Mariya Munaf Dumasia, 21, of Surat, daughter of a single parent Mubina Dumasia, a lawyer by profession, left Surat around five years ago enrolling in the Sumy state university in Ukraine to study medicine. She is among the 700 students stranded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mariya's mother Mubina tells The Indian Express, “We heard that a luxury bus taking the students to the Russian border from Sumy State University hostels was asked to turn back as there was an attack in a nearby area. So for the safety of the students, the bus driver took turns and dropped them at the hostel. The hope to meet my daughter dashed again. We came to know that majority of the students from other states except Sumy state in Ukraine, have safely returned to India. We hope that soon the students of Sumy state will return.” Parents like Mubina, who struggled to send their children to Ukraine to study medicine, are now anxiously waiting to see them back. Mubina recalls how one day in 2018 Mariya had called them from Sumy and during the call her father Munaf, an accident survivor, had a brain stroke and collapsed. “Mariya was talking to me and my husband. Suddenly, something went wrong, and my husband Munaf had a brain stroke, and he collapsed on the floor from the chair, while talking to her and passed away. This entire incident she saw on the video call. She did not cry in front of us, but we know that after the phone got disconnected, she would have definitely cried a lot", Mubina says. Mariya’s father Munaf was bedridden for almost 4 years after an accident in 2014. Her mother, a Commerce graduate and homemaker, went on to study law and practises in the district court. “All the students are presently staying in the bunker in the hostel area and local Ukrainians are supporting them with food and water and other essential items", says Mubina, who has sent emails to Prime minister Narendra Modi, Union Home minister Amit Shah and Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel requesting early rescue of the stranded students. Mubina recently met BJP state president CR Paatil who spoke to Mariya on a video call and asked her to "be patient" adding " all the necessary procedures of eviction are in due process,". She says proudly how Mariya topped the university in third year, and got 97 percentile in Class 12 boards and scored 360 marks in the NEET exam. "At this young age she had witnessed a war", says Mubina whose son in now in Class 12. Putting up a brave face is Devisinh Chauhan, father of 19-year-old Bavendrasinh from Himmatnagar, who is still stuck in war-torn Ukraine. In videos sent by his son, who is in a bunker, he has heard bomb shelling, which has added to his anxiety. "All nine students from our Sabarkantha district had returned home except my son. It gets tough to console my 75-year-old father who keeps asking about Bavendra.It certainly makes us feel scared and helpless to know that they are not getting food to eat or water to drink and when we saw videos from his bunker where we could hear the bombing. They have run out of money too. I have nothing else but to keep a strong face because if I will break down who will support my family then?. My son too tries to give us strength by saying that we should think that he is in the army," says Chauhan who runs a construction business. In the wee hours of March 3, Bavendrasinh along with the group of over 700 students walked down over 20 km to reach Pisochyn from Kharkiv. After waiting anxiously for four days, on Sunday, March 6 late night they were boarded on buses and taken to the Romania border which they crossed around 1 pm Monday. "We have been put in a camp in Romania which looks like a sports complex. Now we are waiting for our evacuation flight," says Bavendrasinh, a third-year medical student at Kharkiv. More than 700 students were camping at the Pisochyn base including around 20 from Gujarat while others are from states like Punjab, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. In the last two days, they were transported in buses to cross borders. The group of 170 students from Kharkiv which Bavendrasinh was a part of had left their bunkers in Kharkiv where they had taken refuge for six days before walking down to Kharkiv railway station to board a train as directed.
