Chennai: “Five years back I went to Kuwait a healthy woman. Now I am back as a patient. I can't even walk. I had borrowed Rs 1.5 lakh to go to the Gulf hoping to get a decent job to escape poverty. I was made to work as a slave there. I came back only because so many people helped me…” Mallika Sethu, from Thiruvannamalai, told reporters at Chennai airport as she arrived from Kuwait on Tuesday.
She regrets her decision to go to the Gulf. She also advises all those women planning to go to Arab countries to work as housemaids not to venture out. She has a reason. Because of ill treatment and assault, she has become ill and not able to walk.
According to her, she went to Kuwait after an agent promised a job with '50,000 salary. As soon as Mallika landed there, she was taken to a man power agency, which sent her to a house to work as a maid. Every year, she was sent to different homes.
The first two years were manageable, she said. “From the third year onwards it was hell. I had to work 20 hours a day. There was not enough food. I was harassed and beaten up. I lost mobility in my legs. I was not even allowed to come to India when my eldest son died in an accident,”she said while recalling her string of woes.
Whenever Mallika asked the manpower agency to send her back home, they demanded Rs 1 lakh, which she never had. It was her daughter Sathya and son-in-law who approached the national domestic workers movement, an NGO, which alerted an activist in Kuwait who helped Mallika to get admitted to a government hospital.
Returning to India was, however, a distant dream. Again, a few NGO and caring Indians along with Indian Mission helped her to generate the money demanded by the manpower agency.
“I also sold my ornaments. I just wanted to get back home,” she says. Finally, the Indian Mission helped her with air tickets and emergency travel documents as her visa had expired in 2013.
