In an exclusive interview with JILL FRASER, Melbourne mum Shweta Verma relives the nightmare moment her baby son’s pram rolled under a train.
It’s the footage that sent chills across the globe: a frantic mum watching helplessly as the pram holding her baby rolls off a station platform and is hit by a train. And for Shweta Verma, the image of her baby disappearing beneath the roaring train has been playing on constant repeat in her head ever since.
Now, in this exclusive interview with Woman’s Day, Shweta speaks for the first time about the terrifying moment when she thought she’d lost her six-month-old son, Saurish, forever. “It was a life and death fear,” she says. “I thought I’d lost my child, who I love more than anyone or anything else – but then the next moment, all I could think was how to find him and see how he was.”
Shweta trembles as she relives the moment. “All I could think was, ‘I want to see him. I want to know how he is. What has happened to my baby, my baby, my baby!'”
Cradling her son in her arms at the end of the ordeal was, for Shweta, a religious experience.
“I was crying. I’d been thinking, ‘Oh, God!’ – and now all I could say was, ‘Thank you, God! You have taken good care of him and it is because of your grace that he is in my arms.’
“I would equate it to having been in excruciating pain and shock, and suddenly being washed with an overwhelming feeling of relief,” she says.
“He was still crying, but he was with the person he was most familiar with. He seemed to know, ‘I’m OK now, I’m in my mother’s arms’.”
The horrifying accident occurred as Shweta was waiting to catch a train home to Melbourne’s Southbank after running errands in Ashburton, in the city’s east, at about 4pm on October 15.
She’d turned the pram so it was in a position for boarding, let go of the handle for just a moment, and the pram rolled forward, off the platform and right into the path of the train.
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