The stone tore open an a-shaped gash nearly an inch wide above Smita Gawankar's left eyebrow, narrowly missing her eye. According to fellow commuters, Smita, who was standing on the footboard of the compartment, was also lucky not to have fallen off the train.

``She was standing on the footboard facing Khar (E) when there was a commotion and I turned around to see her slumped on the floor, bleeding profusely,'' recounts Bella Jaisinghani, an eyewitness to the incident. The stone appeared to have been hurled from the hutments near the railway tracks, and the incident has cast a question mark on whether wire meshes are the solution to stone throwing.

A piece of Smita's forehead hung loose, nearly exposing the skull bone. The hankie that she had clapped to her forehead to stem the bleedingwas quickly saturated with blood.

``She was unaware of the intensity of the incident and calmly answered questions from the ladies crowding around her,'' she added. Even as Smita attempted to examine the wound with a mirror, she was gently prevented from doing so by the women in the middle second-class ladies compartment.

Resting her head on the wall of a private nursing home in Matunga after the operation, Smita is surrounded by familiar faces of television announcers from the Doordarshan Kendra, Mumbai. In a state of shock, she weeps and bites her lip when asked to recount the incident.

``You must understand, for an announcer the face is everything,'' says her colleague Rakhi Joshi. ``She is very lucky, the wound was just half an inch above her eye,'' says Dr Ashok Korde of the Sukhada Nursing Home. Doctors stitched her injury for nearly an hour using plastic surgery techniques to cause minimal facial scars. ``But the injury appears to be more psychological than physical, she might get scared ofapproaching the door in a train,'' he adds. Smita was to go on air at 4.30 pm and her colleagues were left wondering why she hadn't turned up. Even as another announcer stepped in to take her place came the news of the incident. ``We thought it was a minor injury, but we weren't quite prepared for this,'' adds another shocked colleague Shashi Kulkarni.

``People themselves should realise the futility of such acts. No police force can do anything about this,'' says Doordarshan producer Sudhir Kulkarni.