Kid thrashed by teacher fights for life

After the thrashing on July 22, Jyoti, a Std III student of Mahatma Gandhi School at Jogeshwari, quietly walked to her grandmother’s house, where she stayed the night. Being a regular practice, herparents Ramji and Prema did not suspect anything was amiss. But when she returned the next day and vomitted blood, they were aghast. Having taken the beating `in her stride’, the child had not breathed a word about the thrashing till then. After some gentle probing, however, the details tumbled out.

“We took her to two private clinics before trying to admit her to Cooper Hospital,” says Ramji Gupta, who runs a ration shop at Jogeshwari. “But at Cooper we were told to take Jyoti to a better hospital. So, at 2 am on July 26, we admitted her to LTMG Hospital in Sion,” he said. “The doctors say her liver is badly injured and hence the veins on her forehead may rupture any time, and if this happens, she will not survive. “The only way to save her is by administering her some injections,” adds Ramji, who had filed a complaint with the police on July 23. Jyoti herself is the picture of sweetness. Even the grotesque blood clots on her face steal none of the innocence from the child, who was thrashed for a`crime’ most school children are guilty of anyway. Thoroughly fed up with the depressing hospital environs, Jyoti asks her grandmother at her bedside when she can return home. She wears a bored look and occasionally winces in pain. Her only comment on the incident is: “I forgot to paste a picture of a train in my notebook. When my teacher asked me to show her my book, he hit me because I forgot to complete my homework.”

Her grandmother adds: “After treating her for three days, the doctors at the private clinics said they would not be able to save her and that she should be shifted to a better hospital. Now, they have prescribed six doses of injections, each costing Rs 15,000.” Adds a neighbour: “Yesterday, we purchased injections worth Rs 4,000… the first dose was administered today.” Her grandmother says, “If this does not work, we will have to administer a new dose costing Rs 50,000.”

The Guptas have three other daughters in the same school but they do not know if they will send Jyoti back.“Let her get better first. Then we’ll think about it,” says her mother Prema.