She finally managed to loosen her knots, untie herself and run away to the neighbour’s bungalow, a not inconsiderable distance when you consider that beachside bungalows are suitably spaced away from each other and are surrounded by huge, rambling gardens. She reached the house of her seventy-five-year-old neighbour who could not believe what she was looking at. A naked child with red welts where her as-yet-to-form breasts should have been, a head criss-crossed with red shaving scars, her red eyes swollen with tears and that red reflected all over her body in the form of her vaginal blood which had not stopped dripping. The neighbour managed to get her across to Malvani police station; constable Patil and other police officials—who found themselves shaking with the rage of it—arrested her father Dilip alias Francis Fernandes on Christmas day. The little girl was sent off to the remand home. Her case made it to the papers too, prominently.

Did a single non-government organization claiming to be concerned about sexually abused children notice? Perhaps it was because of the holiday season, the turn of the century, the new millennium; merry Christmas and a happy new year little Miss Fernandes.

Some one did notice the story on the mute being raped in the same remand home as Billa Number 61; where is she now, Billa Number 61, who knows, does it matter anyway in such a tidal wave of evil? But some one cared enough to protect the nine-year-old mute from further evil. Majlis, a legal resource centre, filed a petition in the High Court pointing out that the girl, after being raped, was being sent back to the same remand home after her medical examination. Justices P.S. Patankar and R.J. Kochar directed the police to shift the little girl to Bal Asha Sadan, a home approached and requested to take the girl by Majlis. This was in March 2000. April 2000, within one month, there is a dramatically positive change in the girl. This mute child, ‘rescued’ from Dadar railway station in February, was put into the remand home where the entry medical report says ‘hymen intact’. Within nine days she was bit, mauled, sexually probed, manhandled, assaulted and raped. She was then left to her own devices; except that towards the end of February she had convulsions and had to, perforce, be taken to hospital. When she was shifted to Bal Asha Sadan, she bit the other children there, she fought, she cowered under her bed when not having hysterics, she displayed sexualized behaviour, she wept, she would not allow herself to be touched, never mind undressed for a bath. April 2000. The child is a child again, she is mentally slow; but she is not mute, she never was. The power of true love in the form of real care.

Meanwhile: another non-government organization shelter run for destitute children, handsomely funded to save children from the streets. In the suburbs of Mumbaii, it is managed by a head who lives on the premises with his wife and children. He squeezes the breasts of a minor girl so hard that he leaves red marks. The girl, daughter of a prostitute, had been sent to this shelter on the premise that she would be safe from the kind of clients who frequented the area her mother worked in. This little girl’s breasts were squeezed so hard that she was compelled to ask the shelter’s assistant for medical aid.