Women, in particular, are rendered invisible despite the fact that Deepa Malik is breaking barriers as the first Indian to bring home a medal from the Paralympics The first time it happened, she says, she was 17. The only way for her to get into the train from the platform was to ask two porters to physically lift her from her wheelchair and into the compartment. Then, in full public view at Mumbai Central railway station, one of them groped her. “I was like a piece of meat,” Virali Modi, now 25, tells me on the phone from Kansas City where she is undergoing routine medical treatment. “Not one of the other passengers would look me in the eye. My mother stood outside clueless about what was happening. I was too scared and shocked to say anything.”

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