Mumbai: Police have recovered a domestic help’s gold ornaments worth Rs 5 lakh that she had mistakenly given to a poor woman along with bread kept in a plastic bag in suburban Mumbai.
According to the Dindoshi police, the poor woman threw the bag near a dustbin and rats took it inside a gutter. They went through a rollercoaster ride for 24 hours trying to trace the gold and managed to find it thanks to a low-quality CCTV camera that showed rats pulling the ornaments to the gutter.
The 50-year-old domestic help, a resident of a slum pocket at Aarey Colony in Goregaon (East), approached the police on Tuesday afternoon saying she had mistakenly given her gold ornaments to a woman who dealt in scrap materials.
The domestic help told the police that she had finished her day’s work in Gokuldham Complex in Goregaon (East) around Tuesday noon and was on her way to a bank. She was going to mortgage the gold ornaments, kept in a pouch, to repay money that her husband had borrowed. Before leaving for the bank, her employer had given her bread to eat.
She kept both the pouch and the bread in a plastic bag. On her way she saw a poor woman and her son, to whom she handed over the bag, forgetting that it also contained the gold. The domestic help thought she had kept the pouch in her purse. Only on reaching the bank did she realise her mistake. However, as she could not find the poor woman and her son, she rushed to the Dindoshi police station.
“She did not inform her husband. She told us she felt like harming herself. She was very depressed. We gave her confidence. We said we would surely do our best. We told her relatives and her husband not to scold her over the incident because she was already tense and depressed,” said Suraj Raut, an assistant police inspector with the Dindoshi police.
Pawar and another assistant inspector, Chandrakant Gharge, and constables Rode, Pote, Mahingde, Jadhav and Kamble started searching for the other woman. They found one camera where they could see the woman leaving the spot with her son in a rickshaw. They inquired with local people and managed to identify her as a resident of Motilal Nagar in Goregaon (East). They went there but she had changed her address to the nearby Prem Nagar slum.
When the police team tracked her down the same evening, the woman told them that she had thrown the plastic bag near a dustbin as her son did not want to eat the bread. “We suspected that she might be lying but we had to be sure. So we again checked to see if there were any CCTV cameras at the spot where she claimed she threw the bag,” said Gharge.
There was a low-quality CCTV camera on a lane on SV Road that showed the woman throw the plastic bag near the dustbin. As the plastic bag was seen moving, the police realised it had to be a puppy or rat that was pulling it away. When they reached the spot, the bag was gone but there was a gutter at the spot with an outlet for water to pass.
The police suspected that rats may have pulled the bag into the gutter. They opened the gutter and were relieved to see the pouch along with the gold. “Three gold chains, six finger rings, and a couple of earrings were found as described by the domestic help. We returned it to her on Wednesday,” said Jeevan Kharat, senior inspector of the Dindoshi police station. No police case has been registered.
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