by ANURADHA RAMAN
Aruna Shanbaug, a victim of sodomy, is lying in a semi-comma since 1973.
In a room strictly off bounds for all except those attending on her, Aruna Shanbaug lies alone. Her eyes are open and staring vacantly into space. She has been lying this way, in a twilight zone between life and death, since the night of November 27, 1973, when she was attacked by a ward boy who tied a dog chain around her neck, cutting off air supply to parts of her brain, and sodomised her in the basement of Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial hospital, where she worked as a nurse. A woman, a senior nurse at the hospital, enters the deathly calm of the hospital room and approaches her prone form. Her own time at KEM now drawing to an end, she has something to say to Aruna. Bending down, she whispers gently into her ear: “Tomorrow is my last day at work and I don’t know who will attend to you after I am gone. My dear, I need you to go on a long sleep today.”
That was the last scene from the Marathi play, Katha Arunachi (Aruna’s Life), directed by Vinay Apte. Telling the true story of Aruna Shanbaug, it was staged 12 years ago and ran for three months. Though the original script ended inconclusively, Apte recalls, he “wanted to put an end to Aruna’s misery” and that’s why the last scene ended as it did. But what a stage director could do, society and the state cannot. The right to live is enshrined in the Indian Constitution; to wilfully take away life is a criminal act. Had she helped her die, Aruna’s nurse in the play would have been guilty of culpable homicide.
And so the real Aruna still lies, 36-plus years after being subjected to a horrific attack that rendered her partially brain-dead, in a semi-coma in her bed at KEM, unable to see, speak, walk or even move her hands. Kept alive by the force-feeding of mashed food, she has earned, just by lying there, decade after decade, the tragic record of being the world’s longest-staying patient in any hospital.
But now, finally, the ending Apte crafted for his play is being sought, through a legal mandate, for the real-life Aruna. On March 2, the Supreme Court is slated to hear a petition filed by activist-journalist Pinki Virani, who has written a book highlighting Aruna’s plight and is now seeking the court’s intervention to direct KEM to stop feeding Aruna Shanbaug, and release her from the prison of her life. Pinki’s petition before the apex court states: “Aruna cannot be said to exist in the sense a human being is supposed to live. She is virtually a skeleton.”
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