The fortunes of a domestic help in Mumbai swung in her favour after she inadvertently handed over Rs 5 lakh worth gold ornaments to a cloth vendor, owing to police action. A packet of bread, and probably, rats were responsible for the misery she endured for 12 hours.
Sundar Planibel was headed to a bank to mortgage the jewellery to help pay off loans taken for her daughter's wedding when she handed over a packet of bread to a second-hand cloth vendor. What Planibel didn't realise, nor the vendor or his child who ultimately got the packet of bread, was the presence of a pouch housing a box which contained the 117 grams of ornaments.
Only when Planibel reached the bank did she realise that the pouch was missing. She traced her steps back to the vendor and the child, but was unsuccessful. Later, she went to the Dindoshi police who helped recovered the gold within 12 hours.
With the help of CCTV cameras, the police were able to trace the plastic bag near Gokuldham Colony but the pouch with the gold wasn't found. "It seems they threw the bag in the garbage bin,” zonal DCP Somnath Ghagre said. Police found the pouch with the jewellery intact in a nullah. They suspect rats pulled the pouch down a drain from the bin.
“Then we called labourers who removed the nullah slab and found the pouch with the gold intact,” Senior inspector Jeevan Kharat told TOI.