Delhi Girl Abducted At The Age Of 11 And Sold In 2006, Reunites With Family Ten Years Later

One June evening in 2006, an 11-year-old girl left home in Khajuri Khas, northeast Delhi, in a huff to stay with her uncle. Between then and her return home, she was kidnapped, enslaved, repeatedly raped, sold in marriage, widowed by drugs, dispossessed of her two children and sold to a dance bar. Ten years and 28 days passed by.

TOI

When Mala — not her real name as rape survivors cannot be named — returned home on July 24 this year, her mother fainted thinking she had seen a ghost. Her father, a tailor, was not around to shed tears of joy. He had died of heat stroke during a protest at Jantar Mantar one year after police closed her case file in 2008. I told myself she was abducted and killed in Nithari since everyone spoke about the brutal killing of children there," said Mala's mother. She claims she met the police brass and even the chief minister at the time, but nothing came of it.

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Mother and daughter can only lament their tiff on that June night, 10 years ago. Mala had gone out slamming the door behind her. A Maruti van stopped beside her, a couple jumped out, pressed a cloth soaked in some drug to her nose till she fainted, and drove away with her.

When she came to, Mala found herself locked up inside a room with a few other girls in Ambala, 200 km away. Some days later, she was sold to a man from Gujarat as a farm labourer. She worked in his field and slept in the pump room, where she was allegedly raped every night by the man's son.

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"When I resisted, he slashed me with a knife and burnt me with embers."

After suffering for two years, Mala escaped and reached a village near Kothara in Kutch, only to be caught by the couple who had kidnapped her. They took her back to Ambala and hired her out for a few days at a time for sex work and household chores. "Seven eight times within two years," said Mala, now aged 21.

In 2010, a relative of the couple, Jarnail Singh, took her away to Bathinda, promising freedom, but sold her in marriage to a drug-addict 20 years elder to her.

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"I was given a new name; two men bid for me. My husband turned out to be a driver. He used to burn me with cigarettes after getting high at night. I bore him two sons in two years, but he died days after the second boy was born."

After her husband's death, her brothers-in-law demanded sex from her, and when she refused, they turned her out without her sons.

Her luck turned finally when she met a Delhi girl who gave her a mobile phone and some money to return to Bathinda. But she felt out of place there and decided to turn her steps homeward.

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Once in Khajuri Khas, Mala managed to find her way home although the area had changed a lot.

"I do not know how I will get justice, but I wish my children won't suffer the way I have," she said.

Police said a case will be registered on the basis of her statement after her medical test on Wednesday.