7-year-old escapes a life of misery in a middle class home

BHILAI (CHHATTISGARH): She climbed the gate of a brick mansion to find comfort in the cramped room of a kabbadiwalla, sleeping a peaceful night amidst piles of papers, bottles, cans, and human love.
Now in the custody of the police, Pooja Sahu, a precocious 7 year old, holds out her hands to show the callouses around her knuckles and pulls up her shirt to show the deadened cavities on her back, acquired from two years of living with a middle class family."They made me wash utensils all day, my hands were soaked in soap water," she says, "and when I refused to work, they beat me with a danda".
For the last two years, the child had been living with Duttas in Bhilai's housing board area. "My father is a badmaash and in jail. My mother carried bricks for a living. When I was five, she left me at an ashram," she says, "from there, Dutta came and took me away".
In his forties, Shyam Prasad Dutta (50) is a liaison officer for a Kolkata based company, his wife Deepali (46) is a homemaker, and their son Amarjit (18) goes to college. Pooja says they mistreated her, deprived her of food, and made her work like a slave. "I woke up at 4 every morning, made the beds, cleaned the verandah, washed bhagwan ke bartan (utensils for the deities), mopped the floor, bathed, ate breakfast, washed the utensils, then the clothes, had lunch, and once again washed utensils," she reels off. "They gave me food, but never enough. I had to pull out leftovers from the bin to fill my tummy. When they went out, they locked me in the bathroom".
On Thursday, Pooja decided to escape. "After lunch, the mother and son take an afternoon nap. That's when I slipped away". She was spotted at a market place corner by a juicewallah, Manoj, who sent her to a hotelwaali, Kusum, who in turn asked a bunch of neighbourhood kids to take her to the chachi who lived alone.
"She came to my house, and said chachi, I am hungry, can I get a biscuit," remembers Veena Das, who runs a kabaadi shop with her husband Mehboob Khan, both migrants from Bengal, like the Duttas. "I said beta a biscuit will not be enough, eat food, and I served her vegetables, rice and deem (egg)". Within minutes, a bond was forged. Pooja began calling Veena 'mummy'. And Mehboob 'baba'.
"That night, she slept next to me. When she woke up in the morning, she said mummy it was so nice to sleep on a mattress, there I had to sleep on the floor," recalls Veena. "I had tears in my eyes. Who treats children like this? We are poor but even we do not make our children work so hard".
The police has arrested the family under sections 23 and 26 of Juvenile Protection Act and sections 342 and 34 of IPC.
"The girl is a liar," says Deepali Dutta, in the police station. "We already have a maid, you can check. Why would we make a child work?" She claims her husband and she adopted Pooja formally two years ago, to fill the vacuum left behind by their 20 year old daughter who committed suicide four years ago. "But she turned out to be dirty child, who urinated in the bed, and ate from the bin," she says.
As for the callouses on the child's hands, Deepali claims it was a kind of skin disease. What about the injury marks on her back? "Oh well, when she disobeyed, my husband lost his cool. He would say we brought you to lessen our pain, instead you are adding to our grief. And tell me, apna hai tabhi to maraa (since we feel she is part of the family, that's why we beat her)".
"If they really cared for her, would they not have tried to filed a missing person complaint, after all the child had been missing from their house for three days," says Pankaj Keswani, a local social worker who came forward to file an FIR. "They must be punished as a lesson to others in society".