During his nine-month stint in KEM hospital, Rahul Rajput passed the time by watching horror flicks. “Doesn’t all the blood and gore make you squeamish?” asked his doctor. “Woh toh animated hai, mera toh asli hai,” quipped the teenager, whose mangled limb was being held together by an assortment of metal rods.

Rahul was injured, along with ten others, when the truck driver assigned to transport a group of govindas lost control on the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road. The 14-year-old wasn’t even a member of the Dahi Handi mandal, but like many other youngsters, he had decided to tag along to cheer for the neighborhood’s govindas. Before clambering onto the truck, he recalls the driver downing a spiked Thums Up. A short while later, the truck veered off the road, hit a street lamp and Rahul’s right leg became a casualty of the impact. “Mera pair sirf nerves pe latak raha tha,” he recalls.

After four surgeries and an expenditure of Rs 7 lakh, Rahul can still only hobble around a 100-sq-ft room with the help of a special brace. The skin on both limbs is puckered due to a bone transplant and multiple skin grafts. But he still considers himself lucky. Another boy, about his age, is an amputee thanks to that joyride.

Alcohol-fuelled revelries, jostling crowds, and stiff competition between mandals—resulting in ever steeper human pyramids—are responsible for injuries ranging from compound fractures to paralysis to death. According to a Times of India report, 205 Govindas were injured in 2011 and another 235 were rushed to hospital in 2012. Dr Sudhir Srivastava, professor of orthopedics and the head of the spinal unit at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital, says between 100 and 150 patients are admitted to KEM with injuries every Gokulashtami—some as young as five. “Of these about 12 are serious and six to eight patients never recover,” he added. Srivastava has seen patients go into a coma after hitting their heads, and has had to amputate limbs when infection sets in.

While mandals may help initially, families have to bear most of the cost and deal with the long-term consequences. Yogesh Koshimkar’s ankle split when he fell from the centre of a six-layer pyramid. He broke the fall for those on top of him but he had to be on bed rest for over a month and miss work. Similarly, Kalpesh Topare, who broke his left thigh bone during last year’s celebration, will never play his favourite sport kabaddi again. “I can’t run so playing is out of the question,” says the 22-year-old, who had trouble going to the bathroom for over three months and will have to repeat an entire year of his engineering course.

For the last five years, Shivaji Patil’s younger brother, Rushikesh, was an enthusiastic participant in Om Sai Mandal’s Dahi Handi festivities. Last Saturday, he collapsed from exhaustion after a practice session. He was declared dead a short while later. “We raced him to four hospitals, three turned him away because they didn’t have the right equipment,” says Patil. “I was with him the entire time.”

The 19-year-old was part of the fourth layer of the pyramid and there were two or three layers above him. “The whole family begged him not to participate but, being young, he insisted,” says his brother. Local politicians offered the family Rs 3 lakh but Patil says they don’t want the money. In the midst of his grief, he made a heartfelt plea to political parties, “Please stop handing out lakhs of rupees in prize money.”

