The details of the unlikely episode got clear only after the police caught up with Sumeet on Saturday and the game was up. She told them that she had left home as she had failed in her monthly tests at school and knew her parents would get angry on her. What she did not know was that the police would resort to tapping her residential phone line after the missing person's report was lodged, hoping to catch out whoever perpetuated the crime. And sure enough, they got their call.

The all important call came on Saturday morning, when Sumeet called up her parents to let them know that some people had kidnapped her and wanted Rs 10 lakhs before releasing her. The call, the Trilokpuri police discovered, had originated from a guest house in New Friend's Colony where Smeeta had checked in on the pretext that it was close to the Srinivaspuri hospital where her mentally ill mother was undergoing treatment. But not before she had treated herself to a sumptuous burger at the Macdonald's Preet Vihar outlet.

By the time the police reached the guest house in question however, Sumeet had already checked out. The staff manning the place of course told the police their side of the story, after which messages relating to the `missing' girl were flashed to all police control room vans stationed all over the Capital.

As luck would have it, that very evening a PCR van parked near Appu Ghar spotted a girl resembling the 'missing' one. On interrogating her, she maintained that she was not the girl they were looking for. She said her father had been dead for six years and that she had no family. The policemen however detected that she was giving differing versions at the rate of one each minute, and sustained interrogation finally got the girl to confess that she was hungry and wanted them to take her back home.

The police handed over Sumeet to her parents around midnight on Saturday, bringing to an end a daring yet foolish act by an 11-year-old to escape the realities of life.