Mission accomplished at Rasoolpura

                                           

"Rasoolpura," the voice at the other end said.

No more details. Not even the house number. Not even the name of the specific area. No directions to the house.

This was a tough task. It had to be done. And it had to be done immediately. I felt the urgency. There were many hassles. First thing was the deadline of the newspaper. And this tip-off came sometime close to midnight. Secondly, the near impossible situation of being able to find the place. This was in the early 1990s. No mobiles. No GPS. No location maps. But I felt it had to be done.

The tip-off that I got was that a minor girl was to be married off to an aged man. He had come from one of the Gulf countries. The family found a reason to marry off the child to the man. They felt this was the best thing to do. The girl was in her early teens and the man was in his sixties.

The landline in my office rang. "It is urgent," the caller at the other end said. There was concern in her voice. There was also the guilt that she herself was not being able to do anything to stop the wedding ceremony. She had a conscience. A minor girl in her neighbourhood was being given away in marriage to a groom from the Gulf. All that the family assumed was that the girl would live her life happily ever after. Most importantly, one burden of a girl child would be off their back.

"If it has to be done, it has to be done. If it has to be done, it has to be done now," a senior colleague told me emphatically when I discussed that it was important that we publish the story in the newspaper the next day.

The senior colleague was from the desk and not from the reporting bureau.

He asked me to sit on his bike. And we took off. At that part of the night, we went to Rasoolpura from Deccan Chronicle on SD Road where our office was located. But where in Rasoolpura was the question. My senior colleague was not the type who would give up. I found good company in him. We went to different areas in Rasoolpura, different localities and one particular lane. "I think we are here," I said. At that part of the night, there seemed to be some activity taking place in a house. The lights were not switched off. And there was a tent in front of the house.

Destination reached. Confirmed.

Now this had to be handled carefully. We had to conduct ourselves in a way that our intentions would not be known. We had to sound as casual as we could. There should absolutely be no indication that we were trying to probe something or confirm something.

"Confirmed," I said to myself. I conveyed it to my senior colleague who had already understood it by then. I pillion rode on his bike back to the office.

As I sat in front of the typewriter, many thoughts came to my mind. It was not just about being careful about writing a news report with the intention of preventing the wedding of a minor to the aged man from the Gulf.

The report got published.

There was, however, a risk. The wedding was to take place the next morning. How could it be stopped? How could a minor girl be rescued from getting married off? There was no way I should have intervened. What if the man got away after seeing the news report in the newspaper the next morning? If it was not this girl, he would anyway be on his mission during his Hyderabad visit — of getting married. And minor girls were most often an easy target because the families could be lured, especially if they came from a particular economic social strata.

Very early the next morning, I called up the Begumpet police and explained to them the situation. They were swift to act. A team was dispatched to the location. The policemen spoke to the family that getting a minor girl married was against the law. Another team, which found out where the prospective bridegroom was staying, went to the hotel.

I was in touch with the police all the while. I also reached the hotel. The man was bewildered. He had got married several times. It was his habit of coming to Hyderabad, choosing minor girls for marriage, giving some money to the families and taking the brides to the Gulf. What happened to the girl there was, sad to say, of no immediate concern to the families, as from their point of view they had got the daughter married to a rich man from the Gulf.

I spoke with the 'bridegroom'. He was bewildered. It had never happened to him before on any of his visits that the police came to stop him from getting married.

The police booked a case against him. The girl's family was counselled against getting the minor girl married. The police also took up a campaign to alert gullible families against falling prey to the promises of agents who would convince them that the right thing to do was get their daughters married off to rich, even if aged, men from the Gulf.