She came back after running away

She came back after running away
By Sandra Leong

ON SEPT 23 this year, Zahidah Yusrah left her flat in Ang Mo Kio to go out with friends.
At 1am, the pretty 15-year-old called her mother, Madam Yuslina Ariffin, to say she was in Geylang.

She asked if Madam Yuslina would go to the void deck of their Ang Mo Kio flat to pay her taxi fare, but the latter flatly refused.

Recalls Madam Yuslina, 39, who works part-time as a cleaner: 'I was angry that she had broken her curfew.'

Zahidah's 9pm curfew had been implemented by the Singapore Children's Society, through a counsellor Madam Yuslina had sought out to address the Secondary Three student's bad habit of staying out late.

But the last thing the mother of four children - three boys and one girl aged two to 18 - expected was for her only daughter to go missing for five weeks.
When Zahidah still did not return home the next morning, Madam Yuslina sent her a text message threatening to send the rebellious teenager to a girl's home.

When she didn't get a response, she became worried. Though Zahidah had stayed out overnight without permission twice before, she had always come home the next day.

The girl, whom Madam Yuslina describes as 'generally well-behaved', also had little money on her.

On Sept 25, the worried mother filed a missing persons report with the police.

The next five weeks were a living hell for her.

She says: 'I was like a crazy woman. I couldn't sleep. I cried very night.'

Not convinced that the police were looking into her case, she and her husband, store keeper Zulkifli Djafarin, 34, embarked on some sleuthing work on their own.

They called every friend of Zahidah's they knew, but no one had heard from her.

After about two weeks, Madam Yuslina came across a missing persons poster put up by the Crime Library at Admiralty MRT station. She approached the organisation, which designed a similar poster with Zahidah's face printed on it.

'I printed 150 of them and put them up in places like Ang Mo Kio, Geylang and Yishun. If I couldn't sleep thinking of her, I would get up at 3am with my husband to put up more posters,' she says.

'If some of the original posters were taken down by people, I would put them up again.'

While making her rounds in Yishun one day, a group of boys at a void deck told her that they had seen someone who looked like Zahidah, but Madam Yuslina was still unable to find her.

As days passed without news, she began to fear the worst.

'I had heard about kidnapping and prostitution syndicates. When I went to Geylang to put up posters, the people around me were telling me about them and I became so worried.'

She also had faith that Zahidah would show up on Hari Raya Puasa on Oct 13 but when that didn't happen, her spirits sank to a new low.

Then on Oct 30, a policeman called the home.

A girl friend whom Zahidah had been bunking with had finally decided to give her away after they quarrelled.

Madam Yuslina was asked to go to a block of flats in Toa Payoh to claim her daughter. Upon seeing Zahidah, she burst into tears.

'At first I was angry. But she's my only daughter... if she's safe, I'm happy.'

The first words that Zahidah said to her mother were 'Mum, I'm hungry'.

The teenager had been putting up at friends' homes for five weeks and been subsisting on instant noodles.

Asked why she disappeared, Zahidah says: 'I was shocked by my mother's SMS about going to the girl's home.'

But she admits: 'I wanted to go home. I missed my mother and felt sorry for making her worry.'

sandral@sph.com.sg