KOLKATA: Seven years ago, Suvankar Mondal had rescued a 13-year-old girl who was being allegedly trafficked to Delhi by her maternal aunts. On Monday night, the girl, now a young woman of 20, tied the knot with Mondal.
Mondal had helped in rescuing the girl from her grandfather’s clutches by lodging a police complaint against him with Kultali police station.
Cops arrested her grandfather on charges of regularly raping his granddaughter who had just stepped into her teens then. Mondal lives in the same Kultali village, where she spent her childhood.
Circumstances went beyond her control, prompting her to spend her childhood with her maternal uncles and maternal grandparents. Her mother died when she was born and her father fled after that.
Back in 2013, the girl did find at least one person Mondal, a village neighbour, with whom she shared the ‘ordeal’ she had been regularly undergoing at home because of her grandfather. Mondal earns by driving taxi in the city now.
After Mondal lodged a police complaint that put the woman’s grandfather behind the bars, her Delhi-based maternal aunts came down to Kultali and allegedly rebuked her severely. These aunts allegedly had links with a flesh trade racket in Delhi, where they tried to take and then sell her. As the aunts were dragging her away, she screamed and Mondal gave a chase. The aunts had managed to drag her up to Patuli in a car. Mondal, who was following them in his taxi, called up the Patuli police station. The woman was rescued from her aunts’ clutches and sent to a home in Sonarpur.
She recently passed her Madhyamik examination from the home, from where she got out a week ago. “We counselled her and she expressed a desire to join the mainstream of the society, set up a home and have a family. She repeatedly expressed her gratitude to the youth who had saved her,” said Tapati Bhowmik, secretary of Sanlap, an NGO that runs the home where she stayed.
OC Kultali Suman Das said, “I am happy to know that the youth, with whose help cops had rescued the woman, has now agreed to marry her. She spent seven years in a home and has now been socially re-integrated.”