<i>Harrowing tale of a mentally challenged girl</i>
All she remembered were images of a cramped and filthy tin-shed room where men came and went but none gave any heed to her pleas to be taken home.
When she refused to sleep with strangers, she was severely beaten and degraded and her cries for mercy went unanswered though there were many women and girls all around.
The harrowing tale of this 17-year-old mentally challenged girl came to light at Ward 310 of Dhaka Medical College Hospital where she has been under treatment since April 4.
The numerous cuts, bruises and swollen body parts are a testament to the torture she went through at a Jamalpur brothel where she was forced into prostitution.
With great difficulty, the girl gave this correspondent a recollection of her ordeals which began on January 10.
That day she had left her Dhamrai residence in Dhaka with a married man, Shahjahan, a rickshaw-van driver of her neighbouring Kashipur village.
Alluring her with promises of making her his second wife, Shahjahan took her to a house in Savar Nabinagar where he left her with a woman for the night after taking her jewellery for, what he said was, safekeeping.
Next morning the woman introduced the girl to a youth. The youth assured of taking her to Shahjahan in Dhaka city but instead handed her over to another woman at the Jamalpur brothel.
For the next two months she was beaten regularly and the woman controlled who she could see, where she could go and what and when she could eat.
Despite repeated attempts, the girl could not get hold of a cellphone to call her uncle, the only person's number she had in memory.
All she could do was pray day and night.
Her prayers were answered when her captors found her physical condition failing and put her on a Dhaka-bound bus.
The staff at Mohakhali Bus Terminal in the capital found her in critical condition inside a bus which arrived from Jamalpur on March 31.
She was at last reunited with her mother after the staff called up the uncle on the number she gave.
Back home, her mother believes Shahjahan destroyed their lives.
Her husband, an employee of T&T at Dhaka, was murdered in 1996 and the body was found in Amin Bazar. Her elder daughter has been divorced with a child and lives with her alongside her 22-year-old drug addict son.
The only source of income is her husband's pension and the assistance she gets from relatives from time to time.
Now the pressure is on her to provide her daughter's medical expenses as doctors suggested that it would take time for the girl to fully recover.
She, however, does not know how her daughter would be relieved of the mental scars.
The mother had filed a General Diary with Dhamrai Police Station when she found her daughter missing but police are still to follow up on their investigation.
Her only hope now is that her daughter would be served justice through a proper investigation into the crime and punishment to the people responsible.
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