Calcutta, April 8: Home was hell for her. Enough to push her out of home and to the nearest police station, to lodge a damning complaint against her husband. The 26-year-old (name withheld) is employed with a non-government organisation (NGO) working for the cause of sex workers and counselling students engaged in flesh trade.
She has alleged being tortured by her husband, S.K. Nayar, for three months for refusing to divulge the names and numbers of some women her organisation works with.
She went on to reveal how her husband would try to contact the girls so that he could use them for pornographic films he was apparently planning to make with some associates.
Accompanied by some of her colleagues, she went to Lake Town police station last Wednesday and filed her complaint under Section 498 IPC, after she could “no longer bear the torture” inflicted on her by her husband.
The woman, who hails from Kerala, was in Mumbai before coming down to Calcutta two years ago. She was married in Chennai to S. K. Nayar, also from Kerala, a few months before they moved to Mumbai.
In Calcutta, the couple was living in a rented apartment in Dum Dum Park, under Lake Town police station jurisdiction, when she got a job as counsellor in an NGO involved in intervention programmes with sex workers to prevent the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV. She was entrusted with the responsibility of counselling some of the sex workers in trouble. She was even dealing with some school and college-going girls engaged in flesh trade.
“Nayar was unemployed. A fortnight ago, the woman came to the police station and complained against her husband, saying that he was torturing her mentally and physically,” said Sitaram Sinha, officer-in-charge of Lake Town police station.
Police arranged a counselling session with the couple last Friday. When it failed, police arrested Nayar the next day.
According to police and CID sources linked with the case, the woman had the contact numbers of several girls the NGO was working with. Her husband was desperate to lay his hands on those names and numbers.
He, allegedly, tortured her physically and mentally. On questioning, Nayar confessed that he would beat up his wife to obtain the numbers of the girls from her. Police also found him involved with a gang that was scouting for girls to engage in a “blue-film racket”, sources said.
Deputy inspector-general (CID) C.V. Murlidhar has asked Lake Town police to proceed with the investigations. State women’s commission chairperson Yasodhara Bagchi — whom the woman visited on Thursday — has also asked police to pursue the matter seriously.
The woman has, meanwhile, been shifted from her Dum Dum home by the NGO.