After months in darkness, she hides from light & people

The only breakthrough the doctors have achieved is to make her eat. She has developed contractions in the limbs, according to Dr. Karan Singh Yadav, the medical superintendent at the hospital, and is suffering from malnutrition, anaemia and TB. Yadav says, she needs psychiatric treatment to tide over the traumatic experience.

Gita, 21, who was rescued by a National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) team from Delhi on October 18 from a prison at home where her brother Indresh had locked her up, denying her food and clothes for months. When she was admitted in a district hospital in Dholpur on October 19, she spoke incoherently, about her marriage, her fights with the husband, a pre-marital affair and the death of her mother, says Dr JP Garg who attended to her. “She would resist wearing clothes and taking medicines,” he adds.

Gita’s nightmare began the day she told her husband that she had been forced to marry him against her wishes. The husband, Pop Singh, brought her back to her house at Bhamatipur in Dholpur.

Indresh, who considered it a disgrace to the family, stripped and locked her in a room and told the neighbours that his sister had gone mad. Food was passed on to her by the neighbours through a gap in the door which faced a bylane. When the NHRC team went to rescue her following an anonymous petition, they found her nude, semi-conscious, unable to walk, locked inside a nauseating room of darkness and filth.

“We reached their house on October 18 after receiving information from the NHRC. Indresh was present in the house at that time. We saw Gita couched up in a corner of the dark room in the nude and then with the help of a lady constable sent her to a hospital,” says SDM Dholpur DP Gupta.

Gita was staying with her brother, who is absconding, and father Surendra Sharma in Bhamptipur. Her 60-year-old father looks confused and scared when he talks about his son. Indresh, working with the roadway depot at Dholpur, would pocket the Rs 3,500-pension.