Madam Sirr 2

Chapter 9

The Mission Begins

Three girls stand huddled in a corner, their sparse clothing sagging at their limp bodies. They were standing under a light near the Kanpur godowns, mostly derelict and abandoned. They were told to wait here and that a van would come for them.

It was night, a cold mist covering the girls as they shivered. Their faces were covered in dirt, their lean frames looking as if pale ghosts in the dim light. The fear evident in their eyes as they glanced here and there as if they were certain that something was amiss.

They recalled how they had been approached by an older woman a week earlier imploring them with a benevolent wage and suitable employment. The girls had taken a liking to her immediately, she smelled fresh and she had a motherly aura around her.

They stood still, alert as they heard wheels crunching in the dirt. The van stopped in front of them, the stark white standing out in the darkness. The door opened and the lady stepped out with her face covered. One girl amongst the three, the youngest had always wondered why she kept her face hidden. She soon forgot her worries as she slid into the van.

The van drove, speeding away taking the girls to an unknown location that the girls wouldn't have ever imagined.

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A tall lady with cropped short hair limped along the industrial streets of Kanpur. She had shabby clothing and wore broken slippers. Her hair was messy and untied, her face full of dirt. If one looked closely one could notice that her face was covered with scars and bruises, marks of survival.

She limped on, stopping for several minutes at a time, looking around as she was exhausted. She looked young and beyond the dirt, she looked quite beautiful. She looked around at the shops, a hungry glare in her eyes seeking both food and employment. None of the shopkeepers gave her a second look. No one cared.

She kept walking until she neared an alley that turned into a disastrous backend of ruins and industrial wreckage. This was one of the densely populated areas of Kanpur with people milling about seeking employment in factories for minimum wage. They lived in shabby and ruined huts, mostly of one room where two to three people huddled together.

It was here that the lady lived. She had a one-room hut, quite small for her liking but it was the most she could get out of her desperate situation. The room had a small bed with a mattress that was hard as a rock, a small water pitcher, table and a chair. The room was damp and smelled musty with the walls growing on greenish mold. She was given the room by a benevolent factory owner where she returned the favor by engaging in small odd jobs for him.

She stooped to enter her room, gulped down a cup of water and sat down on the bed. She was returning from a full night of stacking boxes and crates into various racks and cupboards. She was exhausted. She examined her hands which were blackened and dirty with tiny cuts of reddened welts everywhere.

She got up and went to the backend and splashed her face with a handful of water from the basin. It was cold. She looked at the small mirror that hung, her eyes staring back at her.

DSP Haseena Malik had an exhausting turn of events. It was almost a week that she entered as a pathetic woman seeking employment and since then she'd had to all sorts of jobs and favors, none that aligned with her job as a DSP.

It was hard work, Haseena wondered as she groaned in protest of her aching bones and muscles. Her entire body felt as if been slammed into a brick wall. It was only a few days and Haseena was already burnt out, the brunt of her responsibility as a DSP and the gravity of the mission weighed heavily on her shoulders. She needed rest but she couldn't give up. Not when the lives of girls were at stake. Haseena was determined to complete the mission despite the unbearable circumstances that she had to experience.