BY THE time Durga Jadhav was thrown out of her employer's Kowloon flat, she had been kept a prisoner for more than a month.
In that time, she was kicked awake by her boss every morning, slapped across the face if the tea was less than perfect and had pots of food dumped on her if there wasn't enough salt.
She was prohibited from making or receiving telephone calls, never set foot outside the house - and for all her heartache and suffering, did not see one dollar of compensation.
Ms Jadhav, 26, knows her case is not an uncommon one. She is one of about 1,000 Indian maids in Hongkong, all of whom have Indian employers. And according to social worker Raynah Braganza-Passanha at the Asian Migrant Centre, almost 95 per cent of them are grossly underpaid and verbally or physically abused.
''But the difference between the Indian domestic helpers and those from the Philippines, is Indian women don't complain,'' Ms Braganza-Passanha said. ''They accept their suffering as their lot in life. It's a psychological thing, particularly because they have Indian employers.'' Despite the inhumane way in which Ms Jadhav was treated, she said she would have remained with her employers; the emotional and physical abuse would have been worth the ''fortune'' she would have made at the end of her stay.
Ironically, when she was given the opportunity to work in Hongkong, she thought she had been blessed. As a villager in one of the backstreets of Pune, India, with four children between the ages of two and 10 and an unemployed husband, Ms Jadhav was not unlike many other villagers who would make about 500 rupees (HK$120) a month working as a washer-woman.