Domestic worker’s body arrives from Saudi Arabia

CHENNAI: A 47-year-old woman, who went to Saudi Arabia as a domestic worker earlier this year, returned dead at Chennai airport on Thursday. A report from the Ministry of Saudi Arabia claimed the housemaid Poongavanam Nagarajan committed suicide on September 4.

The report said there were marks on her neck that suggested she was strangled tightly by a rope indicating suicide. Her family members, however, rule out the possibility of a suicide and suspect foul play.

“My mother would never kill herself. She loved me and promised that she’ll see me once before she dies,” said Boobathi, her daughter.Her daughter recalls her mother calling her on the day she died.

“I asked her, ‘How are you ma?’ She said that she couldn’t bear the pain and that they always beat her up. She started crying and then suddenly she went off the call and I could hear her scream in the background. She screamed for nearly a minute and the call went blank after that, Boobathi said. According to other family members Poongavanam was made to work for over 18 hours a day and was regularly harassed. “There’s never been a day she answered the phone and said she was happy,” said Boobathi.

Her daughter added that Poongavanam had approached the police station a few months before



her death as she was beaten up very badly. She said, “However the police apparently struck a compromise and sent her back to the same house.”

When Express spoke to other house-maids who’ve returned from Saudi owing to torture, they complained of being abused physically and verbally inhumanly. “I couldn’t ask them for phone ever. I couldn’t  communicate with my family even when my father died. I couldn’t call my son when he had broken his thighs. They would beat me if I asked them for phone,” said Ramalakshmi, who returned to her home at Thoothukudi some months ago. Selvi, a domestic help who left from Thanjavur said that she faced adverisities. “I was tortured regularly;  they would even threaten to kill me,” she said.

Poongavanam  Nagarajan hailing from Thiruvannamalai district went to Saudi Arabia as domestic help in February, only to ease  her adverse family situation. She was promised a salary of `17,000 a month by her sponsor Amer Fahd Shehri of Saudi nationality. “She is just one of the thousands of workers who move to the Gulf to earn money for the family, only to realise that it is nothing but torture,” said Valarmathi, a social activist who works with the National Domestic Workers Movement (NDWM).