There is a heady joy in cruelty. Examples are not far to seek; they are scattered across the country in middle-class houses employing children as domestic workers. Little girls, far away from their village homes and often locked in when their employers go out, are the most exciting prey. They are beaten, kicked, scratched, pinched, burnt, starved, their hair torn and their heads banged, and worked from dawn to midnight, with little or no pay. It might be encouraging to know that the police have arrested the employers of little Sumita Oraon after she was rescued by neighbours. She has been lucky rather late. But she is certainly not going to be the last, neither is there any hope that the same thing will not happen to her again, somewhere else. The media capture one such story after another: a nine-year-old locked in with dogs with the main switch turned off, an eight-year-old locked in with half a loaf and a bowl of water when her employers have gone on vacation, a ten-year-old with her earlobe snipped off. And this is without the dimension of sexual abuse.

It is the quality of gleeful cruelty in the heart of the mundane that is so intriguing. The show of power is irradiated with the confidence of having to pay no retribution, and its location within the home also suggests it is playtime for the otherwise powerless. But intricately woven in with this is an intense revulsion towards the poor, a need to keep the ‘dirty’ and the ‘low’ in their place, an assertion of class superiority that can only be understood in terms of an informal but hardened casteism. West Bengal is good at this. And if there is a count made of the number of ‘suicides’ by girl domestic workers in the last few years, the darkness surrounding the Bengali hearth and home will begin to look truly sinister. A parallel count of the number of cases in which the employer has been found guilty, if of nothing else then of having employed child labour, would be revealing. A poor little dead girl’s parents can be bought over by money and threats, and any old story be attributed to her as motive for her ‘suicide’. So although Sumita has been rescued, and so have some others, nothing has changed. How significant is a Rs 1,000 fine for a middle-class couple? That is the alternative to imprisonment if they are found guilty of two of the reported four charges against them. And what is the punishment for employing a child?