: “If you don’t remain quiet, I will slit your throat,” were the words Sunil Rastogi allegedly uttered as he frantically tried to open a lock to gain entry into a room. He was addressing a 10-year-old girl, who kept pleading that she be allowed to go home.
He was unyielding, and for the girl, hope was fading fast. Too young to understand what sexual assault even meant then, she, however, sensed that she would be in danger if they both entered the room.
With the man now arrested for allegedly assaulting 600 girls, the girl said she have been another one had it not been for a lucky escape. On January 12, the girl and her brother were going to attend tuition classes when Rastogi had arrived at the scene.
Winning trust
“The man told us that my father had sent him. Since he was a stranger, we did not trust him. He pretended to make a call,” recalled the girl. The man then allegedly asked her to come along with him to his house where some clothes sent by her father had been kept. “Uncle mujhe chhod do was what I kept saying but with his palm gagging my mouth and his hands busy unlocking he door, I feared the worst,” she said.
Her prayers were answered when a woman who lives in the same building saw the girl struggling with Rastogi and rushed to her aid.
“When he started running and we screamed that others came to help us. But nobody tried to catch hold of him,” said the girl. Later, it was the woman’s help that she managed to return home, barely 300 metres away from the house in New Ashok Nagar where Rastogi had allegedly taken her. Although Rastogi’s arrest has instilled hope in the girl, she knows that there are men on the prowl and being careful is all that she can do.
