Saudi Gazette

Jeddah — This reads like a story straight from a Charles Dickens novel. But this tragic tale of Firdous Shaikh is not fiction.

It happened in a remote desert town called Shaqra, nearly 200 km from Riyadh. The story, however, begins in Kadapa, a small town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Firdous, a young Indian woman, lived in Kadapa with her younger siblings: a sister and a brother.

Having lost her father at a young age and left with a mentally ill mother, Firdous and her two siblings were living in abject poverty. She wanted to secure a decent life for her siblings so she decided to come to Saudi Arabia.

Firdous arrived to work for a Saudi family in Shaqra in 2016 and everything went well for five months. But soon Firdous got homesick and slipped into depression, sources said quoting her employer.

This year on Feb. 13, Firdous was found hanging from the ceiling in her room.

Her employer alerted the police. The police declared that it was a case of suicide. Attempts were then made to contact her family in India.

But efforts went in vain for a few months.

The Indian Embassy finally managed to locate her family. Thus came to light their tragic circumstances.

Her mother is not in a normal mental state, and her two siblings are too young to realize what has befallen them.

Her old grandmother expressed inability to receive Firdous’ body at the airport and take it to their native place in Kadapa.

In such a situation, Firdous was finally laid to rest in Shaqra recently and her funeral prayers were attended by a large number of people.