Indian housemaid in S Arabia returns home

Dubai, Feb 1: Indian Embassy officials in Saudi Arabia have brought succour to an Indian housemaid who was penniless and insane.

The mentally unstable housemaid was reunited with her family in Andhra Pradesh after a marathon hunt that involved thousands of kilometres of travel by air and land to locate her home.

The Saudi police in Riyadh had handed the Indian Embassy in November last year an unidentified runaway housemaid after a shelter for women refused to accept her on the grounds that she was mentally unsound.

An embassy official said the woman was suffering from amnesia as she could not remember her own name, the particulars of her Saudi employer, or her husband.

However, through painstaking work, the embassy officials identified her as Beevi Jaan, wife of Abdullah from Kalageri, Chintapalli Mandal, Cuddappa district, Andhra Pradesh.

Beevi was flown back home in the company of a retired embassy official living in Hyderabad and a serving officer currently in the embassy. However, on reaching Cuddappa, they found no such village called Kalageri in Cuddappa district.

The officials persevered in their mission to locate Beevi's family and went to Pathepeta village in the same district, 50 km away, Arab News reported.

The village was inaccessible by bus so the officials hired an autorickshaw and on arrival, the villagers identified her as Hussain Bee and not Beevi Jaan as the officials had believed.

The missing links fell into place when it was learned that her husband was not Abdullah but Bashu who had expired five years ago.

She had two daughters, one of whom had died while the other one was married.

The villagers have promised to provide details of her Saudi sponsor, her Indian recruiting agent and her passport information.

UNI