By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR
MEDAWARA KALAN, India — The village of Medawara Kalan lies down a one-lane dirt track, past mustard fields, thatched-roof huts and piles of neatly stacked cow dung patties, dried to use for fuel.
Thirty years ago, Badri Nath Singh left this village for the capital city of Delhi, some 600 miles away, one of millions from the vast Indian countryside to migrate to the fast-growing cities.
Last month, Mr. Singh and his family returned, bearing the ashes of his only daughter.
His daughter, 23, who died after being gang raped and attacked with a metal rod on a moving bus in New Delhi on Dec. 16, has become a symbol of all that is wrong with how India treats its women and girls. But until December, she had been an example of something very different: of how far ambition, hard work and parental love can remove one generation from the rural poverty that is the lot of most of India’s 1.2 billion people.
“This episode has shattered my dreams,” Mr. Singh said in an interview this past week in the village in Uttar Pradesh State. He sat outdoors wrapped in blankets on a rope and wood cot, while an ever-shifting crowd of male relatives sat watchfully nearby, sometimes passing scalding cups of chai.
Mr. Singh, his wife and two teenage sons returned to Medawara Kalan, population 2,000, after his daughter’s death on Dec. 29, to perform 13 days of Hindu rituals that culminate in men shaving their heads and providing a meal for hundreds of people, meant to bring peace to the dead.
Little has changed in the village since Mr. Singh left, even as development spreads to the far corners of India. Electricity is scarce, farming is the only occupation, and the government school ends at fifth grade.
“At the village we could not fulfill our needs, so it was inevitable to move out,” Mr. Singh said about the decision to leave three decades ago. Although his daughter was born in New Delhi, she returned often to the village with the family, just as many urban Indians still maintain ties to a family village.
With his move to New Delhi, Mr. Singh was in the first wave of a slow shift that is transforming India from the agrarian land of Mohandas K. Gandhi, who said India “lives in its villages,” to a country of teeming megacities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with more than one million people. By 2011, it had more than 50.
Mr. Singh’s first salary in the city was about $4 a month, but he soon saved enough to have his wife, Asha, join him the city, and then to buy land and build a small home. While girls are not always prized in India, Mr. Singh and his wife lavished attention on their firstborn, a daughter, he recalled. “Whether it’s a girl or a boy, it’s God’s gift,” he said.
The daughter — whose name is being withheld because it is illegal to name a rape victim in India without permission from the victim or her next of kin — showed as a very young girl a love for school, her father remembered. “She used to cry if she couldn’t go to school,” he said.
She was often the best in her class, he said. The education of girls is often overlooked in India in favor of boys, but the Singhs did the opposite with their daughter. “We gave much more attention to the girl” than to the two sons who came after, he said.
“If my sons asked for money, maybe I would refuse, but if my daughter asked for money, I never refused,” he said, putting his arm around his son Gaurav, who stood protectively nearby. He even jokingly called her “beta,” Hindi for son.
Together, they discussed how she might advance further than even their most accomplished relative, a judge. She wished to become a doctor, but because money was tight, she chose physiotherapy and enrolled in a school in Dehra Dun, a major city in the north.
To pay for school, Mr. Singh sold most of the land he owned in Medawara Kalan, borrowed money from family members and worked double shifts, 16 hours a day, loading luggage at the Delhi airport.
The woman had planned to pay for her two younger brother’s education once she started her career. One boy hoped to be an engineer, the other an astronaut.
“My son really worked hard to see his daughter fulfill her dreams,” said Lalji Singh, the woman’s grandfather. “He never knew if it was day or night because he was working so hard.”
The woman’s mother has not been well since her death, the family said. During the interview she sat in a small, dark room, off a courtyard filled with small children and tiny, smoky fires. Cocooned in blankets, she raised her hands in the “namaste” gesture of greeting but said nothing.
On the night of the assault, the young woman, who was about to start an internship for her new career, went to see a movie with a male friend. It was then that the family’s urban dream collided with an ugly reality of life in an Indian megacity.
New Delhi’s public transportation system is woefully inadequate, so the two boarded a private bus, just as thousands in the city do every day. On board were a group of men, mostly working-class migrants, who the police said were drinking alcohol and on a “joy ride,” looking for someone to harass.
Trying to explain the reasons behind what happened next has dominated the national discussion in India.
The woman and her friend were attacked. During the assault, the friend was knocked unconscious. The woman bit one of the men on the hand. She was taken to the back of the bus and raped and a metal rod was shoved into her body up to her diaphragm, leaving her intestines so damaged they ultimately had to be removed, the family said doctors told them. For Mr. Singh, and many who grew up in India’s villages, the brutal episode points to nothing less than an overall decline in the country’s national character. He drew a parallel between the country’s move toward cities and individuals’ focus on earning more, and the events of that evening.
“As there is increase in money, there is within the people greed,” he said. Such a crime never happened in his village, he said.
Doctors who treated the woman told her family immediately that she was unlikely to live, Mr. Singh and his son Gaurav, a thin 17-year-old with a knit cap pulled low over his downcast eyes, recalled.
“The doctor said the very first day that she would not survive, but it was willpower that she did for so long,” Gaurav said, then sunk his chin into his chest and quietly shook with sobs.
Naresh Kumar Trehan, a surgeon and managing director of Medanta Medicity, a hospital near New Delhi, said he had never seen such brutality. “I have seen all sorts of violence, of all forms,” said Dr. Trehan, who treated the woman. “But this kind — I just couldn’t get my mind around it.”
On Dec. 29, the woman died in a Singapore hospital, where she had been flown for treatment. Her body was cremated, and the Hindu rituals related to her death conclude this weekend.
Despite what has happened, the Singh family will return to New Delhi, where Gaurav has his exam for engineering school this spring. “I have not lost hope,” the father said. “I will take my sons forward.”
A short distance from the Singh family home this past week, on the one large flat patch of ground near the village that is not being tilled for crops, about two dozen men shifted bricks and sand, wreathed in the fog while a backhoe rumbled.
It was the first sign of development the village has seen in decades, residents said. The playground of the village school was being transformed into a helipad for a visit on Friday from a top government official who paid his respects to the family.
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