Nun undaunted after train mishap claims left leg

By Lissy Maruthanakuzhy

New Delhi, Jan 9, 2026: A Catholic nun, who lost her left leg and the other big toe in a train accident, says she wants to return to teaching as soon as she is discharged from a hospital in New Delhi.

“I want to get back to work as early as possible,” Sister Shaila Kaitan Gomes, a member of the Carmelite Sisters of St Teresa, told Matters India on January 9, lying under white sheets in a bed at Ganga Ram Hospital.

Two days ago, the 56-year-old headmistress of the junior section of Rosary School in the national capital fell under a train at Agra, some 195 km south.

The native of Vasai in Maharashtra was on her way to deliver some documents to her provincial who is based at Bhopal, capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Narrating the mishap, Sister Gomes said she had got down at Agra Cantonment station to buy some snacks. As she was reboarding, she slipped from the steps and fell under the coach as the train began to move.

Someone stopped the train and onlookers pulled her out from under the train. In the accident, she lost her left leg from above the knee and the big toe of her right leg. Her right shoulder was dislocated as her rescuers used it to pull her out.

As she was conscious, she called her provincial Sister Carmen to inform that she had met with “a small accident.”

Asked how she managed to make the call despite the pain she said, “I was alone. If I allowed myself to focus on the pain, who would have helped?”

Her rescuers asked her to sit up without her leg. “I struggled to do so. They took me to a nearby government hospital. But the doctors there were least bothered,” she said with tears running down her cheeks.

She said hospital did not change her blood-soaked clothes or provide warm clothes in the wintry cold.

“I pleaded for a painkiller tablet at the Agra hospital but they did not provide. ‘You will get it in the ambulance,’ they said,” said Sister Gomes, who underwent surgery on January 9 at the New Delhi hospital.

As she lay unattended at the Agra hospital, her provincial arranged their sisters at Gwalior, some 120 km further south, to attend to the injured nun.

The provincial also informed the province members about the accident and sought their “urgent and earnest prayers” so that Jesus sustain Sister Gomes with “His grace and surround her with His comforting presence.”

Meanwhile nuns from other congregations and priests from nearby institutions helped transport Sister Gomes to New Delhi.

“The Missionaries of Charity sisters came with towels and bedsheets,” Sister Gomes recalled.

The Ganga Ram hospital authorities have said Sister Gomes will be discharged within two days.

In a similar incident on January 4, 2017, at Lonavale station in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, Sister Ambika Pillai, a member of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Garden, lost her left her in a train accident.

After recovery, the 48-year-old nun returned to a children’s home she had set up at Khandwa, in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra’s eastern neighbor, in 2003.