Mumbai: Sold for Rs 50K, 14-yr-old girl escapes from 17th floor toilet window

Sold into slavery at the tender age of 14 and subjected to cruel thrashings every day by her employers, a girl made a desperate bid for escape by climbing out from the bathroom window on the 17th storey of a posh Malad building.

Also read: Minor maid hit with hammer, thumb twisted with pliers

The police arrested Rekha Singh and her daughter Reshma, who allegedly kept the girl and another 10-year-old boy captive as their servants

Thanks to her courage, the police also arrested her monstrous employers - Rekha Singh, a 56-year-old wife of a business tycoon in Bihar, and her MBA-graduate daughter Reshma (35). Shockingly, the cops also found another 10-year-old boy being held captive in their house in the Rustomjee Ozone Tower, Malad West.

Vegetable seller Deepika Chandelkar helped the girl escape her cruel employers

Tragic journey
The story of how the 14-year-old girl ended up as a child slave in Mumbai is tragic and marked by betrayal from the very people she had trusted most. In her statement to the police, the girl said she hails from Varanasi district in Uttar Pardesh, but used to live with her stepmother in Dehli. Her stepmother would beat and starve her, forcing the girl to sometimes beg people for food. Last year, her stepmother forced her into marriage, and the teenager was subjected to both thrashings and rape by her husband.

The cops also arrested Manju Sahani, who allegedly sold the girl for Rs 50,000

Then she met one of the accused - Delhi resident Manju Sahani (45) - who promised to rescue her and give her a job in Mumbai. Instead, on July 15, the woman allegedly sold her to the Malad family for Rs 50,000.

Fed up of the ill-treatment, the 14-year-old wanted to leave her employers, but they said she could not leave as they had bought her. They locked her in a bedroom. Illustrations/Uday Mohite

The girl alleged that the family would beat and make her do all the house work. Fed up of the torture, she tried to leave, but the family then informed her that they had bought her, and that they would not let her go anywhere. Saying this, they locked her into a bedroom. Seeing no other way out, the girl decided to climb out of the bathroom window, high up on the 17th floor. She climbed a floor down and took the lift to the parking area, where she approached a vegetable vendor for help.

Desperate to escape, the girl saw her chance when she went to the bathroom. She climbed out of the 17th floor window, scaled the pipe down to the balcony one floor down and escaped in the lift

The vegetable vendor, Deepika Chandelkar (29) told mid-day, "Around 7 pm, the girl came to me, scared and injured, and said, ‘Please save me, otherwise they'll kill me.' After the girl told me everything, I called the security and also a few residents and they called the police. Since the girl was very weak, I went to the police station with her, where she fell unconscious while giving her statement."

In the parking area, she saw a woman selling vegetables and told her about the horrors she had faced under her employers. She also told the vegetable vendor there was also a 10-year-old boy trapped upstairs in the employers' house

She told me the mother-daughter duo would beat her and another 10-year-old boy was also working there. He had also tried to escape in the past but was caught and beaten badly. But the girl still gathered the courage to try and escape anyway," added Deepika.

The vegetable vendor and a few residents got together and called the police, who took the victims and the accused to the police station. The girl was injured and was taken to hospital, while the boy has been sent to a shelter