The jailed uncle of the Unnao rape survivor cremated his wife on the banks of the Ganga in their village, his forlorn figure and despairing voice mirroring the plight of a family left to fight its battles alone after losing three members in the span of just over a year. An eerie silence had descended on the village, occasionally broken by the sirens of a 10-strong fleet of police vehicles, when the body of the rape survivor’s aunt arrived from Lucknow, three days after she and another relative were killed in a truck-car crash on NH-31 that also left the girl and her lawyer critically injured. In the past two years since the rape survivor named Sengar as the accused, nobody in the village had stood by the family.