Kandi, Feb. 5: The slight four-year-old girl sits forlorn on the red steps of a house, her right ankle tied to the collapsible gate with a rope and a lock keeping the knot on her leg intact. Her left leg is bruised from long hours of being shackled. This has been her plight for the past one year. 

The girl’s mother, a 26-year-old widow forced out of her home after her husband’s death and not allowed shelter by her brother, ties her every morning to the gate of the house, whose owner lives in Calcutta. 

Poverty and compulsions have forced the mother to keep the child tied up as she washes dishes in an eatery across the road in Murshidabad’s Kandi and has little other option because she cannot monitor the kid for the nine hours she works.

The road that separates the house and the eatery is busy and the mother cannot risk the child loitering unwatched. 
Every morning around 7, the woman comes to her workplace from her rented one-room home about 1km away, ties her daughter to the gate and goes to the eatery. 

“I go over and feed her twice. When she wants to go to the toilet, she calls out to me and I go and untie her for two minutes. It pains me to keep her tied up, but I have no other option,” she said, her eyes welling up.

“She loved playing with her neighbours in Roshora (where the woman’s farm labourer husband lived). She loved the company of her father. I know this is the time for her to play and be happy, but I am helpless,” the mother said.

Some Kandi residents today brought the plight of the girl to the notice of the Kandi sub-divisional officer, Bijin Krishna. From the SDO’s office, the girl and her mother were taken by an NGO to a private home in Rejinagar.