Allegations of familial abandonment As of 2011, Shanta had not visited Shanbaug in decades. "I used to go in the afternoons to see her and then come back home [to] work which became very difficult. Once my children got married, I couldn't go," she said. "I feel sorry for her, but what can I do? If I go now, they'll force me to bring her back. Where will I keep her? I live in someone else's house." Contrary to KEM staff's allegations of familial abandonment, Shanta's children Mangala, Savitri and Vinayak said they looked after Shanbaug for more than twelve years after the attack. According to Savitri, they did everything they could to take care of her. "I remember going to the hospital with tiffin boxes. We cleaned her up, washed her and did everything possible till the time we could," she told Mid-Day. The siblings moved to different parts of Mumbai after marriage, and visiting Shanbaug became difficult. "We lived far off and even our mother wasn't well. We also had our families to take care of, and it was possible to check on Aruna only occasionally. But we never abandoned her. We used to visit her once or twice a month," Mangala said. When a journalist contacted Balakrishna, Shanbaug's eldest brother, he was informed that Balakrishna had stopped visiting KEM "because of fear of pressure to take his sister home." Balakrishna died of cancer in 2013; he was living in
Bengaluru at the time of his death. His daughter denies that that the family abandoned Shanbaug. She said her father visited KEM several times until a change in hospital management made it difficult to continue seeing Shanbaug. Balakrishna was preceded in death by Shanbaug's second eldest brother, Govinda, based in
Ratnagiri, and a third Sadananda, who worked in
Honnavar. Anand, her youngest brother and one of her few relatives still living in Haldipur, visited Shanbaug a few times with his wife Bhagirathi between 1981 and 1987. He ran a small restaurant in
Ghatkopar at the time. "Every time, the doctors would ask us to take her. We could not do that. In the end, my husband began dreading going to the hospital," Bhagirathi told
The Indian Express. Anand died in 2012. No one from Shanbaug's family lived in Haldipur at the time of her death. Their ancestral property–four houses built next to each other to accommodate Shanbaug's father and three brothers–was deserted. Initially made of dried grass,
Garave Nivas was converted into
Mangalore-tiled pucca house in 1963.
Shanbaug's fiancé comes forward For years, Desai was referred to as Dr Sundeep Sardesai in media reports and in Virani's book. He revealed his identify for the first time while speaking to
Mumbai Mirror after Shanbaug's death. As of 2015, Desai is a
physician with his own private practice in
Dadar. He completed his MD from KEM, and joined the hospital as a senior registrar in 1973. He remembers Shanbaug as "very dedicated to her work" as a result of which she was posted to the neurosurgery department within three years of joining KEM–something that otherwise requires several years of experience. He said senior doctors preferred Shanbaug to assist during complex surgeries, and she never refused to help even when doctors called her at night after she had finished her day shift. Desai said he "never missed a single story written about Aruna" and believed that "stigma a rape victims carries with her and the way society perceives her has still not changed" in the last four decades. ==Supreme Court case==