India Times recently covered a story that will make you wince.

Very similar to 12 Years A Slave, her story, too, is filled with sadness and exploitation. While one was an African American, the other was an 11-year-old girl sold into sex slavery.

Back in June 2006, Mala (name changed) went to visit and stay at her uncle’s place from her house in Khajuri Khas, northeast Delhi. That was when she was kidnapped, enslaved, raped, sold into marriage and widowed by drugs before she returned home after ten years and 28 days. Mala was also dispossessed of her children and sold to a dance bar.

Mala returned home on the 24^th of July this year. Her mother could not believe her eyes. Her father, who was a tailor was not alive to rejoice his daughter’s return.

“He had died of heat stroke during a protest at Jantar Mantar one year after police closed her case file in 2008. I told myself she was abducted and killed in Nithari since everyone spoke about the brutal killing of children there,” said Mala’s mother. She claims she met the police brass and even the chief minister at the time, but nothing came of it.

Both mother and daughter regret their fight on that night, ten years ago. Mala walked out after slamming the door behind her. A Maruti van stopped near her, and a couple jumped out. They pressed a cloth soaked with drugs to her nose till she fainted and drove away with her.

When she regained her consciousness, Mala found herself locked up with a few other girls in Ambala, 200 km away from her home. A few days later, Mala was sold to a man from Gujarat who enslaved her as a farm labourer. She worked in his field and slept in the pump room. She alleged that the man’s son raped her in the same room every night.

“When I resisted, he slashed me with a knife and burnt me with embers.”

After suffering for two years, Mala finally escaped. She reached a village near Kothara in Kutch, where she was unfortunately caught by the same couple that kidnapped her. The couple took her back to Ambala and hired her out for a few days at a time for sex work and household chores. “Seven eight times within two years,” said Mala.

In 2010, a relative of the couple, Jarnail Singh, took Mala away to Bathinda, promising freedom, but instead sold her to a drug-addict 20 years elder to her.

“I was given a new name; two men bid for me. My husband turned out to be a driver. He used to burn me with cigarettes after getting high at night. I bore him two sons in two years, but he died days after the second boy was born.”

After her husband’s death, her brothers-in-law demanded sex, but when she refused, they turned her out without her sons.

Her luck changed completely when she met a girl from Delhi who gave her a mobile number and some money to return to Bhatinda. Since Mala felt out of place there, she decided to return to the house where she grew.

Once in Khajuri Khas, she finally managed to find her way home although the place had changed.

“I do not know how I will get justice, but I wish my children won’t suffer the way I have,” she said.

You can read the original article here.