“We want to continue to look after Aruna.” This is what the nurses of KEM Hospital have written in a letter to the civic body.

The letter, submitted to Additional Municipal Commissioner Manisha Mhaiskar last week, made it clear that the staffers are happy to care for the former nurse, Aruna Shanbaug, who has been in a vegetative state for the past 36 years.

“They have also written that Shanbaug has some cognitive faculties. She is able to recognise people,” said Mhaiskar.

Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued notices to the Centre and Maharashtra government, in a petition filed by author Pinky Virani, requesting that Shanbaug be allowed to die. Virani’s lawyer Shekhar Naphade had argued that Shanbuag should not be force-fed as her life was worse than an “animal existence”.

Mhaiskar said she had not received any directives from the state or the SC yet.

Shanbaug (59) had suffered complete paralysis after a ward boy sodomised and assaulted her in 1973. She has been lying on a bed in a tiny room outside Ward Number 4 at KEM Hospital since the incident.