Life in a remand home is no different. As Billa Number 61 discovered. A deaf-mute minor, she was found wandering around on Mumbaii’s Churchgate railway station in a state of severe shock. She had been sexually abused several times during her journey from nobody-could-make-out-where to Mumbaii. She was sent to a remand home and given the identification tag of 61, no one thought of giving her some kind of human identity with even a temporary name.

Billa Number 61 was soon, and often, raped by the male cook of the remand home. He gave her fruits to eat in return which she accepted gratefully and happily, a small half-rotten apple today, a shrivelled chikoo the next.

Billa Number 61 felt hungry one afternoon, the food was never enough at the remand home, and she went to the kitchen for some fruit. She took off her salwar, hiked up her kameez and lay down with her legs spread wide on the cold, slimy kitchen floor. She waited, within a few minutes she would get something to eat.

When the cook was on top of Billa Number 61, two other girls came into the kitchen chattering and laughing among themselves. The cook got off, hiked up his trousers and offered them fruit. The girls ran out to call someone, anyone, in charge. When they returned with the warden, the cook was nowhere in sight. Billa Number 61 was sitting on the kitchen floor calmly eating a pulpy banana.

There was an uproar when this story got into the newspapers, committees were hastily appointed and several ‘fact-finding’ missions wound their way to this remand home, reports were written out, proclamations made, recommendations noted, several city non-government organizations working with and for children held meetings and were suitably outraged, the cook was sacked by the home and arrested by the police. Billa Number 61’s case only recently came up for hearing; the cook, Shivaji Nanavare, was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and fined Rs 23,000.

This incident happened in September 1997.

In February 2000, a nine-year-old mute inmate of the same remand home was raped on the same premises. This was discovered when she was admitted to the hospital with convulsions; she had been raped within nine days of being ‘rescued’ from the Dadar railway station and placed in that remand home. When she was admitted on February 25 to the hospital with convulsions, doctors also found other signs of sexual abuse apart from a deep bite mark on her face and abrasions on her body.

The newspapers reported on this crime; nothing much else happened bar a few murmurs of disapproval from the non-government organizations who raise money in the name of deprived children and ostensibly work towards their betterment.

But constable Patil read about it and quickly made his way to the remand home from his posting at the faraway Malvani police station. ‘I needed to see if that other child was all right,’ he says gruffly.

That other girl had been a resident of a small bungalow on the as-yet picturesque Marve beach. Her mother had died recently, her fifteen-year-old brother had turned alcoholic and was frequently thrown into the lock-up for drunken behaviour; this seven-year-old was just about learning to take care of herself, her home, her school, her studies and the domestic requirements of her brother and father when her forty-eight-year-old father decided to have some fun with her. She resisted, she fought back and tried to run away; he shaved off her hair and mauled her; she tried to run away nevertheless, he tied her to the bed post and raped her continuously for three days.