She was stumbling, wandering and suffering and her family was left longing, or rather hoping, for her return.
But when the reunion finally happened ten years after her abduction as a child, she brought with her a tale of a journey where she was sold, resold, tortured, raped and brutalised by many.
The injury marks on her body bear testimony to her claims of being burnt with cigarettes and given electric shock.
On July 25, a 20-year-old who was abducted as a child in 2006, returned to her mother, a resident of Khajuri Khas.
Abducted and traffickedShe recalled that on the fateful day, July 2, 2006, as she stepped out of an auto-rickshaw, someone gagged her mouth from behind and abducted her. She fell unconscious soon after and by the time she regained her consciousness she met another girl who informed that they were in Ambala and broke the shocking news that they would be sold.
“And sold we were. I was taken to Gujarat and handed over to someone. Since then I was bought and sold like a commodity at least seven times over the next four years. Almost everywhere I was physically abused but none of my buyers was more severe and brutal than Jaggi who not only raped me and pushed me into prostitution, but would beat me severely at the slightest protest,” she said.
Her mother added that the tool of torture would be anything that Jaggi could lay his hands on.
“Burning firewood, a livewire and cigarette that he inserted into her private parts… He was merciless and unsparing,” said the mother.
Glimmer of hopeA glimmer of hope came when an elderly man from a Punjab village married her and fathered two children, both sons, with her. That sense of assurance was to prove another mirage when the man and his family unleashed another round of violence on her.
The husband died last year and she was forced to leave home by her in-laws. Life came a full circle when she was separated from her children even as she had been torn away from her parents.
History was to repeat itself when yet again she found herself being sold by another man to someone in West Bengal's Siliguri. Unfortunate as it was, this move was to pave the way for her eventual return, she says.
“In Siliguri, I met a woman from Delhi's Tughlaqabad who promised to help me. I sold the only ornament I had to travel to Delhi where the other woman, an angelic figure in my life, was waiting for me at Old Delhi Railway Station. She guided me to Welcome where my family once lived. There I found my elder sister, now married, who brought me home at Khajuri Khas,” said the girl.
Police rebuffHer mother’s attempts to register a case were however, rudely, cut short as the Station House officer at the Khajuri Khas police station simply wrote a file number and asked her to arrange for the required documents.
“He told me procuring the necessary documents was not his job..Being illiterate, there was little I could do and returned home,” the mother said.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (North East) A.K. Singla said on Tuesday the police finally recorded the statement of the victim and would now add provisions pertaining to rape in the abduction case that had remained unsolved.
