New Delhi: Nine days after violence broke out during the student protests in Delhi on July 20, Vinita, a 25-year-old constable, lies in her bed, recovering from severe head trauma. Stitches line her scalp, where a brick hit her, while she was on crowd-control duty near Janpath Metro station.Posted with the social media cell in the DCP office of South East district, Vinita was deployed on the ground that afternoon along with her colleagues to manage a swelling throng. “Our primary mandate was crowd control and clearing the main road,” she tells TOI. “We were directing the protesters into the metro station to clear the traffic on the road.”By 5pm, the situation appeared to have stabilised as most of the crowd was shepherded into the station. “There was a brief moment when we thought the worst was over,” she recalls.“I had relaxed for barely two minutes when the calm was shattered,” Vinita says. A mob armed with stones and bricks, which she claims were concealed in bags, suddenly charged out from behind the entrance of the metro station.“We started falling back, but the mob continued chasing us,” she tells TOI. “I ran for my life, but they were after me. I turned to look back, and that’s when the brick hit my head.” Blindsided and dizzy, Vinita initially did not realise the severity of her injury. “For quite some time, I couldn’t see or feel the full extent of it,” she says.Desperate to survive the hail of bricks and stones, an injured Vinita staggered through the chaos, before crawling towards the gate of the first private office she could spot. Once inside the compound, a security guard rushed to assist her, applying thick cloth compresses to her head. However, the deep laceration bled so profusely that the cloth was drenched through twice within minutes.As violence raged outside, Vinita tried calling her team, only to find there was no mobile connectivity as jammers cut off the signal. Left with no way to contact her colleagues, she pleaded with the security guard, “Please locate anyone from my team; I need to get to a hospital immediately.”After an agonising wait, her colleagues eventually located her and took her by ambulance to Dr Ram Manohar Lohia (RML) Hospital, where doctors administered multiple stitches to close the wound.“I don’t know how I made it out alive,” says Vinita, who is recovering under the care of her family. “I am waiting to heal before returning to the line of duty,” she says, scarred, but not scared.