GURUGRAM: A 16-year-old girl was kept in confinement in a room, cut off from the rest of the world, for three months and sexually assaulted almost every day of her captivity by a 25-year-old private security guard, who she knew from a housing society in Gurugram’s Palam Vihar where they both worked.

He took away her cellphone, and visited once every day with food and groceries. The room was always locked from outside. To keep her quiet, he drugged her food and water. In case that didn’t work, he tortured and thrashed her, just so she lived in a perpetual state of fear.

Between May and last week, the chilling story of ‘Room’ — the 2010 novel and subsequently Oscar-winning movie about a woman in the US held

in a garden shed by a man for seven years —became the reality of a teen who had come with her parents to Gurugram looking for work, lost her way and ended up in the hands of a predator. The teenager’s captivity may have been much longer — her parents had lodged a kidnapping case in Bengal in May and recently returned to Gurugram resigned to not seeing their daughter again — if not for a stroke of luck.

On the evening of August 22, her captor Mohammad Aalam Manjar forgot to lock the room as he made a brief errand. The teenager sensed her opportunity and ran. She managed to make contact with her parents. Late on Friday night (August 24), Manjar was picked up by a police team from his house. That was in Chauma as well, in the same neighborhood as the ‘room’, a house where Manjar lived a parallel life with his wife. Manjar was produced in court on Saturday and sent to judicial custody. An FIR has been registered at Bajghera police station under sections 323 (causing hurt) and 344 (wrongful confinement) of the IPC, and sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

The teenager has been admitted to hospital. Police are waiting for her medical report. She told police her family had been living in Gurugram for several years and she and her mother had been working as domestic helps at homes to earn a livelihood. Manjar knew her and her parents well.

In the first week of May, the girl and her parents went home to Bengal. A few days later, on May 13, Manjar reached Bengal too and arranged a meeting with the girl. It’s not clear yet what he told her but she agreed to return to Gurugram with him. Thus began her captivity, in a room Manjar rented at Chauma.

When her parents later contacted Manjar, he feigned ignorance. The parents had no reason to suspect him and searched in places in Bengal for their daughter. In her statement to the police, the girl said, “He held me captive in a room and sedated me using a cold drink and raped me. After this, he visited every day, raped me and sedated me again. He thrashed me if I resisted.”

Investigating officer Mukesh Kumari said Manjar, who is originally from Kishengunj in Bihar, had admitted to the crime. “He said he kept his wife in the dark by saying he was working extra hours when she asked why he came home late every day and sometimes stayed away for twothree days.”