The Singapore hospital is as squeaky clean as its corporate PR: Mount Elizabeth, a parkway health hospital. The dark blue van marked ‘Hindu casket’ matches the uniforms of the men loading her body into it (blue shroud, of course). But from here on, life and death get messier. At the funeral parlour in Singapore, while the corpse is being embalmed, the Indian official inspecting the coffin has brought his shopping with him in see-thro’ plastic bags. Next: the deceased is returned to her residence. The city which the body is brought back to, is garlanded with electric wires; growing thickly across the New Delhi street where she lived. The last journey to the cremation ground, in yet another hospital van, takes place in the half-light before dawn. Roads lined with more police than mourners; the cremation ground guarded by rifle-at-the-ready troops from India’s Border Force. Mass migration to the kingdom of the dead? No, only the body of the Delhi rape victim, to be tidied up on the purifying pyre. But this is not the end, thankfully. Out on the motley streets, a 20something woman demonstrator with a stick in one hand and an iPhone in the other. The stick is useless: would snap like a twig if it even grazed a police helmet. But the woman who’s shouting a slogan can’t stop herself grinning when she sees the camera pointing her way: she’s having the time of her life.