Bonnie Konyak
Dimapur | October 18
Eight years old and with just some channa and nine rupees to her name, Deepa Moni has run away from her ‘Naga Malik’ determined to go back home to Metlajan to see her ailing mother. “Just put me on the train and I will go back home”, she tells the Women police at Women’s Cell, Dimapur.
Deepa says she is a class II student of M.E. School Metlajan who was brought to a Naga family by her father on Monday by train. Innocent of the world, she saw her Naga Malik give “two five hundred notes” to her father, Dara Singh who had left her with the excuse that he was going out to buy her a dress for Durga Pooja. He never came back.
In her clear tone, Deepa tells the women police taking care of her that her male malik had received a call from her father on Wednesday night saying that her mother, Konmai, was sick. It was this news that made the already homesick Deepa run away from her owners to go back home and see her mother. Deepa is adamant that she will not go back to the Naga family of ‘a husband, wife and one child’ saying that they had threatened to beat her if she did not learn Naga language. She discloses to the police guardians that they had hit her once with a stick on her backside.
Deepa was found wandering around 3rd Mile, Dimapur on Thursday and she stopped at the Police Check Gate at 3rd Mile and were asking the police personnel ‘this and that’.
The police there took her and handed her over to the Diphupar police from who the Women Cell personnel collected her at around 3:00 PM. Enchanted by her intelligence and loving nature, the women police say that their duty would be to first seek out her Naga guardians. Meanwhile Deepa herself seem quite taken in by her protectors and is insisting that she be taken home with the lady police for the moment, but her future remains uncertain.
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