In the confusion, the four men fled.

After the din had died down and with the backing of the neighbours, she went to the cops, who told her to buzz off.

'They scolded me saying that I should not bother them with trivial issues. For them it was too small a thing to intervene,' the woman said.

But the police saw it differently.

When questioned, station officer Vijay Kumar confirmed that the woman had approached the police, but said that it was a domestic dispute.

He said: 'It was found to be a false allegation and the issue was only limited to a domestic dispute and she went home.'

Except that she didn't go home.

Residents of the area said the woman is now in hiding, afraid that the men who had come to collect might show up again.

'Some of the neighbours know where she is, but she is too scared to go home fearing that her husband's friends might kidnap her,' said another local resident on the condition of anonymity.

And her loser husband? It seems that even his own mother has given up on him.

'We owned some four bighas (2.6ha) of ancestral land and used the earnings to get two meals a day for the family of four, including his wife and their two sons,' said MrKumar's mother, Shakuntala.

The sons are aged seven and four.

'But he sold the land and squandered the money on gambling and drinking. He even sold all the utensils,' she said.

This article was first published in The New Paper on Dec 28, 2008.