Every evening after dinner, at 10pm in Beijing, software executive Sangeetha Narayan flips open her laptop and logs into her Skype account for a chat she describes as "soul-saving'.

At the other end of the call is her seven-year-old daughter Meena, a Class II student who lives nine months each year with her grandparents in Bangalore.

Meena is a victim of an unlikely tension shearing families apart at the frontiers of the growing ties between India and China. Read