Among the thousands of people who took the Yellow and Violet lines of Metro was a 19-year-old woman who was travelling with a dead eight-month-old baby in her arms.
The night before, she was raped by three men – the driver and two “co-passengers” of a shared auto she had got into with her baby girl, one of the men flung her baby on the median verge of a road in Gurugram’s Manesar, next to the spot where she was raped.
It was past 2 am when the men fled, and she waited till dawn, holding the motionless baby in her arms before she got an auto to her in-laws’ place in Old Gurgaon. She set out for Tughlakabad in Delhi, where her parents live. They boarded a Metro and visited a doctor who also told her the baby had died.
The bereaved mother and rape survivor, according to the FIR lodged at the Manesar police station are just 19-years-old.
She had left in a huff for her in-laws’ place on Khandsa Road in Old Gurgaon, taking her baby girl along with her, after a fight with her immediate neighbours. She hadn’t wanted to spend the night in the house, in a village near IMT Manesar, in such an acrimonious atmosphere as her husband was away for work.
On NH-8, she got a lift from a truck driver. But she got off minutes later as the man seemed heavily drunk and was harassing her. She then waved down a shared auto that was headed towards Gurugram. There were two men in the passenger seats. It had seemed like any other auto ride till the driver suddenly took a U-turn on the highway, before Kherki Daula toll plaza.
The two men in the passenger seat then started making sexual advances at her. The baby was crying but that only irritated them, made them more aggressive. “Some distance after taking the U-turn, the driver stopped the auto and said to one of the other men to bring food.
They then drove on to IMT Sector 8 where she was dragged out of the auto, to a vacant plot. One of the men had snatched her daughter away and covered the baby’s mouth with his palm to stop it from bawling. The men took turns to rape her. Each time, one person held the baby. When they were ready to leave, one of the men threw the crying baby at the concrete median verge of the road.
With the baby in her arms, the woman walked down the road and reached a factory, Pencil Electro Ltd, where a guard asked her to wait till dawn and then helped got her escorted to an auto that took her to Khandsa Road, where her in-laws lived. Her thoughts were fully centred on the condition of her baby, and she did not even mention what had happened to her to her family members till later in the day.
Her husband came to know what had happened from his father after she reached their place. He went to the police, who told him to ask his wife to return immediately to Gurugram from Delhi with the child’s body.
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