Sourabh sat like that outside the station just to be around other Indians. There were always taxi drivers there. He'd been in Melbourne only eight months then and felt alone. His father died suddenly when Sourabh was four. Sourabh is bright but, said Ravi, "very innocent. The first time I spoke to him he called me 'bhai', which means 'bro'. He wanted me to like him." Ravi began to drive Sourabh home to the sparsely furnished house in Mallee Hen Street he shared with seven others. Sourabh slowly gained confidence as his jobs and studies went well. Sometimes he dared to walk home from the train. Then last weekend Sourabh was brutally bashed and robbed, the latest in what a police source told The Age was an "epidemic" around western suburbs train stations. In just a few minutes his whole life changed again. The Federation of Indian Students of Australia say they know of 60 serious assaults in Melbourne in a few years. Many go unreported. The police and the State Government have a reference group to talk about the issue and play down race but it's an open secret around Werribee that attacks are usually racial by local gangs of mixed ethnicity. Solicitor Scott Ashley from the Wyndham Legal Service said he heard that some assailants had called it "Indian hunting". He had seen police and medical files and "it is fortunate someone has not died".

He was on the train home last Saturday night when it happened. He'd done a shift at KFC in Melbourne Central. That's the job his devout Hindu vegetarian mother didn't like  "she said to wear the gloves and not to touch the chickens," he said. It was about 8.45pm. He was listening to the radio through his phone. He had a backpack containing $650 in cash for rent and fees for his hospitality management course. At Aircraft station, between Laverton and Hoppers Crossing, six young men got on. "Hair untidy and smelling bad," said Sourabh. They took his phone and bag and kicked him in the head and face and ribs, laughing and racially abusing him. He cried. "It was like they were playing a cruel game." The attackers got off at the next stop, Hoppers Crossing. Sourabh was helped off at Werribee by an older man in a cap who laid him on a bench and called an ambulance. Sourabh was unconscious. He was taken to the Mercy Hospital, bleeding, with broken teeth and a fractured cheekbone. When the man in the cap left the station he saw Ravi the taxi driver and told him one of his countrymen was in strife and an ambulance was coming. Ravi delivered a passenger and returned but Sourabh had already been taken away.

Ravi didn't know it was his innocent bhai. Across town in Hawksburn, Sourabh's mate Sourabh Bakshi was at a friend's house and found 20 messages when he turned on his phone. It was 11pm. "The nurse said, 'Come now, we need someone.' " The two Sourabhs knew each other in India. Sourabh Bakshi is 26, a permanent resident and casual waiter. He lives at Mallee Hen Street, too; they sleep in the same room. When he got to the hospital the nurses noticed that his semi-conscious friend's pulse rate went up. At 3am older Sourabh took younger Sourabh home. He had no health cover. His head had been scanned but they figured they couldn't afford any more. The doctors said he wouldn't work for a month. School fees, rent, food and now this, no income. He couldn't tell his mother because she would be hysterical with worry. The next morning older Sourabh went to a chemist for painkillers and saw Ravi. The story emerged. "We thought Melbourne was supposed to be liveable," Ravi said. "But it is not." For most of the week Sourabh lay under a rough blanket on a bottom bunk. Figurines of the Hindu deities Lord Shiva and Shri Ram looked down on him from the top of a wardrobe yet he began to doubt his karmic faith: "If you kind, then good will come," he said, "but if you cruel, bad things happen. I have never been cruel. There is no reason for anyone to do this to me."

Sourabh couldn't eat solids, couldn't sleep. Older Sourabh brought sodden Weet-Bix to the bed. He rang his mother on Tuesday. "I only tell her that I got hurt accidentally and have two weeks off," he said. The police came on Wednesday, the transit safety division. Meanwhile Victoria Police revealed they would send officers to India to brief Melbourne-bound students and that the latest western suburbs sting on street crime and assaults had netted 20 offenders. A helpline began operating. By the end of the week, in Sourabh's words, a "ray of hope" emerged. Solicitor Scott Ashley from the Wyndham Legal Service, who Sourabh found through Ravi, had organised a dentist and psychologist and applied for State Government money to cover costs. Loading Yet Sourabh is deeply scarred. He hurts all over but his heart is also wounded because any trust he had found has vanished. Last night he said he was considering going home to his mother.

"It makes me worry," he said. "I was so scared of this happening and then it did happen. So it is possible that in Melbourne it will all happen to me again."