Kiliroor sex scandal: A lifeline that ended in life-support

To Sati Surendran, the photograph seemed to hold the promise of a future. In the matt radiance, framing her daughter under a jackfruit tree ...

To Sati Surendran, the photograph seemed to hold the promise of a future. In the matt radiance, framing her daughter under a jackfruit tree or reclining in the verandah in a lozenge of light, she did not see the warning of the ordeal ahead.

When a relative introduced her to the middle-aged Lata Nair, a ‘‘well-connected talent scout’’ for Malayalam films and television serials, Sati saw a way out for her teenage daughter from the poverty that burdened the manual labourer’s family in the backwater village of Kiliroor.

Once the photos were passed around, Shaari Surendran went for an ‘‘audition’’ in nearby Kottayam and soon, the 16-year-old was packing her clothes to go to Munnar for a prolonged shoot. Nair had gifted Shaari with a sleek cellphone to reassure her parents the girl would be in touch while she charted a career.

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Months later, when Sati saw her daughter, she was pregnant, traumatised after repeated sexual abuse and probably, as doctors treating her indicated, hooked to drugs.

‘‘The warning bells would have rung if it had been a man. But that Lata appeared so eager to help…how can any woman do this to another?’’ Sati said. Shaari, on continuous life-support since childbirth in mid-August, died in a Kottayam hospital last evening.

The case would have been brushed under the carpet but a few days after Shaari was found but when an entire Namboodiri family committed suicide in a neighbouring district, Lata Nair’s name figured again. The temple priest described how Nair had lured away his daughter, a classical dancer, to act in television serials. Nair surrendered a month later.

The state government has approached the CBI to take over investigation as a large number of politicians including, reportedly, a serving minister and a well-known opposition leader, are involved along with the director of a leading TV channel and a jewellery baron. The police reportedly have leads to not only local VIPs but also leading Malayali expatriates in the Gulf.

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Shaari was interred in a temporary cement structure this evening at her father’s ancestral house in Aramalakunnu, Changanaserry, after post-mortem as the body might have to be exhumed.

T.B. Mini, secretary of the Janathipathiya Vanitha Sangatana, instrumental in exposing the case, feels it is a positive sign. ‘‘But the authorities’ resolve should go much further. They should get all the main suspects to undergo lie-detector and DNA tests,’’ she says.

Sati now has Shaari’s three-month infant to take care of.