Every day, Narendra Sarna would receive a call from his daughter Dipti, asking him to come pick her up. He received a similar call on Friday morning, when she asked him to pick her up from the Vaishali Metro station. But this call from Dipti, made from an unknown number at 6 am, was different. It was the first time Narendra had heard from Dipti in over 36 hours, after she went missing on her way back home from work Wednesday evening. “My daughter has been so strong. In spite of being traumatised after such an incident, she was brave enough to tell me that she will come to Vaishali from the New Delhi railway station. I asked her to wait at the railway station and rushed there. We also informed the police and local administration. I cannot thank them enough,” said Narendra. [related-post] At 8.30 pm Wednesday, Dipti’s father was on his way to pick her up from a point close to the Ghaziabad bus stand when he received a phone call from her friend, alerting him that his daughter might be in danger. “She had called me at 7.42 pm Wednesday, informing me that she reached Vaishali metro station. At 8.17 pm, she called me a second time after she reached Hindon Bridge, asking me to come pick her up from near Krishna Hospital,” said Narendra. An executive at Snapdeal’s legal department for over an year, Dipti would take the metro from Gurgaon till Vaishali every day. She would then get into a share auto-rickshaw from Vaishali Metro station and travel till a spot near Krishna Hospital, from where her father would pick her up. Sometimes, her father would pick her up directly from the Metro station. On Wednesday evening, however, Narendra received a phone call from Dipti’s friend who said his daughter might be in danger. “Dipti had been talking to her friend when she screamed and the call got disconnected,” said Narendra. Since Wednesday night, nearly 200 police personnel, along with Dipti’s family and friends, had been searching for her in and around Ghaziabad. After receiving news about her return, friends and family members gathered at the Sarna’s Kavi Nagar residence in Ghaziabad. But Dipti remained indoors most of the time, only stepping out with her parents and policemen to visit a hospital, where she underwent a medical examination. She was also taken to the Raj Nagar Extension area, where the incident took place, to identify some spots. On Friday afternoon, when Narendra tried to wake his sleeping daughter up, she urged him to let her sleep. “She has not slept in the last two days. Every time someone tries to ask her about what happened, she starts crying. Apart from giving her statement to the police in the morning and a brief account of the last two days to us, she has not spoken about it. We are just grateful that she has come back safe. She was not harmed physically,” said Vandana, Dipti’s mother.
