On November 27, 1973, 25-year-old Aruna Shanbaug, then a nurse working at Mumbai’s KEM hospital, was attacked by ward boy Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki. She was changing her clothes in the hospital basement when Walmiki first choked her with a dog collar, then raped her anally and robbed her. With that incident, her life got over. Her dream of getting married to her doctor fiancee lay shattered. She went into coma, only to emerge dead after 42 years of an excruciating life.

Aruna has gone to another world. However, her departure has left many unanswered questions for us to ponder on.

First, our judicial system. For decades, Shanbaug remained the brutal face of rape in India. Walmiki was convicted but it was Aruna who served the life sentence, not of 14 years but of 42. Her rapist was sentenced to seven years, not for rape though. That too was reduced to six because he had already served a year in jail while the case was on.

In her book Aruna’s Story celebrity author Pinki Virani says “The worst part…. He was not sentenced for rape because he had not committed the rape vaginally; it was anal.”

From Shanbaug to Nirbhaya, rape has become a scourge of Indian society. As rape and added brutalities to it have gone up, the conviction rate has remained abysmally low. Our news is littered with rape horror stories. Be it a newborn baby or a child or an adolescent or a grown woman or even a 70 plus woman, rape has pervaded all ages and all strata.

As Shanbaug aged from a vivacious and beautiful nurse high on a budding romance about to turn into marriage with her doctor beau, to a vegetative, comatose, shrunk specimen of a rape survivor over four decades, the face of rape in India, and the response to it, only turned more dastardly.

In 1973, rape was relatively less as compared to now; today it comes with added brutalisation, extreme violence and blood curdling death, not to mention, an alarming lack of public outrage to its frequency and also the absence of a sound mechanism to curb the menace that has stigmatised the mind of our youth who indulge in such heinous act with impunity and wantonness, not too bothered about the law, thanks to its slackness.

Shanbaug breathed her last after 42 years of showing the society what this crime can do to a person. But it’s such a sorry state of affairs that no one really listened to her, all they did was shower her with pity.

If that’s one face of our society, there was another one which gave us cheer. The undedicated love and compassion of KEM nurses has been superlative. Since 1973, a room in Ward 4 had been Shanbaug’s home. Forty-two years in bed and not a single bed sore! The KEM Hospital nurses took it upon themselves to attend to Aruna’s every need, every day, every night for four decades and more.

They vehemently fought for her right to live after a well-meaning euthanasia plea was filed in Supreme Court. They pressurised the BMC to stand down on their decision to move out Shanbaug and clear bed No 4A.

Abandoned by family, forgotten by the nation, Aruna found her source of life in these KEM nurses. The care that they accorded this patient of bed No 4a without any vested interest makes them worthy aspirants for the Bharat Ratna the next time the nation decides to give away one.

At a time, seven-star multiplex hospitals in India are fleecing people with their target-based approach, these KEM nurses stand out as gems of compassion, dedication, selfless service and commitment to their noble profession.

Shanbaug will miss these caretakers as much as they will miss her. The nation, meanwhile, needs to dwell on why it scripted a society wherein a Shanbaug had to suffer so much and so singularly and on why her rapist still roams free in some place not in an untraceable and remote part of India but in the heart of the nation, in its Capital somewhere, free to repeat the crime and yet again get away if so desires.