If time can heal…

Aruna Shanbaug is no more, but her legacy lives on.

May 23, 2015 09:15 pm | Updated November 16, 2021 05:03 pm IST

New Delhi: **TV GRAB** A file photo of 60-year-old nurse Aruna Shanbaug who, since the last 37 years, has been living in a vegetative state in a Mumbai hospital. The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a plea for the mercy killing of Aruna. PTI Photo (PTI3_7_2011_000075B)

New Delhi: **TV GRAB** A file photo of 60-year-old nurse Aruna Shanbaug who, since the last 37 years, has been living in a vegetative state in a Mumbai hospital. The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a plea for the mercy killing of Aruna. PTI Photo (PTI3_7_2011_000075B)

Aruna Shanbaug was almost exactly one year younger than me. In November 1973, when I was in Thiruvananthapuram busy writing columns for The Hindu and nursing my baby son, she was in the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay taking care of critically ill patients and planning to get married to Dr. Sundeep Sardesai in December. But one horrific night changed everything. While my life went on as usual, hers came to a drastic standstill. And she never really lived again.

This was 1973. Rape was a hidden crime, which was never mentioned in public because it stigmatised the woman. As for sodomy, forget it. And so, the Dean of KEM Hospital decided not to publicise the nature of the atrocious attack on Aruna Shanbaug. Instead the gold chain and engagement ring, which her attacker — janitor Valmiki stole from her — were used as evidence to book him for the lesser crime of assault and robbery.

The normally reserved young nurse from Karnataka had chided the janitor for stealing food meant for the hospital’s dogs. His brutal act caused asphyxiation, which cut off oxygen to her brain, resulting in brain stem contusion injury and cervical cord injury. It also left her blind and hearing impaired. She was discovered the next morning lying on the floor unconscious, with blood splattered all over. Although her eyes looked normal, she could not see. She could not speak and her cognitive powers had gone. She could move her limbs but could not walk. Aruna Shanbaug had slipped into a Permanent Vegetative State (PVS).

The history of Shanbaug’s living death has been chronicled in great detail by many writers, journalists and even poets who visited her over the years. The most well-known of course is Pinki Virani’s book  Aruna’s Story: The True Account of a Rape and its Aftermath , published 25 years after Shanbaug slipped into PVS. There have been many other equally riveting descriptions of her living conditions and the attitude of generations of doctors and nurses who cared for her as time rolled by.

I will not dwell too long on her story. The stark fact is that her promising young life was strangulated with a dog chain. And the man who sodomised her in a dark, hospital basement and left her to die actually walked out scot-free after spending just seven years in prison. She, on the other hand, died every single day for the next 42 years.

Following the attack, nurses in Mumbai went on strike demanding improved conditions for Shanbaug and better working conditions for themselves. Concepts like sexual harassment at the workplace and a woman’s right to a safe work environment were not even recognised back then. Reputation was of paramount concern and the brutality of the attack remained under wraps for a while. However, KEM Hospital decided to extend all possible care to the woman who had been brutalised on its premises.

Time flowed by. Her tormentor was released from prison, tried to sneak back into the hospital, was caught in time and never seen again. Shanbaug was shifted to a safe room with a locked door. New nurses took over and were briefed about her love for mangoes and fish. Her old colleagues visited her whenever they could.

In the 1980s, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) made two attempts to move her out of KEM Hospital to free the bed she had been occupying for seven years. However, the hospital’s nurses launched a protest. They wanted to continue to look after her. Dr. Pragnya Pai, Dean of the hospital for 10 years, spoke Konkani (Shanbaug’s mother tongue). Every evening she would sit and speak to Shanbaug, tell her stories and play music.  She made changes to her room by adding colourful curtains and bringing in a music system.

Enter Pinki Virani.  By the time Virani entered the scene a couple of decades had passed by. She was terribly moved by Shanbaug’s plight. She wrote: “Aruna Shanbaug is not blessed. She is partially brain dead. She is blind. She cannot speak. She has atrophying bones, wasting muscles… She feels pain; this part of her brain is a sly survivor, it continues to be healthily alive. She gets her periods, these are excruciatingly painful periods.”

The rest is history. Virani wrote her book and she also went to court in 2009 asking to legalise euthanasia. In March 2011, the Supreme Court passed a historic judgement permitting passive euthanasia in the country but also ruled that this was not applicable in Shanbaug’s case. The nurses who had cared for her through the decades said they would not let her go. And since they had cared for her over decades, it was a clinching argument to keep her alive.  Meanwhile her birth family had totally abandoned her and her fiancée had moved on.

And so, as Shanbaug lay in her bed — unaware of the world that continued to move around her, unaware of the battles fought in her name — she became an iconic symbol to whom different people related in different ways.

To the nurses, she was a symbol of hope. A hope that even if she didn’t recover, their compassionate stand would be vindicated in some way.  Hope that, if anything like this happened to one of them, the others would rally around as they had done for Shanbaug. Generations of nurses cared for her over four decades, talking to her, feeding her, singing to her, caring for her because they said, “She was family”.

To others looking at the situation from outside, she was a symbol of despair. A constant reminder of other women who are brutalised and condemned to a living death.

To caregivers looking after loved ones with serious cognitive mental and physical problems, she was a symbol of the cruelty of fate and the burden it can cast on those in the vicinity.  

To women’s rights activists, she was a symbol of the tragedy perpetrated by gender discrimination and sexual violence against women.

But surely Shanbaug did not want to be a symbol of anything. She was at the very cusp of living a full life. Like me, she too would have wanted to have children and grandchildren and a job that brought her satisfaction.

When she finally died on May 18, 2015, the debate raged once more. Would she have wanted to live like this? Would it not have been more compassionate to let her die? Even to help her die? There were heated arguments, as usual, on both sides.

For me, one of the big takeaways from Aruna Shanbaug’s story is the compassionate care she received from her colleagues and the hospital where she lay for 42 years. They did not do it for money or for fame but because it needed to be done. Imagine any of today’s glitzy hi-tech hospitals showing this kind of compassion for one of their own. Yes, there were many helping hands, unlike in a home where care-giving and the financial burden fall on individuals. But that does not take away from the fact that they actually cared and money was not paramount.

The other big takeaway of course is the legalisation of passive euthanasia. Thanks to Virani and her involvement with Aruna Shanbaug, today we actually have legislation that ratifies something most of us believe in: that a person must be allowed to go passively and in peace when life is no longer worth prolonging.

Aruna Shanbaug, Pinki Virani and the nurses of KEM have all given us some life examples that might never come our way again. Thanks to all of them, Aruna Shanbaug’s legacy will live on for a long time.

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