Maaghi, police investigations reveal, was not allowed to meet anyone by the family and they would lock him up when they went out. ``Conversations with the family's relatives have revealed that the servant boy had a deep-seated anguish in his mind because of that,'' says Uday Sahay, DCP West. The murders, police suspect, could have been a result of the anguish.

Maaghi's case is not singular. Police files, says Sahay, are replete with cases of children employed as servants being maltreated and taking to crime or killing themselves.

He cites the case of a 10-year-old boy from district Guna in Madhya Pradesh who committed suicide inhis employer's Punjabi Bagh residence on September 28. ``Before he killed himself, the boy attacked the two-year-old baby under his care with a cricket bat and tried to kill him,'' recalls the DCP.

``Then, before hanging himself, he wrote on the wall that he would come back in his next birth to take the child away.''

What happened next? The police, of course, registered a case against the employers who were reported to have ill-treated the boy. ``People in Delhi have strong biases,'' says Sahay. ``They'll ill-treat servants just because they belong to another region.''

In yet another case, nearly a month ago, a 14-year-old girl committed suicide after she was allegedly harassed by her employer in West Delhi locality. The employer was booked by the police, sources add.

Ill-treating young, impressionable children leaves their minds damaged and often results in retaliatory action.``The major motivation sometimes is not robbery; aggression becomes a means of taking out frustration,'' says Prof K D Brootaof the Delhi University psychology department. ``Most people treat their servants like 18th-century slaves, while in the same house they continue to shower affection and wealth on their own children.

This disparity can tempt the child servant to steal or commit a crime out of sheer jealousy,'' explains Broota.

Never hurt a child's ego; replace him if you don't like the way he works, the psychologist cautions. For, the results can be very dangerous. Employers' responses to their servants and servants' to their employers are conditioned by their social environment. And that's where the trouble begins, often leading to a ``clash'' in sociological terms, sociologists point out. In simple words, this would mean a violent outburst on the part of the servant.

Hiring a child as a house-help is a bigger responsibility than one would think. ``It involves part of parenting. The responsibility for re-socialising the child in the new environment is a must in order to avoid confrontation,'' says Prof Ehsanul Haq ofthe Centre for Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University.