No. No it is not a beautiful world.

At just 22, Jyothi looks like a broken woman. As nightfall swallows the last of the light and the mosquitoes descend, she describes how her violent marriage led to the death of her three-year-old daughter, Lakshmi, last year.

Her husband, an alcoholic and drug user, would attack her at night after she returned from working as a housemaid for a high-caste family. In a flat voice and with dead eyes, she describes his rituals of violence.

"He used to blast the TV and the audio player to drown the noises, then he'd strip me and beat me black and blue with a belt. He would use a hot iron rod on my private parts. My brother-in-law works at night, and my sister-in-law and mother-in-law were scared of him.

"He used to say, 'Why did you have a girl? It should have been a boy. This girl must be someone else's.' One night he tried to slit my throat." Jyothi touches a scar on her neck. "My daughter begged him not to kill me. He tied my hands and legs and put me on the bed. He was a strong man. I knew I was lost."

One day last winter, Jyothi went to work as usual, leaving Lakshmi in the care of her sister-in-law. "My husband came back to the house drugged, grabbed Lakshmi by the legs, and swung her against the door again and again," says Jyothi. "When I returned after the attack, she wasn't conscious and she was bleeding from the nose and eyes."

Jyothi fled to her parents' home with her daughter; there, over the next few days, Lakshmi grew increasingly weak. "I took her to the hospital, but the doctor said, 'It's beyond my control,'" says Jyothi. "We didn't have any money to have her X-rayed."

Lakshmi died soon after. Although the family notified the police of what had happened, no action was taken.