carry. Photo by C Y Gopinath

Priti Mahabali's umbilical cord had wrapped around her first baby's neck in the womb. The doctors of Belapur's MGM Hospital discovered this shortly before she was to go in for delivery. With normal labour ruled out, they'd have to go for a Caesarean section. Transfusion bottles of O+ blood, which Priti had declared as her blood type, would be needed.

Her husband Ashish was despatched with a sample of her blood to get cross-matched at a lab. That's when the nightmare started. Priti's blood did not cross-match with any of the O+ blood available. She was clearly not an O+ or any other known blood type.

It was January 15, 2007. Ashish called Anil Gare, a social worker at Nair Hospital whose mobile number he had fortuitously stored. Anil organised blood camps, among other activities, and advised Ashish to contact the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) right away.

The ICMR thought Priti might have a rare blood type known as Bombay Blood. They knew of a donor, but only had his name and village, Mahul, in Thane. Ashish, growing desperate by now, went knocking from door to door in Mahul to find someone who knew that donor. With evening approaching and time running out, he called Anil Gare again.

"Maybe you should speak to Vinay Shetty," said Anil.

That's the moment everything changed. Vinay is a curious man, passionately devoted to finding blood for other people. The Lifeblood Council, which he runs, is dedicated to the prevention, care and cure of thalassemia major patients - and maintains a registry of Bombay Blood donors. His spreadsheet has 560 names, carefully compiled over decades, though not all of them are donors and not all are traceable now. Other states have additional Bombay Blood donors on their lists.

To Ashish's relief, Vinay knew a Bombay Blood donor, Santosh Waradekar. And yes, he could get him from Goregaon to the Belapur hospital. No, they should only draw his blood if it became necessary; Bombay Blood is precious, like gold.

Priti Mahabali's first child was born safely on January 17. No transfusion was necessary but the Bombay Blood donor stood by patiently as long as they needed him to.

Vanishingly few people in the world have Bombay Blood, one of the world's rarest blood groups. It is frequently misclassified as O+, which it mimics. It was identified in 1951 by Dr Y M Bhende in the blood of a patient admitted to KEM Hospital after a railway accident. His blood lacked the H antigen (a kind of protein) that red blood cells carry on their surface. His blood also carried a thitherto undocumented antibody that wreaked havoc on other blood groups like O, A or B. The only blood his body could accept was from someone with his own rare blood.

In a paper in The Lancet in 1952, Dr Bhende proposed that Oh - better known as Bombay Blood after the city where it was discovered - should be recognised as a rare blood group.

One in 10,000 people in the Indian sub-continent have Bombay Blood, we are told, and one in a million in the western world. Such numbers can convey a false sense of precision and security. The truth is that you cannot have a denominator without a census, and no one has ever done a count of this rare community.

Two Sundays ago, however, I sat in a room in Pune with about 30 people from a mosaic of backgrounds, ages, and communities who all had one thing in common - they were all Bombay Blood donors. They stand together in the group photo above, precious strangers united by blood.

One of them, an IT engineer in his 30s called Kashif, had discovered only days earlier that he had Bombay Blood when he went for a renal procedure. There was a 21-year-old lad called Luksh Uchil, studying industrial design at the University of Toronto, visiting India on vacation. Being Oh negative, he can only accept Oh negative and could be in a crisis far from home if he needed emergency Bombay Blood, and had not cryogenically frozen his own blood (called autology) in a Canadian blood bank.

A father who had discovered that he had Bombay Blood had brought his toddler for a blood test; perhaps he was a Bombay Blood baby.

Having Bombay Blood makes a human being unexpectedly golden, born to save some stranger's life one day. Vinay Shetty receives calls from distant cities and countries, urgent appeals for Bombay Blood. Not long ago, he arranged flights for two Bombay Blood donors to travel to Hanoi for a baby born with Bombay Blood. Thankfully, the donation became unnecessary.

"They are special people," said Ashish, Priti's husband. "My wife's donor travelled from Goregaon at his own cost. He waited without complaining as long as we wanted. He never asked for any compensation. He just stood ready to give."

If you think or know that you have Bombay Blood, or know someone who does, contact ICMR and let them know, so that you are included in the national rare blood registry that they are compiling.

If you have trouble getting through to them, call Vinay Shetty, 98201 46448. He'll know what to do.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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