Gurgaon: Barely 11 years old then and a student of Class VI, she was kidnapped in Gurgaon and sold off to a man, who eventually became her husband, in Uttar Pradesh's
Etah in 2008.
Ten years later, the girl — now 21 and the mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old girl — has managed to find a way back to her parents from the life of
slavery, captivity and threats she was thrown into by her captors. The vicious circle of fate ended in December 2017 when she, with the help of a Noida woman, mustered the courage to break out of the locked room her husband mostly kept her in and reach out to her family.
Police said the woman, the youngest of four siblings, was kidnapped by a neighbour, Pushpender alias Teka, who lived as a tenant opposite their house in a colony near
Dhanwapur village in Gurgaon's
Sector 104. She used to call him 'mama' (maternal uncle) as he was from her mother's village in Etah.
Pushpender allegedly took her to Etah in 2008 and left her alone at the bus stand there. Soon after, Santosh, apparently a middleman, arrived and said he would take her to her parents. She went with him, unaware that she was being kidnapped. She eventually landed in the hands of Ashok Tiwari, a resident of Dehalia village in Etah. She told police he bought her from Santosh, and then anointed himself her husband after performing a wedding ritual.
"Even before I could realise what was going on, I found myself locked in a room. My husband would open the door to serve me food and for physical relations and then lock me up again," she alleged. "And whenever I said I wanted to talk to my family, he would thrash me and threaten to kill me."
In the house in Dehalia, where she claimed Tiwari lived with his family, the kidnapped girl was mostly kept confined to a room that was locked. She was watched all the time, and never allowed to leave the house, sometimes not even her room. In that state, she told police, she spent around seven years — growing up from a child to a teenager to a young woman almost entirely in captivity and facing regular physical and sexual abuse.
In 2015, Tiwari decided to shift to Greater Noida and took up guard's job at a private hospital. He brought her along and rented a small place, but here, too, he locked her up in a room when he went to work. She did not have any access to the outside world, not even a mobile phone.
After days of persuasion came a silver lining. Tiwari allowed her to go to work, and she landed an attendant's job at the mental ward of the same hospital. But he would come and see her frequently during the work hours and warned her against talking to any of her colleagues or hospital staff. "Once I returned home after finishing my duty, he would again lock me up. I never met anyone in the neighbourhood," she told police.
In August 2016, she gave birth to a girl. The maternal break helped her gather her thoughts. When she went back to work, she had made up her mind to take a co-worker's help to escape. On December 20 last year, this co-worker got her to talk to her elder brother over phone. On December 24, her family took her back to Gurgaon along with her daughter.
This Monday, the woman lodged a formal complaint against Tiwari, Pushpender and Santosh. Based on that, an FIR was filed under sections 323 (causing hurt), 342 (wrongful confinement), 363 (kidnapping), 366 (kidnapping a minor girl), 370A (exploitation of a trafficked person), 506 (criminal intimidation), 34 (common intention) of the IPC at Rajendra Park police station.
"I have come out of a hell and will never go back. I want strict action against all the three men, including my husband who ruined my life," she said.
Her father, an auto driver, claimed he had filed a missing person's complaint at Rajendra Park police station in 2008 when she had gone missing, but in vain. "I request the police to arrest all the three accused." Inspector Ajayveer Bhadana, SHO, Rajendra Park police station, said none of the accused has been arrested yet. "We are investigating the matter, and will take appropriate action," he said.
