Caught in a loop

A mother awaits justice for her gang-raped daughter; two others pray for relief for their convicted sons... the prolonged wait of three families bound by a heinous crime.

- REKHA DIXIT

Every day between 8pm and 9pm, Asha Devi goes to a memorial in her housing complex in Dwarka, west Delhi, and lights a lamp for her daughter, the 23-year-old physiotherapist intern who was brutally gang-raped and killed in one of the most horrific crimes in India in December 2012. For Asha Devi, keeping alive the memory of that bright young girl is very important. And also very difficult, because the ugly memories of her last days keep popping up. The distraught mother has not found closure, not while the killers stay alive.

There are no lamps in the hovel at Sant Ravi Dass camp in south Delhi, where an old and lonely widow ekes out an existence on the charity of others. Known locally as tai (aunt), she is the mother of Ram Singh and Mukesh, two of the six men who violated the girl. Ram Singh died mysteriously while he was an undertrial in Tihar jail in 2013. Mukesh is on the death row; his lawyer is making another desperate bid to extend his life, though legally it appears that all recourses have run out. Among the impoverished, there is a greater acceptance than there is among the middle class, which places a premium on morality. In this neighbourhood, residents can separate the criminal from his family, and the social ostracism one finds in better neighbourhoods is more tempered here.

In another home nearby lives another mother; her son Pawan Gupta is on death row, too. She does not smile, not even at the adorable antics of her toddler grandchild. To those who do not know, the home almost appears normal, with a younger son and daughter who are studying and a married daughter who visits often. But in a family where the older son is just days away from the noose, normalcy is an ideal they can only dream of. Pawan’s ageing grandparents are just too baffled with life to utter anything.