A Phone Call That I Did Not Make.....

 Chilling Delhi winters ... to be precise the month of February 2011... day and date I don’t remember..but the memory is fresh & disturbing...

 My room-mate (Sona) is an early riser, and as always that winter morning she woke around 6.45 am...She opened the front door of our house and she screamed her lungs out... No it wasn’t her trick to wake me up...But her scream did make me jump off my bed...I stood on my bed rubbing my eyes wondering what had happened....

 Cut To The Previous Evening- I had gone to visit my cousin sister and later in the day even my roomy joined me there...Sona told me that our neighbours and landlord had come searching the terrace in search of a girl... A house hold help to be precise ...

 This little girl barely 12 years old I thought, worked as a household in our neighbour’s house...we never spoke but always acknowledged each other’s presence through a smile or a silent eye contact....

 Cut To Winter Morning- I gathered composure and moved close to Sona to see what was happening... Sona was almost motionless as she stood staring at a girl sitting on our shoe rack covering herself with a shawl...

 We could not see clearly due to the mist and I bet we both would give anything for it to be a dream...but it wasn’t...

 The girl was actually present there and she sat there unaffected by our presence and gesturing us to keep quiet.. Yes she told us to keep quiet lest we would get some unnecessary attention...

 We somehow gathered our wits and managed to talk to her...First how did she manage to escape the eye of so many people who came searching for her... She had spotted a ladder on our terrace and used it to limb up to the terrace of another house and stayed there the whole night... Then why did she come down in the morning... She heard some noise and thought somebody was coming so she climbed down again....

(N.B—I and Sona only went further into trance thinking so much was happening just outside our house and we didn’t know anything...Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)

 Why did she run out of the house...Allegedly she was ill-treated, beaten up in that household....Where did she want to go...She wanted to go some sister’s house in Rajouri Garden..

(N.B—She had no idea about the address or the phone number of this sister of hers)

 She then took out a small paper, something like a visiting card in a decrepit condition..we somehow jotted down a phone number from that card and managed to find out from her that her mother tongue was Sadri (a language spoken by tribal’s in Jharkhand)...She had no idea who brought her there...and where exactly she would go...

 Me and Sona were in a fix as to what would be the best thing to do...To hand her over to her owners was bounding on us...So we did hand her over to them and told her that in case they kept her back..she should let us know and we would do the needful...

Needless to mention the scolding and the ill treatment her owner meted out to her when we informed them about her presence...

Me and Sona left for office later in the day...when we came back home we checked on the girl and she was not there...they must have send her back to where they had got her from....

 I felt the pinch of the irresponsible behaviour on my part...if I couldn’t do anything I should have called up the child helpline centre...but I didn’t...Why I don’t know...but I didn’t and that is the fact...

 To add to my dismay...I and Sona made a phone call in the number that we had jotted down from the visiting card...

 It was a bizarre conversation..people speaking on the other side of the phone weren’t even sure about the location of the so called office...they mentioned the name of an apartment called Alak-Nanda...they said they can provide us with young kids to work as domestic help and told us to visit them...It did not take any master mind to understand that there was something definitely wrong but we had no means to verify the facts....

 This incident somehow didn’t want leave my memory and turned more miserable... Almost after two months as I was surfing through the TV channels...I heard the word Alak-Nanda...it was coming on the channel Star News....How far Star News is to be trusted is a matter of debate but what they showed swapped me off my feet... That apartment Alak-Nanda was a hub for child trafficking... small children from nearby tribal areas were brought here in the name of giving them work and were placed as household helps and even other sort of business... and the news clip went on to show details about the entire business was being run in that building Alak-Nanda..

 I can choose to believe that the girl I am talking about is safe..that the Alak-Nanda apartment being shown in the news is not the one I came to know off...and the girl is back with her family...

 But I know what was happening was just the opposite....

 For me this is one incident for which I can never forgive myself...one phone call was all that was needed just to ensure the girl was safe... The girl had no expectation from me I know because here deep black eyes were blank just a tinge of hope that she herself could make things better....

And in the end what was needed was...Just One Phone Call...

A phone call that I did not make.... !!