“After my dad re-married when I was 5 years old, my step-mother started treating me ill. For instance, she set my right foot on fire because I wasn’t helping her with daily chores. I took charge and fled from home, went out searching for a job and when I was 8 years old, I met a few girls of my age who were working in an export factory. I also joined work there and stayed with my new-found friends. With our hard earned salary, we paid the house rent and got our daily food.

The owner of the export factory was a very kind lady who looked after us like her own children. When I was 18 years old, she got me married to the security guard of the factory. We were blessed with two girls, but to my dismay, my husband was a drunkard and a drug addict. He spent all our earnings to satisfy his addictions.

One day my second daughter, who was just a few months old then, went missing for 6 hours. I came to know that he had sold our daughter for 1.5 lakhs to get money to try and quench his insatiable desire for drug and alcohol abuse. But, the owner of the factory I was working in at that time, helped me retrieve my daughter by paying back the amount to the people who had bought her in the name of adoption.

After that, my husband went missing and 15 years have passed by since then. I have been working a lot of odd jobs to look after my daughters and to ensure that they are well educated, unlike me. I do not want my daughters to go through any hardship, instead, I want them to be independent women. My only wish is that my daughters take up police or law related jobs.”