 A nurse by profession, she never knew fate had a cruel twist of events in store for her. She never knew that she will be nursed one day by other fellow nurses for the rest of her life.
This is Aruna Shanbaug legacy. She epitomises the visceral fear that the devil wins some battles.
In 1973, she was a nurse in Mumbai’s famous King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital. Shanbaug was just 26-years-old and a junior nurse at the hospital when she was brutally assaulted and raped by a ward boy cum cleaner named Sohanlal Bharta Valmiki, who Shanbaug had scolded for stealing food that was meant for stray animals adopted by the hospital.
Since then, for the last 42 years she has been cared for by KEM Hospital Mumbai. She struggled to survive every moment as she was in the Intensive Care unit of KEM Hospital.
From that day on, Shanbaug became a resident of the hospital. So thorough was the care she got over the four decades that while she was bed-ridden, she did not get bed sores, a fact noted by the Supreme Court in its landmark judgement of 2011, rejecting a petition to euthanise her.
Every nurse in the hospital vows to care for her and they will not pull the plug. She was one of theirs and they have sort of closed ranks around her.
The case triggered a debate on euthanasia and Pinky Virani, who wrote the book ‘Aruna’s Story,’ made passionate pleas for an end to what she described as Shanbaug’s “unbearable agonyâ€.
If the laws and rules would have been made strict since the Shanbaug abduction, would there have been a ‘Nirbhaya’ and the countless others who have come under the similar fate.
Is this just another story to mourn for the lady for a minute or is it the time to bring about a change? Well, the answer is clear in every mind while we are losing more Shanbaugs but the implementation and the effort is still nowhere to be seen.
Shanbaug’s rapist Valmiki served a seven-year sentence in prison after being convicted of robbery and attempted murder but not rape as an official deleted parts of her medical report that showed Shanbaug was sodomised.
She had been lying in a vegetative state for the past 40 years, passed away at 9.40am on Monday. +
Doctors at KEM Hospital said that she had been fighting pneumonia for the last six days.
The courage and struggle of Aruna Shanbaug will always be remembered.
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