Meet Lakshmi Tatma, a two-year-old girl born with a a headless parasitic twin fused to her body at the pelvis. Her parents were too poor to pay for an operation for their daughter in New Delhi, where doctors said they would be unable to treat her anyway.

But medics at a specialist centre in Bangalore offered to operate on Lakshmi free of charge, and a 30-strong team caried out a marathon 27-hour procedure on the girl, who, without surgery, would probably not have lived past adolescence. The toddler is making an excellent recovery.

See more amazing pictures in this month's issue of Bizarre Magazine.