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Vinod Kambli and his wife Andrea.

Tired of being assaulted repeatedly and locked in the house, Soni Sarsal (30), who works as a nanny in former cricketer Vinod Kambli’s household, allegedly drank phenyl out of desperation; an FIR has been registered against him and his wife Former cricketer Vinod Kambli and his wife have been charged for torturing and locking up their domestic help, who drank phenyl, allegedly in a bid to escape the harsh treatment meted out by them.

The Bandra police have registered an FIR against the couple on the word of their nanny, Soni Nafesingh Sarsal (30), who claimed that they would often withhold her salary and would threaten to thrash her in public if she pushed her case. Soni told mid-day that she had been hired as a nanny for the two Kambli children for a monthly salary of R10,000. However, when she would ask them for money, she never got more than Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 at a time.

"I started working at their residence some two years ago and since then they haven’t paid me my full salary. Whenever I asked them for it, they would assault me brutally and not let me go home," she alleged, adding that the couple had also confiscated her phone and passport so she couldn’t escape to her house in Bharat Nagar in Bandra (East). Things came to a head last week, however, when they locked her up in the house and went away for three days. "I was not allowed to go home for ten days and when I said I wanted to leave, they assaulted me with their bare hands. Then they locked me inside their house and left me there for three days," Soni recalled. According to the police, when the family returned on Friday, Vinod and his wife Andrea were drunk and they began to assault her.

"Soni drank phenyl in a fit of frustration and said to them, ’Kill me now.’ She managed to escape and got admitted at Bhabha Hospital. When her family approached us early on Saturday morning, we went to the hospital to take her statement," said a cop attached to the case. "After constant harassment from them, my sister got fed up with the Kamblis and drank phenyl. They got scared that Soni would die in their home, and they let her go. She immediately went to the hospital," alleged Soni’s sister, Aisha. Soni, who was discharged from the hospital yesterday, claimed that she was frequently beaten up or threat ened for all kinds of reasons, such as the times when Vinod had asked her to fetch alcohol from the liquor store. "When I refused, he threatened to take me to my neighbourhood and publicly thrash me there," Soni claimed. ’Irregular worker’According to Andrea, however, Soni was irregular at work and would keep asking for money on some pretext or the other. "We didn’t pay her full salary because she would miss work frequently and would also keep asking for advance, claiming some or the other relative was unwell. We have never hit her; if this were true, there are cameras at our house that would have captured all of this," she told mid-day.

Mumbai Police spokesperson DCP Dhananjay Kulkarni confirmed that an FIR had been registered against the Kamblis under Sections 343 (wrongful confinement for three or more days), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code. "We have registered the offence and the investigation is in progress. We are yet to record the statements of the accused party and if they are found guilty, they will be arrested," he said. ’I would never hit a woman’Vinod Kambli denied the charges and said they were "completely false". "I would never raise a hand on anybody, any woman. I pay all my servants... I have got another servant, she has been getting her salary... Why should we lock her (Soni)? My door is open, we have got CCTV cameras everywhere," he said. He, in turn, said that Soni had been dismissed from her job after she was found to be taking drugs. "When my wife told me she (Soni) had been taking drugs, I just told her to leave the house and we did not do anything to her," he said.