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The following article is a true life account of the love story...Saddening, how not only has one life been extinguished because of the uncontrollable lust and violent acts of some men, one other life, that of the man she loved....

NEW DELHI—She called him "a perfect man." He still keeps her number stored in his cellphone, under the name Jewi, derived from a Sanskrit word meaning life.

"She was the closest person to my heart," says the young man. Soon he is expected to tell a judge about the night she was raped aboard a private bus here, an attack that left his friend dead and the world horrified.

"I find myself surrounded by the pictures in my mind of the incident of that night in the bus," says the 28-year-old information-technology specialist, who was himself badly injured in the Dec. 16 attack. Broad-chested and plain-spoken, he now walks with a cane.

Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, he gave new details of the assault and described his close and complex relationship with his friend, a petite recent college graduate who was 23 at the time of her death. Both her name and his are being withheld due to Indian law governing the identification of the woman as a rape victim.

The case has stirred widespread protest and calls for justice. Five men face charges including rape, kidnapping and murder. Lawyers for the five say they are innocent. A sixth person accused, a juvenile, faces proceedings in juvenile court. A lawyer representing him couldn't be reached.

In many ways, the young man and his friend were a modern dating couple, yet still bound by caste and tradition. Living away from home, the two were making their way in India's widening professional class—she was a physiotherapist looking for her first job, he leads a team specializing in Internet voice technology for corporations.

They shared their problems, took vacations together and consulted each other even over the purchase of a pair of shoes. She once talked him out of investing in a company that turned out to be a fraud. He gave her the login details to his Facebook account.

Their families were aware of their closeness and didn't interfere, the young man and her family said. But the two friends felt their relationship would always be a friendship and not a marriage, he says. He came from a high-caste Brahmin background. His father is a prominent lawyer. His family lives in a three-story home with servants' quarters.

By contrast, his friend hailed from a Kurmi agrarian caste that is lower on the Hindu hierarchy. Her family lives in a small concrete-and-brick house near the Delhi airport, where her father works as a laborer.

Differences like these worked against a union. And the young man says he was loath to go against his family's strong wishes that he find a traditional match from within his Brahmin community.

"We just didn't talk about it because it would sour our relationship," he says of his friend. "We were of equal status as friends."

In an interview, the young woman's mother said to the question of marriage: "You can't really say what could have happened in the future."

The young man's father says the subject of marriage never came up, but had their son made a fervent case, the family "might have given it a thought."

CLICK HERE to read the rest of the article written by Krishna Pokharel in WSJ.

CLICK HERE to read the complete coverage of the rape case by WSJ.