SURAT, India — It has been five months since the death of her brother Shailesh, but Dhabi Bhavuben, 35, still can’t believe that he took his own life. Shailesh was a quiet man who spent long hours at his small diamond polishing bench in the western Indian city of Surat, where he used to work extremely hard hoping to make ends meet for his wife and two young children.
For decades, Surat’s glittering diamond trade had been a steady source of income for the city’s workers, who cut and polish roughly 80% of the world’s diamonds. But when the war in Ukraine broke out in Febru 2022, everything changed.
