The anguish of the last three weeks has already taken a heavy toll on Lakshmi.
Her face looks drawn and exhausted, and as she sits with a cheap printed
shawl wrapped around her bird-like frame, relatives watch over in case she
suffers yet another fainting fit. She can barely bring herself to eat, and
when someone offers her milk to drink, it goes untouched.
Ask her what she thinks should happen to the men arrested for gang-raping and
murdering her daughter, though, and a sudden steel comes into the
46-year-old's quiet, hesitant voice. "Mercy" is not among the
words that comes forth.
"My soul will never know any rest if the men who tormented my daughter
are not hanged," she says. "If they are not, the idea of them
being in jail, eating and watching television, talking and laughing when my
daughter has gone from this world will eat away at me. Living out the rest
of my life will be very hard if those men are not hanged."
That Lakshmi has no interest in leniency is hardly surprising. The killing of
her daughter has caused shockwaves across India, firstly because it
epitomised a culture of sexual violence that has long gone unchallenged, and
secondly because of its sheer, frenzied brutality. Using a tyre iron as a
weapon, the gang beat the 23-year-old student so badly that she died 13 days
later in a hospital in Singapore, having suffered massive internal injuries,
brain damage and a heart attack. Yet her mother's rejection of clemency is
also a way of fulfilling her daughter's dying wish, whispered during one of
her brief bouts of consciousness as she lay in her hospital bed.
"When one of few things she said to me was: 'Mama, I want them to be
burnt alive'," said her mother, who sat last week hunched in a charpoy,
a traditional string cot that her relatives had set up in the yard of her
home. "What they did to her, how they used that iron rod on her was so
inhuman, I can't understand it."
Lakshmi - not her real name - was speaking to The Sunday Telegraph at
her ancestral home in Medawara Kalan, a dirt-poor farming hamlet of mud huts
and squat brick homes that lies amid yellow-green mustard fields in the
northern state of Utter Pradesh. Life here has changed little from how it
was centuries ago: buffaloes wander the sidestreets, heating is from cowdung
cakes rather than gas or electricity, and women grind spices outside their
homes for meals still cooked on wood-fired clay stoves. It was in the hope
of providing their children with better prospects than these that Lakshmi
and her husband moved to the Indian capital, Delhi, before she was born.
Following their daughter's cremation in Delhi a fortnight ago, however, the
family returned to the village for the first time in five years, prompted by
the desire to be among a large extended family and friends. The constant
presence of people to sit with, talk to, and just be with, is a solace,
according to her father, 53. "I couldn't bear the idea of walking into
our house without my daughter," he said. "That's going to be the
hardest thing for all of us."
On Friday, the tiny village was abuzz as as it greeted another rare visitor -
Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, who, in the style of most
Indian politicians, arrived in a manner more befitting of a head of state.
Beforehand, the massive craters on the long winding road leading to Medawara
Kalan were filled hastily with sand and broken stones, while workers erected
a small white marquee outside the family's modest home, connected by
stretches of green carpet to a hastily-erected helipad.
As some 500 policemen stood guard, the minister himself finally touched down,
chatting briefly to the family and then handing over a cheque for £26,000 as
compensation for their daughter's death. He also announced plans to build a
hospital in the village, currently some 120 miles away from proper medical
facilities.
Yet in its grandstanding pomp and ad hoc largesse, the minister's visit also
underlined the divide between India's "haves" and "have-nots"
- a divide that Lakshmi and her partner devoted to their lives to getting
her on the right side of. Like millions of modern Indians, they were
determined that their own children - boys and girls alike - would be the
first to have a chance of a decent education and a professional career.
Lack of funds, though, was not the obstacle to their ambitions.
"My father's family couldn't believe it," said Lakshmi's elder son,
20, as he sat stroking his mother's hair.
"Fighting broke out when my parents sold some land to finance her
education. Then, when they sold the jewellery they had inherited, my
relatives were just stunned. They thought my parents were mad and told them
to stop. But they went ahead, they were determined to give her a good future."
In Lakshmi's daughter's case, it turned out to be money well spent. She was,
by all accounts, exactly the kind of hard-working, dutiful daughter that
every Indian family dreams of, the sort who would fulfil the expectations of
even the most socially-aspirant parents.
A star pupil at school, she supplemented her own fees by tutoring other
children, raising her nose from books just long enough to scold her younger
siblings for not following her example.
"She used to say to me: "You have to make something of yourself',"
her brother recalled. "Do you think Papa left his village and his whole
family to come to Delhi just so that you could be a failure?"
At first, she had wanted to be a doctor, but her father, who held down jobs
variously as a mechanic, security guard and airport loader, could not raise
the necessary bank loans. The Sai Institute of Paramedical and Allied
Sciences, in the city of Dehradun in the Himalayan foothills, offered an
alternative: a 4½-year physiotherapy course that was far cheaper. Once
qualified she would earn a monthly salary of 30,000 rupees (£340), more than
four times her father's income.
Having enrolled in 2008, she also worked night shifts at a call centre,
advising Canadians about their mortgages and honing her English; she became
an avid reader Sidney Sheldon novels and of "One Night @ the Call
Centre," a best-selling Indian novel about six call-centre workers. As
her confidence grew, the once-shy girl swapped her traditional dresses for
jeans, tops, and high-heels. By virtue of her education, she also become the
second "head of the family" alongside her father.
"Whenever there was a problem at home, some issue, we always waited to
speak to her," said her brother. "Papa too would consult her, even
more than consulting Mama, because he knew she would be sensible and know
what to do."
"She was our life," added her mother. "She always used to tell
me that the struggle to educate her would soon be over and then, when she
started working, our lives would improve."
Had she ever feared for her daughter's safety in Delhi?
"I would sometimes say that I was scared, that she should be very careful
whenever she went out. But she always told me to relax. 'Don't worry, I'll
be fine, nothing will happen."
That turned to be the one thing which her daughter - always the family member
who got things right - got wrong.
One the night of December 16, after seeing the movie Life of Pi, she
and a male companion took a ride home in what seemed like an ordinary
private mini-bus. Instead, both the driver and the other "passengers"
were a gang on the prowl for victims. As the bus drove around the streets,
its windows blacked out from view, her male companion was beaten unconscious
while she was raped, the attackers eventually discarding the two of them by
a roadside.
When her parents, already distraught by her failure to return home on time as
usual, received a phone call from a hospital to say she had been admitted,
they initially assumed it was just a minor car accident. Ten days later they
were being flown with with her to an intensive care ward in Singapore, where
the Indian government - stung by outrage over the incident - hoped that
specialists might be able to save her life.
By then, Lakshmi's daughter was so weak that much of her last communication
with her parents was in sign language. In some ways, the limits on
communication may have been a blessing.
"She did not know that her intestines had been ripped out," said her
mother. "When she asked me why the doctors had done such a big
operation on her abdomen, I just told her that I didn't know. I kept telling
her she would recover and come home.
"Then, one day, I saw the machine for her blood pressure make a strange
noise, and the line (on the monitor) changed. I looked at the doctor and he
said that she had gone, that there was nothing more he could do for her."
As the family continued mourning last week, five men appeared in court charged
with kidnap, gang-rape and murder, while a sixth defendant, believed to be
17, faces charges in a juvenile court.
Lawyers for some of the suspects - who could face the death penalty - have
said they were tortured by police into making false confessions, a claim
that brings a snort of dismissal from the victim's mother.
Some reports of the story have focused on the fact that several of the accused
came from the same notorious district of Delhi, a so-called "slum
cluster" called Ravidas Camp that sits in an otherwise upmarket area
near the city's main airport. A maze of alleyways and squalid brick housing,
its lawless reputation gives easy credence to the narrative that the crime
was the tale of two contrasting Delhis - one chasing the modern Indian dream
of middle-class prosperity, the other embracing a ghetto culture of violence
and sexual pugnacity. Not in the mind, though, of the victim's mother, who
herself knows how it it is to be raised poor.
"People ask me if I ever educated my sons on how to treat women with
respect and not harass them them or stare at them, but I always reply that I
never needed to," she said. "My sons have never misbehaved with
women or even thought of it."
She added that she was not interested in compensation from the government, or
in the various promises of help that have been made by ministers and
organisations, including job offers for her son, who must now face up to a
future as the main family breadwinner. "I want only one thing. I want
to see those animals hang," she insisted.
This weekend saw the formal Hindu mourning period for her daughter come to a
close. For the past 13 days, various prayers and rituals have been
performed, designed to let the soul pass peacefully to the next level of
existence. At the final ceremony today (SUN), worshippers were due to offer
clothes, accessories and other items deemed to help the deceased in their
journey. Whether they would be of much use in Lakshmi's daughter's case was
a moot point - her education had also made her a committed aethiest, said
her brother.
"I've got jeans, a shirt, shoes, shampoo, eyeliner and moisturiser,"
he said, smiling. "I know it won't reach her, but I'm doing it as a
gesture for my sister."
One item that his ever-studious sibling might have been keen to receive will
not be offered up. Friday was the day that she was due to receive the
results of her final year physiotherapy exams, the culmination of all those
years of striving by both her and her parents.
But asked if she would try to find out what the results were, her mother shook
her head. "What's the point?" she said. "Nothing matters any
more."
Names have been changed in this article for legal reasons
Two hundred years. But there seemed little chance, two hundred years
ago, that many people would remember either the novel or its author by
now. The draft that she produced at twenty-one was rejected by a London
publisher sight unseen. Other disappointments followed, and after a
series of personal upheavals, she gave up writing altogether. 
196 Comments
