The world's oldest mother

Randeep Ramesh meets Rajo Devi Lohan, the Indian woman who,
in November, gave birth to her first child - at the age of 70 Randeep Ramesh

Baba Ram and Rajo Devi Lohan, with baby Naveen. Photograph: Amit Bhargava/Corbis

Until two months ago, few outsiders bothered to visit Alewa, a dusty village in north India, surrounded for miles by little more than fields of wheat and potholed roads. But since late last year there has been a swelling stream of visitors - a pilgrimage to the site of a biological wonder of the world or, depending on your point of view, a fusion of social taboo and science.

For the visitors have been coming to see Alewa's newest resident, a baby girl named Naveen Lohan. At first glance there is little to distinguish Naveen from the 25 million babies born each year in India. Two months old, an ebony fuzz of hair covers her head, she has hazel skin and black eyes. From beneath the folds of an oversized yellow and red striped woollen jumpsuit, she appears unmoved by the world around her - but then she is absorbed in other things, suckling noiselessly from her mother's breast.

And while Naveen sucks, her nursing parent is the star of the show. Rajo Devi Lohan was 70 when she gave birth last November, making her the world's oldest known first-time mother. Her features are sharp and angular, her frame light and bony. And although when she stands up her back is bent, she holds her daughter with great tenderness.

"We have waited for more than 40 years for this child," she says, stroking Naveen's cheek. "It was God's gift to us that she arrived." She also says that she plans to breastfeed her "for at least three years". And, who knows, maybe she will.

Before Naveen came along, the baby-shaped hole in the Lohans' life was a source of public shame and anguish. For years Rajo Devi and Baba Ram, her 72-year-old husband, had endured village gossip and avoided neighbours at local weddings and festivals. The pressure to preserve their family's honour, part of India's village code, was so great that friends and family urged the couple to separate. "Everyone kept telling Baba to leave me, to get someone who could have children," says Rajo Devi.

Baba Ram says his family had prayed for decades for a child. He met his wife when they were still children themselves. Their arranged marriage in 1950 took place in a country that itself had just been born. Baba Ram was 14 and Rajo Devi was 12. For the next 15 years they tried and failed to start a family. They visited local quacks, took herbal medicines, sought blessings from the high priests of the area's biggest temples. Nothing worked. Finally, in despair, Baba Ram returned to his in-laws' house and demanded something be done.

To placate him and the gods, he was given the hand of Rajo Devi's sister, Omni. She was eight years younger than Rajo Devi but she, too, proved unable to have children. Resigned to their fate, Baba Ram and his two wives put aside their hopes and concentrated instead on building a shared life together. They built a brick house for themselves and their buffalos. The family ate and slept upstairs and the livestock did the same downstairs. "We were known as people who could not have children. It is not a good thing in the village," says Baba Ram. "Family means children in our culture."

In Alewa, turbaned men sit in groups smoking hookah pipes, buffalo are hosed off in the middle of stone-laid roads and dogs catch the mid-morning rays of an Indian winter sun. Although just 100 miles from Delhi, the village is cut off from the hustle and mores of modern life. Most of its 200 families live instead by a centuries-old order built around harvests, religious festivals and caste hierarchies.

Rajo Devi has few possessions apart from an old television. Even her shirts are shared with her husband. Neither she nor Baba Ram can read or write, so they had never heard of the revolution that had taken place in fertility science since they first started trying for a baby. But, luckily for them, a neighbour had read about a 60-year-old woman who had had twins through IVF in a nearby hospital. He told the Lohans about the new "medicine", and they duly went to see the "miracle family", who lived 25 miles away. "They told us that you have tests and take medicines and then you have a baby. We had never heard of such a thing," says Rajo Devi.

In fact, Naveen was the result of a collision of technology, light regulation and money. India's medical culture emphasises the mother's right to create life rather than the rights of a child. Unlike their counterparts in Britain, Indian doctors do not need to take into account a mother's age, only her physique. There are no legal restrictions on the number of eggs that can be implanted. Although it is 30 years since IVF arrived in India, there is still not a single law governing fertility treatment.

Determined to repeat the feat of their new acquaintances, the Lohans sold two buffalos, took a government loan and mortgaged their rice, wheat and sugar-cane crops. With 175,000 rupees (£2,500) the trio were ready to embark on the treatment themselves. Such is the spread of IVF in India that they had only to travel 30 miles to the nearest big town, Hisar, to find a doctor willing to treat them.

First the Lohans bought an egg from a donor. According to the doctor who treated the family, they were unconcerned about the donor's identity. "It was from a good local girl," he says. "They did not ask who."

Dr Anurag Bishnoi runs a private clinic in the leafy back streets of Hisar. He inherited the practice, rather optimistically called the National Fertility Centre, from his father. He says the clinic gets 50 patients a day, adding that "moral questions about rights and wrongs do not delay us".

"The social stigma of childlessness is very terrible in India," says the doctor. "We have had cases of people feeling suicidal about it. Age is not the issue, it is whether the mother is tough enough physically and mentally."

When the Lohans turned up, the doctor first tested Omni, the younger of the two women. But Bishnoi says she had high blood pressure. "So the only option for the Lohans was for the older woman to be the mother. She had no problems, she could walk, and she was determined."

Decades of heavy smoking, however, had rendered Baba's sperm unable to penetrate the outer skin of the egg - it had to be injected directly for fertilisation, a procedure that carries an inherent risk of "genetic abnormalities". The embryo, which Bishnoi says was "normal", was then implanted into Rajo Devi's womb.

And so Rajo Devi entered her 70s with severe morning sickness. For the first month she continued to work outside in the sun cutting sugar cane but doctors advised her to stop. "I had no backache or knee problems." she says. "In the village we grow strong with hard work. If I sat in a chair all day for my life I would have had problems when pregnant."

But eight weeks before her baby was due a routine ultrasound scan showed Rajo Devi was in danger of losing her child. She lost three litres of blood; a surgical team was on standby to remove her uterus. In the end, Rajo Devi avoided a hysterectomy, but she had to remain in hospital for a month. The baby, delivered by caesarean section, was light, at 3lb 5oz, but safe and well. The 70-year-old wears the traumatic experience as a badge of her hardiness. She bristles when asked whether an apparently frail and elderly woman should have been allowed to give birth.

"I am strong. I used to work 12 hours every day in the fields. The doctor told me I have the strength of someone half my age. Even when I am 80 I will be able to catch Naveen if she runs away," she says, cracking a toothy grin.

Rajo Devi seems unconcerned by the controversy surrounding her child. To questions about a child's right to grow up with its parents before they die or become infirm, she shrugs, saying that the extended family will step in. Baba Ram, meanwhile, says he loves both his wives "equally" and that there are enough hands in the household to manage a baby. "They are sisters to themselves and wives to me," he says. "And they will both look after Naveen."

As for the fact that Naveen is the product of Baba Ram's sperm and an anonymous donor's egg, that is not something that they wish to acknowledge. "Look, she has Baba's face. And she has my feet and hands. There was no one else involved," Rajo Devi snaps. "I just took two tablets. That is it."

As for the future, the Lohans now want to try for more children. Next they are hoping for a boy, boys being valued in traditional Indian society for both bringing a dowry through marriage and retaining the family - and the caste - name. "The problem is money," says Baba Ram. "I have spent everything on Naveen. But we want a boy. Whatever property I can give I can give to him. Naveen will just get married and leave the house. She could be gone in 15 years. Our name will die with us unless we have a boy."

In the village, the arrival of Naveen is seen only as a cause for celebration. Here the miracle of the Lohans' baby was divinely ordained and fulfilled the entitlement of every woman to have a child. The partying did not stop for 10 days after the Lohans brought the baby home from hospital. Sweets, drinks and well-wishers flooded the house. Even today, Alewa's residents break out into a smile and speak of "God's gift" when asked about the Lohans. In this corner of India, the feeling is that of shared joy of the overcoming of the stigma of childlessness, rather than the strange aberration of a 70-year-old woman having children.

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