The joy and panache of a wedding reception quickly turned sombre in Jharkhand's Jamshedpur on Monday when a guest choked on a sweet that could not be retrieved. It was a rasgulla, a common sugary dessert made of milk solids, that claimed the life of the 41-year-old, a news report said.
The victim was identified as Lalit Singh. His family was attending a wedding reception at Jamshedpur's Maliyanta village when tragedy struck unexpectedly.
It is reported that Singh gulped the rasgulla and found it hard to breathe. When it became evident that he was choking on the small ball of sugar, people around him tried to help by attempting to remove it from his throat. However, nobody could get the rasgulla out, and Singh soon collapsed.
With various attempts failing to dislodge the sweet, Lalit Singh's father and others quickly rushed him to the nearby MGM Hospital, where doctors declared him dead, NDTV said in a report.
The rasgulla had completely blocked his airways, which led to his death within minutes of the incident. It is suspected that he accidentally gulped the sweet whole. Singh's body was handed over to his family after a post-mortem, the NDTV report added.
It is a flap of tissue called the epiglottis that prevents food from entering the windpipe, as the human throat is a common pathway for both food and air. The epiglottis folds over the trachea when food is swallowed, effectively avoiding any chance of asphyxiation.
However, if a large, solid food item—such as a rasgulla, laddu, or even a ball of boiled rice—is swallowed too quickly or whole, it can become lodged at the back of the throat (the pharynx). This can physically pin the epiglottis shut or block the opening of the trachea entirely, sometimes causing death.