A remarkable work of investigative reporting and non-fiction writing in the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Journalist Pinki Virani recreates the real-life tragedy of Aruna Shanbaug, who was attacked with a dog chain and brutally raped in the very hospital where she was a nurse, and abandoned by her family thereafter.

Brain-dead for sight, speech and movement, yet hopelessly alive to pain, hunger and terror, she now lies, barely alive, in the hospital where she once treated patients back to health. Virani’s investigations also unearthed the crowning tragedy: while Aruna has been in coma for over twenty-five years, her rapist, a sweeper in the hospital, walked a free man after a mere seven years in prison for ‘robbery and attempt to murder’.

Vivid and gut-wrenching, this is a book that will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.

About the Author
Pinki Virani set a new trend in the genre of faction in India with her best-selling Aruna’s Story. This book was translated into several Indian languages. Her next work, Once Was Bombay was among the first to deal with an Indian city as a socio-poitical entity—instead of romanticizing it—in story-telling format. Bitter Chocolate, is a chilling account of the abuse of scores of innocent unsuspecting children in the upper and middle class homes of India.

Pinki Virani took an American masters in Journalism through a scholarship from the Aga Khan foundation, which was followed by an internship at the Sunday Times in London. She returned to India and a career in journalism after that and was the first woman editor of Mid-day.