On the last day of June, a young mother poured half a bottle of pesticide down her little daughter’s throat before drinking the rest of it herself. The child was brought dead from her home in Panchberia village in Nadia district to the sub-divisional hospital and her mother, Lakshmi, died there that same afternoon. Minutes before Lakshmi took the last decisive step of her life, she had been teaching her daughter the alphabet. She did not take it well when her mother-in-law asked her to go and cook instead. She shut herself in with her daughter, possibly after a heated exchange, and proceeded to kill the child and then herself.

No act of violence in which parents kill their children and themselves is ever simple, for words like poverty or debt are no measure of the vortex of circumstances that creates in fathers and mothers a murderous combination of hopelessness and protectiveness. To approach any such event, it is useful to pick any one strand, to see what unravels. Lakshmi has made that easy. She was teaching her child. For West Bengal, shamefully deficient in literacy and school education, every mother teaching her daughter in a village is a ray of hope. Why should education kill?

The facts provided by the correspondent suggest the direction in which the answer lies. Lakshmi had studied till Madhyamik, and had then been married off to the mute son of the well-off Gopal Biswas seven years ago. For any girl from an underprivileged rural family in West Bengal, to study up to Class X is a daily struggle. It is also a struggle for her illiterate parents, who sometimes fight for their daughters’ education in defiance of their communities, which expect girls to be married by 14 or 15. One kind of failure is indicated by the dropout rates, but there is another too, perhaps more painful. In two villages near the tiny town of Purandarpur in Birbhum, all but two of the 22 girls who sat for the Madhyamik this time have failed. Two of the failed candidates were from the Bagdi community, the first girls to have gone up so far within their caste in the locality. How hard Lakshmi must have struggled to hold on to her studies is suggested by the fact that her father earns Rs 30 a day in Kamalabas village in the district of North 24 Parganas.

From a survey of women domestic workers in seven districts of West Bengal that I did recently, I picked a random sample of 17 from North 24 Parganas. Of the women themselves, nine are illiterate, six claim an ability to read a little and write numbers but no schooling, and two have gone to school until Class V. Among their 14 daughters of school-going age and above, five have gone to school, and all have dropped out. One managed to study till Class X, and one till VIII. According to the women, the monthly income of these households ranges from around Rs 1,800 to Rs 2,700.

Environment often plays a part in creating role models and aspirations, in altering priorities and values. Lakshmi grew up away from her village, in a relative’s house in Hanskhali in Nadia. She studied in one of the 14 high schools in Hanskhali block, where women’s literacy is 35 per cent, and men’s 51. From the survey I mentioned, I looked at 15 samples from four villages close to Haldia. East Midnapore is known for the importance it gives to education, and the results this time were different for the children of the domestic workers interviewed. Of the women themselves, eight are illiterate, two are slightly literate with no schooling, and five have gone to school, one having studied till Class VIII. They have 11 daughters of school-going age or over, of whom one is married, two are dropouts at classes VI and VII, and all the others in school, one in Class X. Four of the women said they wanted their girls to be educated, although everyone wishes for their daughters to be married well. One woman said she needed help because her husband habitually tears up his children’s school-books when he comes home drunk. All the boys except one Class X dropout are in school. The income range is similar to that of the sample from North 24 Parganas, where the households did seem to show some slight effort to send their boys to school.

It is likely that for Lakshmi the environment in Hanskhali was more congenial to studying than her own village could have been. The area is better off than it once was as a refugee colony, but Panchberia, her in-laws’ home, is far more prosperous. Her strange alliance was made possible by the fact that the groom was mute, and her father-in-law demanded no dowry of her far worse-off father. But she accepted the responsibility for her father’s poverty and her society’s demands: unless she got out of the way, how could her younger sister, a dropout from school, be married?

It got worse. Lakshmi’s father-in-law distributed 20 bighas of his land between his two older sons, one in the paramilitary force and the other an agricultural trader, completely depriving his mute youngest son. Trouble for Lakshmi had begun with the birth of her daughter, and it worsened now that she began her fight for justice and for self-respect. She went about it confidently, talking to a local NGO, to neighbours and to the panchayat. Perhaps in spite of good intentions, they failed her. The panchayat members had told her they would speak to her father-in-law after the elections. But she broke before that.

What is it that wears down a woman, a fighter whose sense of empowerment must have come to some extent from her education — she was teaching her daughter — to such fragility that all she sees is endless darkness for herself and her child? With all economic security torn from her, from her husband and daughter, rendered dependent on her in-laws — of which her mother-in-law reportedly never failed to remind her — and deprived of justice in her own home, her memories of struggle and aspiration, her compliance with her father’s wishes and her acceptance of her partner, her knowledge of poverty, a sense of no support for her fight for self-respect and equality, all and more must have converged in one hideous sensation of futility that brought about the end. It is frightening to speculate that she may have found it easier to continue had she never known the light of education in her apportioned darkness. The facts of her life suggest that she knew education is empowering — her acquired strength would have empowered her husband — but her circumstances had emptied her of the resources to hold on.

But the frightening speculation has to be addressed. A competitive percentage count of female literacy is as futile as Lakshmi must have seen her life to be. Everyone who believes in education must see that education and empowerment do not make a simple equation; the work of educating is like a war, to be fought on all flanks for the sake of all uneducated men and women, every girl and every boy. It matters. Exactly one month after Lakshmi’s deed made it to the newspaper, another girl, 19 years old and a higher secondary student, has gone to court against her parents after the police in Khardah refused to act on her complaint. Her parents are trying to force her to stop studying and marry a man 20 years her elder, while she wants to study till she can stand on her own feet and live in Sodepur with her uncle and aunt who support her. The court has ruled that she is an adult, free to choose how and where she will live, whom she will marry and how she will conduct her life.

It matters very much.