Why did the child not even scream? Has he been ‘priming’ her from before, touching her when he came for previous deliveries? Or did the child not scream because she is used to it in her own home? Has the deliveryman been doing it to other children? Why have they not complained? Or have they, and their parents have told them to keep quiet? Has the deliveryman been doing it to little girls, and boys, in his own neighbourhood? Where has this deliveryman come from, some other city where he did it to another little girl outside her own home? Is he another Uday who has been simply thrown out of one home like little Vaishali’s, and landed in another?

Increasingly it is meshing. People Like Them. People Like Us. The nastiness of one spilling over into the other.

And more and more it is happening. Children setting upon other children. Criminally, sexually.

• On 12 February 2000, three pre-teen boys raped a seven-year-old girl in Calcutta; they lured the girl who was watching video in her own home to a secluded place through her nine-year-old male neighbour. They tempted her with chocolate and then gang raped her.
• A seven-year-old girl was similarly lured by her teenaged neighbour in Krishna Nagar, Uttar Pradesh. He raped her in broad daylight, and when asked why, he said, ‘I wanted to see what it was like.’
• An eleven-year-old boy from Hyderabad has played ‘doctor-doctor’ so savagely with his nine-year-old sister that she bled till late evening. Their father is a child specialist.
• In another ‘mummy-daddy-get-married’ game, a fourteen-year-old boy in Chandigarh has bit his ten-year-old cousin sister’s nipples so hard that she needed extensive medical attention.

Are these children getting this message from adults—that it is all right to do something, anything, to a child? Child psychiatrist Dr Shekhar Seshadri nods grimly and says, ‘When children set upon children to sexually abuse them, it is very different from the initial, mild and occasional sexual exploration they conduct among themselves at a particular age. The increasing cases of Child Sexual Abuse among children, and upon each other, tend to be for three reasons. Substance abuse like drugs, glue-sniffing, alcohol and the like which reduces restraint. If they have themselves been sexually abused by their elders. Or when they model themselves on adults.’

Meanwhile, the statistics grow. Every child who is raped by an adult turns into a statistic. A life barely lived, already a horrific statistic:

• 3,393 children were raped in 1993; 634 of these were below ten years
• 3,986 children were raped in 1994; 727 of these were below ten years
• 4,067 children were raped in 1995; 747 of these were below ten years
• 4,083 children were raped in 1996; 608 of these were below ten years
• 4,414 children were raped in 1997; 770 of these were below ten years

That is an 8.1 per cent increase in 1997 over 1996, of children sixteen years of age and below.

And it is a 30 per cent increase in five years, from 1993.