A Bangladeshi woman was rescued from the brothel in Budhwarpeth, Pune, in December 2015. After her salvage, she had been lured to India under the false pretext of a job, and was instead sold into commercial sex work, had to first find her way home. But now that clearance from her home country to accept her back has come through, she has tweeted a hand-written letter to the Prime Minister to help her convert the Rs 10,000 she had saved in the old denominations to new ones.

In her letter to both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and minister of external affairs Sushma Swaraj, the survivor has laid bare her circumstances and how the money she had collected as tips from customers – amounting to Rs 10,000 – was in the possession of the brothel owners at the time of demonetisation, reports Indian news media NDTV.

The Bangladeshi woman claims that before coming to India, she had been in an abusive marriage for three years. After divorcing her husband, she took up a job at a garment factory in Bangladesh for Rs 9,000 that she used to look after her parents. There, one of her colleagues told her about contacts in India and how she could earn as much as Rs 15,000.

‘As my financial condition was not good, I agreed to it and he brought me to Vashi. where, to my horror, he sold me to a Nepali women for a mere Rs 50,000,’ the survivor writes. ‘I was then taken to Bengaluru and handed over to another woman who forced me into prostitution. Later, I was assured that I was being sent back to Bangladesh, but instead ended up in Pune.’

After a year-and-a-half of this torture, she was rescued in December 2015 with the aid of the Rescue Foundation, but all her belongings, including the money stashed away, were left behind at the brothel.