A law that recognises a mother’s right to her child as greater than the father’s until the age of 14 had to be reinterpreted on Monday when little Anita exclaimed: “But I don’t even know her!”

Anita was only 25 days old when her mother, Rina Hazra, deserted husband Prabir and their newborn. The then 25-year-old woman was admittedly so depressed at not giving birth to a boy after seven years of marriage that she never returned to her husband’s house at Tetultala Jala in Piyara Bagan, Howrah.

Staying with her parents, Rina wasn’t to come out of that phase for another six years, by which time Anita would be her father’s daughter.

The high court bench that heard Rina’s custody petition— not having remarried, she had a strong case — tried in vain to convince Anita that she would need her mother more until her early teens. The Class II student of a convent school in Liluah took only a second to give her verdict.

“I want to stay with my father. I will not go with her (Rina),” she said.

Justices Amit Talukdar and P.S. Banerjee didn’t have another question to ask. They only had a few words of sympathy and advice for Rina. “We have tried our level best. Although custody cases are not within our jurisdiction, we have tried and failed. You have the liberty to approach the appropriate forum,” the bench said.

Rina can, however, approach a lower court only for visiting rights.

Anita, happy as only a child can be after such an emotionally draining moment, went back home with her father as if nothing had happened.

Prabir’s lawyers Jaymalya Bagchi and Rajiv Lochan Chatterjee said it was a complicated case that tested the court. The firmness with which Anita said she wanted to stay with her father prompted the judges to allow her to do so, they said.

A medicine shop employee, Prabir had feared arrest on receiving a lawyer’s notice from his wife in February and moved the high court for anticipatory bail. After fixing the date for the in-camera hearing, the division bench asked Prabir to bring Anita along.

“Tears were the first indication of what was in Anita’s mind. When the judges asked her to go to her mother, she cried,” Bagchi said.