RIYADH, 1 February 2007 — Despite government regulations and appeals from the Ministry of Labor promising deterrent action against harassment of housemaids, a heart-wrenching story of an Indian housemaid who came to Saudi Arabia a decade ago has come to light.
The woman came to the Kingdom as a sane woman and left as a penniless insane one. In what turned out to be smart detective work by an official at the Indian Embassy here, the now mentally unstable housemaid was reunited with her family after a marathon hunt that involved thousands of kilometers of travel by air and land to locate her home in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
It all began when the Riyadh police handed over to the Indian Embassy in November last year an unidentified runaway housemaid after the Housemaid Welfare Center refused to accept her on the grounds that she was mentally unsound.
I.P. Lakra, second secretary at the Indian Embassy, said the housemaid, who seemed to have psychological problems, was suffering from amnesia as she could not remember her own name, the particulars of her sponsor, or her husband. However, through painstaking detective work, the embassy officials figured out that she was Mrs. Beevi Jaan, wife of Abdullah, from Kalageri, Chintapalli Mandal, Cuddappa district, Andhra Pradesh.
Muhammad Jailani, a clerk in the cultural wing of the embassy, was given the responsibility of returning Beevi to her home. Lakra explained that Jailani, accompanied by a retired embassy official now living in Hyderabad, undertook the joint mission to hand Beevi over to her family in Kalageri.
“However, on reaching Cuddappa, it was learned that while there was no village named Kalageri in Cuddappa district, there were two other villages called Palegiri and Helegeri in the district.”
The mission turned out to be a wild goose chase in both the villages and further afield in Kalageri in Chittoor district, 240 km from Cuddappa, where no one could identify the woman. Undaunted by what seemed to have become an exercise in frustration, the intrepid officials persevered in their mission to locate Beevi’s family. They were able to get some information from Beevi that seemed to suggest that she was from Pathepeta village in the same district, 50 km away.
The village was inaccessible by bus so the officials hired an autorickshaw to go there. And it was there that they had their first breakthrough with the villagers cheering the return of Mrs. Hussain Bee and not Beevi Jaan as the officials had believed.
The missing links in the jigsaw puzzle then fell into place. Her husband, it turned out, was not Abdullah but Bashu who had died five years ago. She had two daughters, one of whom had died while the other one had married. The news of the woman’s arrival made the villagers very happy and her daughter ecstatic.
According to Lakra, Hussain Bee was presumed dead by the villagers since she had traveled to Saudi Arabia 10 years ago in hopes of improving her family’s lot. But when no money was received nor any communications for a decade, the logical conclusion was that she had died.
The inhabitants of the village have promised to provide details of her Saudi sponsor, her Indian recruiting agent and her passport information.
Lakra said the Indian Embassy had incurred expenses of about SR4,000 which was met from its Welfare Fund. He has promised the embassy’s full support in tracing the Saudi sponsor and recovering her rightful dues.
