'Once he is arrested, I will ask why he did this': Shock & anxiety grips Faridabad girl after stalker shoots her

GURGAON: She looked at her hand and a question haunted her just outside the operation theatre — “will I be able to study further?”The anxiety in her voice, moments before doctors operated on her wounded hand and shoulder, echoed the fear that now grips the entire family.

At just 17, her entire world has been upended.“She keeps crying and asking whether she will ever be able to study ever again, whether she will recover from all this. In the operating theatre, she screamed in pain. She keeps looking at her hand and asks, ‘Are they going to replace it with a plastic one?’” her aunt told TOI in the corridor of Sarvodaya Hospital.

The girl, a Class 12 student preparing for her engineering entrance, was shot at on a busy stretch by a man who had stalked her for months.

The accused, Jatin Mangla, is still at large.“She keeps saying she doesn’t feel safe. She is afraid for us too, because the accused hasn’t been arrested yet. She keeps telling us to go home and that she will talk to us later over a video call,” the aunt said.Her mother — teary-eyed— struggles to answer her daughter’s questions. “She keeps asking if the man has been caught. She told me once he is arrested, she will ask him why he did this. She asked me, ‘Do men really do such things in real life?’”Doctors said the girl was stable but traumatised. “There is one fracture in a finger of her left hand.

There is one entry and exit wound of a bullet on the left shoulder and there are multiple pellet injuries on her face, shoulder, and hand. She is now stable, but traumatised by the incident,” a senior doctor treating her said.The girl’s mother said they were unaware of the extent of harassment until the attack on Monday. “The only change that I noticed in her was that she changed her library after Diwali. She chose a library closer home.

When I asked her the reason, she told me that the earlier library was crowded. Since winters were approaching and it gets dark too early, she switched the library around the 27th to 28th of this month,” her mother, a homemaker, said.It was only a week before the shooting that the girl confided in her two brothers about the harassment. The brothers called Jatin and asked him to stop. He apologised, and the family believed the matter was settled.

“My sons spoke to him over the phone a week ago. We never thought such an incident would happen,” her father said.But on Monday, as the girl walked down a busy street in Shyam Colony with two friends, Jatin appeared. He crossed the road, pulled out a gun, and fired. The girl raised her hand to protect herself, taking the bullet in her palm and shoulder. Fragments injured her face. Residents rushed to help as Jatin fled the scene, discarding his weapon.“It has been more than 24 hours since the incident happened, but no arrests have been made so far. We just want the accused to be arrested,” the girl’s grandmother said.