She is all of 16.
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That is an age when most teenagers you know own fingers that have a special rocking teen life of their own.
Those superfast fingers spend all their time flying across the keypads of their phones -- WhatsApping two dozen friends at the same time, posting selfies, forwarding posts, checking Instagram, FB, songs, caller tunes or playing games.
Monica More sits in her hospital bed at the KEM hospital, central Mumbai, a blanket wrapped around her upper torso.
Her phone rests on the mattress in front of her. She stares down at it. A college friend is sending messages on WhatsApp for her.
It is going to be a long while before Monica can get back to being that teen again.
She doesn't have any fingers any more.
Monica lost not just her fingers, but both her arms at the Ghatkopar station, north-east Mumbai, on January 11, near about 2 pm, when she fell off a packed suburban train, into a yawning gap between the platform and the train bogey.
The More family live in Nehru Nagar, Kurla, north-east Mumbai. Monica's father Ashok works at a travel agency. Her mother Kavita is a housewife and her kid brother Kartik, 13, studies at the S K P Walawalkar High School, Kurla.
Monica had only recently begun college, at the SNDT campus, in Ghatkopar. She is in first year junior college -- studying commerce and starting to like a few of her subjects, like book-keeping.
Other than college, friends and getting a career, life revolved around Hindi films, Bollywood dancing, decorating her hands with mehndi. And Shahid Kapoor, her favourite film actor, Monica confesses shyly.
It was something of an upheaval for the More household to figure out how Monica was going to get to college.
Till then she had only traveled by bus or rickshaw, since school was nearby, but her new college was further away.
To catch a bus to SNDT she would have had to cross the busy main highway, at Kurla, to get to the bus stop and Kavita More was not keen on that.
Distances were also longer by bus -- 45 minutes. It was decided that Monica would need to take the train every day to get to SNDT.
Kavita travelled with Monica every day for ten days, teaching her how to catch the right train and board safely.
Boarding a train in Mumbai is a complex and daredevil act. Those who commute daily can, with a practised eye, figure out how many trains to miss -- one train three minutes, two trains six minutes -- till you know which train is a safe bet to board.
Trains are so dangerously packed -- and getting worse each day -- that a slight miscalculation can be lethal.
Says Kavita, "She told me, 'I have learned. Now you don't have to come and drop me'." But ten days of Kavita's coaching, and the experience Monica subsequently gained, was not enough.
Monica made a fatal error boarding her train that Saturday.
Did her error match the consequences?
Can life be so tough in Mumbai that a single misstep by a student boarding a train for college could have had such a tragic impact on her life?
Yes, because Mumbai's local trains are the most overcrowded in the world with up to 16 people trying to fit in one square metre of floor space during the worst hours of the day.
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