24 yrs after she was sold, a daughter tracks her father down to a teashop

That phone call had changed her life forever. She had found her father, after 24 years.

At the other end, the private detective handed over the phone to Ibrahim Sherrif, 65, deaf and mute, working as a cleaner in a small eat-out near the bustling town square in Arcot, near Vellore, 130 km north of Chennai.

“He cannot hear nor speak. But I am sure he heard my voice,” Naseema told The Sunday Express on phone from Jeddah. “He began to utter noises. I understood how he felt.”

It’s an incredible story that’s just entered the last, happy chapter. Of a poor widower whose youngest and “favourite” daughter was whisked away by a relative and “sold” to a couple in Chennai for household work. Of an eight-year-old, youngest of three, who was later sheltered, educated by a Brahmin couple from Mysore. Of her husband, moved by her tears over the years, who got in touch with a detective agency in Chennai.

“The story begins 24 years ago when Sheriff, then earning his living by rolling beedis in Kanchipuram, struggled to look after his three daughters, Mumtaz, Shamshad and Naseema, after his wife Rohaya Bee died of tuberculosis,”’ says R Varadaraj, Director, Sun Detective agency, who made that phone call to Jeddah last month.

“While the eldest daughter was married off, the second was sent to a nearby house for doing domestic chores. It was Naseema, Sheriff’s favourite, who enjoyed the privilege of going to a nearby school.”

But Naseema’s life was about to change. “A distant relative picked her up one day when her father was not around, took her to Chennai, and handed her over to a couple, both police constables, for doing household chores,” says Varadaraj.

Then began the dark days. Naseema remembers being tortured and forced to do gruelling household work. She says she was often beaten up by the couple, who even used a hot iron to sear the skin on her hands.

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