Dead girl walking

It was before 10pm on September 24 when Shakhnoza Shukurova (27) reached the South Extension market. In its glory days, South Extension, fondly shortened to South-Ex, was the mecca of Delhi’s aspirational shoppers, and though the independent boutiques have now given way to international high street brands, it’s hardly a deserted stretch, even on a Thursday night. Shakhnoza was on her way to attend a party, but her friend, Naaz, insisted that she first meet her at South-Ex so she could return the money she had borrowed. Shakhnoza had spent the day shopping. She’d bought a pair of shoes at Aldo and when they turned out to be a bit big, she picked up insoles to hold them in place. Then she went to Yashwant Place market in Chanakyapuri and bought a gold ring as a birthday present for the party she was going to. After which, she stopped to buy some flowers. Driving her around the city was Pritam, a chauffeur whose services she had been using for several years. All this while, she was on the phone to her mother in Uzbekistan, giving her detailed descriptions of everything, while clicking photographs and sending those to her from her second phone. When she reached South-Ex, she told her mother, she was going to Naaz’s car for five minutes to collect the money and she would call her right after. Then, Shakhnoza vanished.

When Shokhista Shukurova did not hear back from her daughter for 20 minutes, she dialled everybody’s number she had in Delhi. Pritam’s phone was switched off. By midnight India time, she managed to get through to a friend of Shakhnoza’s called Ozoda and asked her to find the driver. Ozoda and her husband set off searching and finally found Pritam sleeping in the car, outside his office. Pritam said there were four people in the car — Naaz, her boyfriend who is an Afghan citizen, a woman Miyasassar, who goes by the name Masha and allegedly runs a sex racket, and a man who had a cap on. He saw Shakhnoza enter Naaz’s car and it drove away. Ozoda and her husband eventually dialled 100, and the police were officially brought in. Even though Pritam’s version suggested that Shakhnoza entered the car voluntarily, the inspection of the site of the crime revealed the insoles had fallen out of her new shoes.

Those were the days Mother-daughter duo — Shokhista and Shakhnoza Shukurova

Four days after the event, and a predictable confusion over whose jurisdiction the crime falls under, an FIR was filed. On October 2, Shokhista arrived in India, along with her daughter Zamira. They went to the police station, and through the recommendation of people they barely knew, hired a lawyer. The lawyer explained to them that in India in order to file a case of kidnapping, they had to pay a sum of ₹3 lakh. The family immediately paid ₹1.25 lakh and promised the rest soon. The following days, they were told that the charges for interrogating each suspect was ₹20,000 and additional sums should be paid for analysing phone records. By this time, the second sister of the victim, Nodira Said, who lives in the US, joined the family. At first, they followed the lawyer’s instructions and paid, at least in part, the money that was demanded. They started going to the police station every day. Said managed to attract some media attention on the case. As the news of the missing Uzbeki girl started to appear in newspapers, the family hoped that eyewitnesses would come forward and a genuine effort would be made to trace the girl. They caught on to the lawyer’s deceitfulness and found a replacement. The Uzbeki embassy wrote to the Home Minister. The police called in a few people and asked them questions. Masha, and her Indian husband, Gagan, were present at the police station most days. But for six weeks there were absolutely no breaks in the case.

On November 16, Delhi Police made the shocking revelation that Shakhnoza was murdered, and that her burnt body was recovered from Samalkha in Haryana. She was found by a farmer on September 26, two days after she went missing. But since the Haryana police weren’t aware of the case of the missing Uzbeki girl, it took them until November 16 to put the story of Shakhnoza and the burnt corpse together. All this while Gagan made regular appearances at the police station. The missing Uzbeki girl became the dead Uzbeki girl and the media dutifully reported it as such. In its report on November 17, The Indian Express quoted a police officer saying, “Gagan told the police he and Naaz abducted Shahnaz on September 24 and strangled her to death in a car in South Delhi and drove with the body to Haryana. Gagan claimed Naaz told him Shahnaz was not returning her visa (sic) and giving her ₹8 lakh she owed her.”

A hunt for Naaz began. On November 21, she too turned up dead; her body was found in Hapur in west Uttar Pradesh, in a similar, partly burned state. The police immediately arrested Gagan. A report in The Times of India said that he confessed to the crimes. “Naaz,” Gagan is reported to have said, “and Shakhnoza got into an argument in the car.” He held Shakhnoza tightly to quieten her down but “she got strangled in the process.” They then put the body in a case, poured petrol over it, set it on fire, and disposed it in a field in Samalkha. They stayed in Samalkha for two days, during which Naaz panicked over the crime. Gagan was worried she would let the fact of their involvement slip and so he drove with her to Hapur, killed her, burned and got rid of the body.

***

“This makes a nice story. But in truth, Shakhnoza is still alive,” Said, the sister from the US, tells me. It’s Christmas day and I crawl through the gaggle of shoppers in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar to reach the Kasturba Bhavan locality. Even a decade ago, Lajpat Nagar was visibly a stronghold of Delhi’s teeming middle class. Clusters of wires tangled overhead and colourful lengths of washed turbans hung down terraces. Now though, large parts of the neighbourhood are taken over by Afghans — businessmen and refugees. Inside Mazaar restaurant, where I meet Said and Shokhista, taut waiters in Pathan suits serve tea and pulao, while Arabic pop blares from the music system, and it is hard to believe you haven’t travelled abroad to reach a place which is so authentic to its roots.

Mazaar serves a dish called Qabuli-Uzbeki and it is, indeed, such a confluence of Delhi, Kabul and Uzbekistan that have brought us here. While the trims of the story of Shakhnoza are kidnapping and possibly murder, the essence of it is a deadly confluence of aspiration, sex and human trafficking. Shakhnoza, her family is eager to emphasise, was merely a dancer. She had been visiting India since 2008 and staying for short durations — often a couple of weeks, sometimes, a month or so. In 2014, she met and fell in love with an Indian boy, which gave her the reason to visit more often. One day, while at a beauty salon, she was talking to her mother on the phone, when a girl overheard her speaking in Uzbeki and approached her. The girl was blue and bruised. Her name was Naaz, she too was from the country, she told her, from a rural region called Hozarm. Employment prospects were next to nil there and so when someone approached her asking if she’d be interested in working as a nanny or housekeeper, she immediately agreed. As soon as she got her travel papers, she went to Tashkent and from there she was taken to Almaty in Kazakhstan and then Istanbul, and through a long circuitous route, Nepal and finally Delhi. At Delhi, her passport was taken away and she was sold to a broker who kept her locked up in an apartment and forced her to service six or seven clients every day. Eventually, she managed to escape from the clutches of the broker and ended up with the Uzbeki madam, Masha. She was desperate to get out, but didn’t have money or her passport. Shakhnoza took her home, and had her write down this statement so that they could send it to the embassy and ask for help. Naaz wrote it down but then baulked at sending it to the embassy for fear that the news of her prostituted life would reach her hometown. This letter was found among Shakhnoza’s possessions after her disappearance.

***

While their exact details might be slightly different, Naaz’s story is true of thousands of women from Central Asia who are trafficked across the world. Even as Thailand and China continue to be leading destinations, after the financial meltdown of 2008, sex workers from Central Asia started moving to India from Dubai. Neither official agencies, nor NGOs have the exact number of women from Central Asia who are in India, but most estimates put Uzbeki women themselves at upwards of 3,000.

Like many Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan too declared itself independent from the former USSR in 1991. But without any reserves of oil, economic prospects in the country did not improve. Cotton farming is the country’s leading economic activity, and even as recently as 2013, the Uzbek government was censured for enslaving its own population. When cotton-picking season comes around, students, teachers, nurses, doctors, all have to ensure that their quota of cotton is picked. Schools are closed, essential services are downgraded and business hours are reduced as the state-sponsored forced labour kicks in. In newspaper reports about busted rackets of Uzbeki prostitution, the most common reason stated is that the woman wanted to raise money to send home for a medical emergency.

It is economics that brings these girls — most of who are trained as hairdressers, nurses and secretaries — to countries like India. Some are lured into it with offers of ‘respectable’ jobs and some come knowing exactly what they are getting into it. Either way, it is often economics that work against them too. The girls are forced to surrender their passports to their ‘employers’ and are paid a margin of the money promised.

Often, they take loans in advance, in order to pay for medical help for an ailing family member, or to buy an apartment in Tashkent, and the interest rate compounds so fast that they never end up making enough money to pay it off. Even if they do, there is no guarantee that they will be able to take the money into the country. A news account of an Uzbekistan sex worker, who was deported from Israel in 2014, says that the girl landed in Samarkand with $10, the customs officers having taken the rest.

These risks notwithstanding, a ‘lucky few’ do manage to make some money. With their fair skin and lithe bodies, there is no dearth of demand for them in India. Across Delhi, Mumbai, Goa and Punjab, all it takes is a phone call to hire a ‘Russian girl’, a term that denotes a girl from anywhere in Central Asia. They can be hired for ₹10,000-15,000 for an hour, and the rates go up to ₹1 lakh for an evening. They stay four or five to an apartment in various parts of the city and are ferried around by taxi drivers who are vetted and approved by the local fixers. A simple Google search for ‘blonde girl Delhi’ throws up nearly million pages in results with barely concealed titles like ‘South Delhi blonde escort huge tits’ or ‘kissing Delhi escorts’. Delhi blonde escorts even has a Twitter handle.

Despite the fact that Uzbeki bodies are traded so openly, there are no organisations working to help them. Most NGOs that I spoke to, in Delhi and Mumbai, said the only foreign victims of human trafficking they worked with were Nepalis or Bangladeshis.

***

Perhaps it is this accepted arrangement of bilateral trade between Indian men and Uzbeki women, but when Said tells me the story of her sister’s run-ins with people from the sex trade, she doesn’t sound ruffled. Once Naaz came into her life, Shakhnoza started receiving threatening phone calls from Masha, Gagan and others. These, she duly recorded, and sent to her mother. Shakhnoza had few friends, and she wasn’t very close to her sisters. But the mother and she were thick and spent hours talking to each other on the free phone app, Viber. Even though she was 1,500 km away in Tashkent, her mother knew where Shakhnoza was, almost down to the minute. Through the nearly two hours we sat at Mazaar, Shokhista watched Shakhnoza’s videos on her phone, on an endless loop, not even pausing them when she dissolved into tears.

Afterward, I accompanied the duo to their home, a single room with a kitchenette at one end and a bathroom at the other. A bed and two chairs were the only furniture in the room. Here, Said opened a large bag of documents. In the two months that she had been in India, Said has started her own investigation. She broke into Facebook groups and internet rooms, and showed me reams of photos of beautiful, well made-up Uzbeki women. In some, they posed by themselves, in others they were held close by their clients or ‘husbands’, regular men in office-going white shirts and ironed pants, who you could have run into anywhere in the city. Hidden somewhere in the crevices between these groups is Shakhnoza, Said is convinced.

Although the family denies it, Shakhnoza’s own involvement in the sex trade cannot be entirely ruled out. In August, she was invited to dance at a party that was hosted by another Uzbeki madam, Ummida. Both Ummida and her husband, Rajneesh, have been previously implicated on human trafficking charges. There, Shakhnoza claimed to her mother, she was given a Coke laced with some substance to drink. She passed out for an hour and a half, and when she regained consciousness, she found herself semi-naked and wearing a different set of lingerie. When she threatened to go to the police, Ummida allegedly extorted her with photos and videos of her shot in compromising positions. Worried about her reputation in Tashkent, Shakhnoza let the matter drop. She became quieter though after that, and was listless in her phone conversations with her mother.

Said acknowledges that all these events are linked in a sinister manner and they are what led to that September evening. However, she doesn’t accept what happened after Shakhnoza was pulled into that car. “The police showed us one photograph of the body, and from the leg that was visible, I am pretty sure it’s not Shakhnoza. If the police is entirely convinced about it, then why isn’t the DNA test being shared with us,” she says.

So where would she be, I ask.

“Maybe in Punjab. Maybe they have kept her as a sex slave.”

***

Towards the end of January, I meet the family again. By now they have been here for four months. Said has left her husband and her 21-year-old son behind, and spent a considerable sum of money. But the case hasn’t really gone anywhere. This time, we are waiting at the Patiala Court, where a lawyer is willing to go through their papers. Notwithstanding its prurience, every case needs some closure and the Shukurovas refuse to leave this country until they know exactly what happened. “I will only go back when I take Shakhnoza with me,” Said says.

This conviction is because Said’s theory that Shakhnoza is alive has suddenly received a shot in the arm. Someone who knew the girl spotted her. One Mandeep Rawat, an acquaintance of Shakhnoza and her mother, came to their house in January and told them that he saw Shakhnoza in December. In a statement recorded with the court, Rawat says he was on his way from Delhi to Kullu on December 11, and had stopped for a smoke in Chandigarh. Standing across him at the paan shop was Shakhnoza, dressed in a pink nightdress and not looking very well. She was with a burly, 6-ft tall man, who Rawat assumed was her boyfriend. When Rawat greeted her, Shakhnoza waved back. At this, the man bundled her into a waiting car and sped away. Rawat wasn’t aware of Shakhnoza’s disappearance. When he came back to Delhi, he went to meet his lawyer on some matter, and because he knew the lawyer was acquainted with Shakhnoza, he mentioned seeing her. That was when he was informed that Shakhnoza had been “dead” since September.

Highlighting these inconsistencies, the family filed a writ of habeas corpus in the last week of January, but the court rejected it for being incomplete. Now their only request is that the case be transferred to the Crime Branch, where they hope they would uncover more evidence.

At the police station that is investigating the case though, there is no doubt that the dead woman is Shakhnoza. Requesting anonymity, a senior police officer said that the DNA result is in the jurisdiction of the Samalkha police and he isn’t aware if there is a confirmation that it is Shakhnoza. But there are no changes in their stance in the case. Gagan is guilty of the murders and charges against him have been filed with the court.

***

For the last 10 days, surprisingly, Said has ignored my calls. I finally manage to get through to her sister Zamira, who has come back to India to help in the search for Shakhnoza. “We don’t want to give you any information now,” she snaps at me.

As I listen in to our previous conversations, I notice that Said had raised the possibility of Shakhnoza being a sex slave in Punjab well before Rawat reported spotting her there.

It could have been a coincidence.

It could have been prescience.

Or it could have been information she had somehow managed to ferret out. Said’s sudden reticence to talk possibly indicates she is close to finding her.

Even so, several questions remain. One though, is more important than the rest. What are the chances that a dead girl reappears? For now, no one can say with absolute certainty that it’s zero.

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