New Delhi:
In a small house, a five-year-old plays with her three-year-old brother on a weekday. School is not an option for now. She has been in and out of hospital, and this is the fourth home she has lived in since April.
That is when she was kidnapped and raped by two men. While she fought for her life in hospital, India united in anger with the same sort of force that had triggered massive protests when a medical student was fatally gang-raped on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012.
A series of glaring lapses drove home how little appeared to have changed. When she was kidnapped, her father was offered a bribe of Rs 2,000 to go away. The police never bothered to search the building she lived in. It was her mother who discovered her two days later in the basement, tied up, starving, bleeding. Bottles and candles had been inserted in her.
Protests were held, demanding action against the police. Flowers and stuffed toys were sent to her by strangers.
Two men were arrested for the assault on the child, named "Gudiya" or Doll by sections of the media.
When she was declared better and allowed to go home in May, relief fizzed in the air.
Since then, however, Gudiya's family, has fought for recovery without any support. They were given a lakh by the government as compensation, and moved to a hostel so that the child could recover far away from the building where she had been kidnapped and tortured.
But within two months, hostel officials asked the family to leave. Gudiya's father, who earns around Rs 100 on the days when he finds work as a hired hand, says he has rented four different homes, each move driven by the desire to protect his daughter from the murmurs that spread through the neighbourhood when her story was discovered.
"So many leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Sushma Swaraj had come and promised help," he said to NDTV. "Now, their people don't even take our calls."
Since she left hospital, the child has gone through four major surgeries. The operations are paid for by the government, but the cost of commuting and medicines is not small, her father said.
A fast-track court is trying the two men accused of raping her; a few weeks ago, she was taken there to recount what happened, but was unable to share the nightmarish details.
"She went twice to the court. The first time, she just signalled that she had been hurt on her neck and below the waist. The other time she could not say anything at all," he said.
Her mother says she would have preferred for the child to not be made to testify.