Anita Lakhotia sits on a small stool and stares up blankly at the picture of her son, Yash, high on the wall next to the family shrine. The Lakhotias live in a flat on the fourth floor of a modern block in Howrah, across the river from Calcutta, in India's West Bengal state.
The boy's hair is neatly combed, his shirt clean and smartly pressed. Only seven years old, he looks the very model of a middle-class Indian child, just as he does in the last picture his parents took of him, wearing Western clothes, hugging his sister and smiling on an evening out at a mall in January 2009.
It was that which cost him his life. Because, as the Lakhotias and thousands of others like them are finding out, to join the booming middle class in India today is to become an irresistible target for those left behind, those who also want a share of the spoils.
Kidnapping children for ransom is one of India's boom industries. With police often slow to react and wealthy parents eager to pay to get their children back, it should be one of the quickest and simplest ways to make money.
Instead, it is a lottery, because all too often the kidnappers panic and kill their captives.
Two days after the picture in the mall was taken, Yash walked out of school and climbed into the car of a man he believed had been sent to collect him by his parents. Local people found his body in bushes near the Howrah waterfront three days later. There was dried blood on his nose and a mark on his neck, which police, when they finally stirred themselves, concluded was the result of strangulation.
Yash's death nearly destroyed Anita. The 35-year-old was pregnant when it happened: by the time she gave birth a few months later, she had convinced herself that the infant would be Yash reborn. When she found out the baby was a girl, she collapsed. Depression gnawed away at her. It was weeks before she left hospital.
