A tortured domestic help in his teens found a saviour in his employer’s landlord on Thursday.

Joy Kumar Gupta, who had let out the ground floor of his Gariahat Road residence to civil engineer Prabir Ranjan Sen and his wife, knew for almost a couple of weeks that his tenants were torturing 13-year-old Mohammad Sahin. Around 3pm on Thursday, he could hold himself back no longer and rushed to the boy’s aid.

“I heard him cry for over half an hour. When I came out of our house to find out how serious it was, Sahin was on the staircase with tears streaming down his face,” police quoted Gupta as saying.

Sen and his wife had left home by the time their landlord stepped in to save the teen. Gupta took Sahin to Gariahat police station, where he revealed that Sen had been torturing him for a fortnight.

The deputy commissioner of police (south), Rajesh Subarna, said Sahin would be medically examined for confirmation of torture.

The Sens had recruited Sahin 17 days ago through an acquaintance from the teenager’s native village, Rajgram in Murshidabad.

“The boy told us that his ordeal began just two days after he came to the city,” Subarna said.

The officer quoted Sahin as saying that the engineer would “grab me by my hair and drag me around, sometimes wrenching off tufts of hair from my scalp”.

Sahin was often targeted for trivial reasons. “He was sometimes beaten up for not keeping the newspaper in the right place,” the police said.