For about three weeks now, Mahendranath Tripathi has been sitting by his daughter’s bedside, telling her stories about how the police have killed the men who attacked her — or about all the people who are coming to visit her.

All the stories are fiction, as are the ‘visitors’ — but Tripathi can’t make himself stop hoping that his daughter might hear, and that she might then smile, or maybe start speaking again. The doctors aren’t as hopeful.

29-year-old Rati has been drifting in and out of coma since she was moved out of the ICU into a special room in hospital. She opened her eyes once three weeks ago, occasionally moves her hands, and appears sometimes to be responding to voices. She is being fed through a tube.

Rati, a manager at a private coaching institute in Delhi, was thrown off a train by a gang of robbers on November 19 last year. Villagers found her by the tracks about 25 km ahead of Bina station in Madhya Pradesh. The gang had been allowed on board the Malwa Express by a TTE who, the family alleges, did not try to stop the train even after she was pushed off.

It was 19 hours before Rati was brought to a well-equipped private hospital in Bhopal. She had been taken to a couple of government hospitals and one private hospital before that.

Rati’s mother Mithya and her 21-year-old brother Adhyatma were waiting for her at Ujjain station from where they had planned to visit the Mahakal temple. Rati’s two phones were switched off. It was only after the train reached Ujjain around noon that the family heard from other passengers what had happened to her — over six hours ago.

“I was stunned when I saw her at the Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal,” says Mithya.

Rati is the eldest of the couple’s three children. The family is from Kanpur, and has a small garments shop. “I don’t earn enough… Rati takes care of us and her siblings,” says Mahendranath, occasionally kissing his daughter’s hand and wiping his eyes.

Mahendranath insists Rati had raised three fingers when he told her that the police had eliminated the two men who had attacked her — indicating, he says, that there were actually three men. After police announced the arrest of the criminals, her parents had tried to make her look at the television set broadcasting the news.

Rati is a post-graduate in English and is studying for an MBA from IGNOU. She is a lively, cheerful woman, an athlete and volleyball player, who had moved to Delhi about eight years ago, her parents said. She is extremely brave, they said, and had grappled with the robbers who had snatched the chain around her neck on the train.

According to the parents, at night, Rati often feels her neck for the chain, and during the day, fiddles with the tube that is used to feed her. “Ever since a physiotherapist joked that the tube looks like an elephant’s trunk, she tries to remove it,” Mithya says.

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