The Good Girls Read online

  Grove Press

  New York

  Also by Sonia Faleiro

  Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars

  The Girl

  UM

  IFM and ZFM

  Copyright © 2021 by Sonia Faleiro

  Maps © Emily Maffei

  Jacket design by Ahlawat Gunjan

  Jacket photograph © Simon Wilkes/Unsplash

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  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Bloomsbury Circus, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2021

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5820-8

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5821-5

  Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  ‘Women must particularly be guarded against evil inclinations, however trifling [they may appear]; for, if they are not guarded, they will bring sorrow on two families.’

  —The Laws of Manu

  Index of Characters

  The Village of Katra

  Padma Shakya, sixteen years old

  Her father Jeevan Lal, a farmer, and stepmother Sunita Devi

  Ram Sakhi, Padma’s biological mother who died when she was two years old

  Lalli Shakya, fourteen years old

  Her father Sohan Lal, the Shakya family patriarch and older brother to Jeevan Lal and Ram Babu, his wife Siya Devi and their four other children: daughter Phoolan and sons Virender, Parvesh and Avnesh. Lalli is their youngest daughter

  Ram Babu, Padma and Lalli’s paternal uncle, his wife Guddo and their seven children

  Ramdevi, Padma and Lalli’s paternal grandmother who lives with Jeevan Lal and family

  Manju Shakya, a cousin spending her summer holidays with Lalli’s family, aged twelve

  A first cousin of the Shakya brothers, Babu ‘Nazru’ Ram, aged twenty-six. He lives with his family in the midst of the Katra fields

  Rajiv Kumar Yadav, a neighbour who draws Nazru’s attention to the girls’ behaviour in the fields

  Yogendra Singh Shakya, a prosperous cousin of the Shakya brothers, who the brothers often turned to for help

  Prem Singh Shakya, Yogendra’s brother. He saw Lalli talking on the phone on the day she disappeared

  Their father, Neksu Lal

  The Hamlet of Jati

  Darvesh ‘Pappu’ Yadav, aged nineteen, watermelon farmer

  His father Veerpal ‘Veere’ Yadav, mother Jhalla Devi and brothers Avdesh and Urvesh, both in their twenties

  Avdesh’s wife, Basanta, and their infant daughter Shivani

  Pappu’s cousin and close friend Raju, in whose shack he often spent the night

  The Village of Nabiganj

  Ram Chander, Padma’s oldest maternal uncle and her late mother’s oldest brother

  His son, Ram Avtar, aged eighteen

  His younger brother Kanhaiya Lal, who had been told a dream that predicted what happened to the girls

  Ram Chander’s three other brothers, who, along with their families, comprise around thirty people living together

  Police

  Sub-Inspector Ram Vilas Yadav, aged fifty-seven, in charge of the police outpost located in Katra village

  Chattrapal Singh Gangwar, aged fifty-six, recently promoted to Head Constable

  Constable Sarvesh Yadav, aged thirty-nine, accused of dereliction of duty towards the Shakya villagers

  Constable Raghunandan Singh Yadav, who assisted the family

  Constable Satinder Pal Singh Yadav, a quiet man who did as he was told

  Inspector Ganga Singh Yadav, Station Officer of the police station in Ushait and first Inspecting Officer on the case

  Mukesh Kumar Saxena, a locally powerful police officer who went on to head a Special Investigation Team on the case

  Maan Singh Chauhan, Superintendent of Police, highest-ranking officer present on the day the bodies were found

  Post-Mortem Team

  Lala Ram, the former sweeper who conducted the post-mortem

  Dr Rajiv Gupta, general practitioner, District Hospital, Budaun, who oversaw the post-mortem

  Dr Pushpa Panth Tripathi, gynaecologist and obstetrician, District Women’s Hospital, Budaun

  They were accompanied by Dr Avdhesh Kumar, a senior surgeon at the District Hospital and A. K. Singh, the hospital pharmacist

  Politicians

  Narendra Modi, the new Prime Minister of India who was sworn in on 26 May, two days before the children were found

  Akhilesh Yadav, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who was in control of the state police

  Mayawati Prabhu Das, Dalit leader with cult status in Uttar Pradesh

  Bhagwan Singh Shakya, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a Shakya community leader

  Sinod Kumar Shakya, a member of Mayawati’s party and an elected member of the state legislative assembly. The Shakya family were his constituents and he was their confidant

  Shareef Ahmed Ansari, Sinod Kumar’s close aide. He spoke on behalf of his boss and gave the Shakya family every possible assistance

  Central Bureau of Investigation

  Vijay Kumar Shukla, Investigating Officer

  Anil Girdhari Lal Kaul, Supervising Officer

  Medical Team

  Dr Adarsh Kumar, Additional Professor, Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

  He was accompanied by two others, Dr Manish Kumath and Dr Sunil Kumar

  Contents

  Prologue

  Rabi: Spring, 2014

  An Accusation Is Made

  Lalli’s Father Buys a Phone

  Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange

  Nazru Sees It Too

  Unspeakable Things

  The Naughty Boy

  The Invisible Women

  Lalli Asks for a Memento

  The Fair Comes to the Village

  Padma Lalli, Gone

  Thieves in the Tobacco

  Where Are They?

  Every Eight Minutes

  Jeevan Lal’s Secret

  Adrenaline in the Fields, Tears at Home

  Nazru Changes His Story, Again
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  ‘Bastards, Go Look for Them Yourselves’

  A Finger Is Pointed

  Sohan Lal Storms Out

  Finally, News

  ‘An Unspeakable Sight’

  A Policeman’s Suspicion

  The Poster Child for a New India

  A Reporter’s Big Break

  ‘The Matter Will End’

  The First Politician Arrives

  The Matter Should Be Settled

  Someone to Solve Their Problems

  The Politician’s Aide

  ‘Liars, Thieves and Fucking Scum’

  Cable Wars in the Katra Fields

  Complaints Are Written, Then Torn

  The Bodies Come Down

  A Sweeper and a ‘Weaker’ Doctor

  The Post-Mortem

  Farewell Padma Lalli

  Kharif: Summer, 2014

  The Worst Place in the World

  The Women Who Changed India

  The Zero Tolerance Policy

  A Broken System Exposed

  Separate Milk From Water

  A Red Flag

  The Villagers Talk

  The False Eyewitness

  Purity and Pollution

  A Post-mortem Undone

  ‘Habitual of Sexual Intercourse’

  A Mother Goes ‘Mad’

  Visitors to the Jail

  The Case of the Missing Phones

  The Truth About the Phone

  ‘She Is All I Have’

  ‘There Is No Need to Go Here and There’

  ‘Did You Kill Padma and Lalli?’

  ‘Machines Don’t Lie’

  ‘Have You Ever Been in Love?’

  DROWNED

  Results and Rumours

  The Rogue Officer

  Friends, Not Strangers

  Pappu and Nazru Face to Face

  ‘Girls Are Honour of Family’

  Pappu in Jail, the Shakyas in Court

  Epilogue

  Birth

  Rebirth

  Love, Hope, Vote

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Prologue

  Good Days Are Coming Soon

  People called them Padma Lalli like they were one person.

  ‘Padma Lalli?’

  ‘Padma Lalli!’

  ‘Have you seen Padma Lalli?’

  At sixteen Padma was the older cousin by two years. She was small, only five feet, but even so she was bigger than Lalli by three inches. Padma had oval eyes, smooth skin and collarbones that popped. She had long black hair that she knew to pat down with water and tightly plait or else there would be words.

  Lalli’s kameez hung from her frame like washing on the line. Round-shouldered and baby-faced, she was the quiet romantic who read poems out loud.1 Padma had dropped out of school, but Lalli told her father she wanted to study and get a job. And while it would please him to share the memory of this conversation, they had both known it would never happen. The school Lalli attended had a roof, but not enough rooms – many classes were conducted outside, in the dirt, and there were seven teachers for 400 pupils. But even if the school had been different, a girl’s destiny lay in the hands of her husband.

  School broke up one blazing afternoon in May, and all the children congregated in Ramnath’s orchard to shout, run and climb trees. Lalli hurried to Padma’s side. As the others pelted down green mangoes, the teenagers stood aloof. They were together always, apart from everyone.

  Some 3,000 people lived in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in the Budaun district of western Uttar Pradesh, crammed into less than one square mile of land. On harvest mornings, when it was time to cut the rabi crops, the entire village congregated in the fields. Women hitched their saris and men rolled up their trouser bottoms. By 8 a.m. the ground was tapestried with branches of tobacco, and freshly picked garlic bulbs filled the air with a biting fragrance.

  Even small children pitched in. They shooed the crows that swooped through the fields like great black fishing nets, they chased away the long-limbed rhesus monkeys that prowled lunch bundles for roti sabzi.

  That summer, temperatures climbed to 42 degrees Celsius. Amid whirlpools of dust, cobras slithered out of their holes, but the barefoot boys and girls paid no heed. The harvest was the one precious opportunity their families had to make money.

  Economic growth had improved incomes, and elections every five years brought promises of more. The day before the harvest, on 26 May, a charismatic new Prime Minister named Narendra Modi was sworn in with an irresistible slogan, ‘achhe din aane waale hain’. Good days are coming soon.

  As they waited, the majority of families in Katra went without electricity, gas, running water and toilets. They bought solar panels, they lowered buckets into wells. They gathered dung for cooking fuel. They squatted in the fields, pulling their knees up to their chest as they scrolled through their phones to pass the time.

  Some were carpenters and tailors; others worked as political fixers, marriage brokers, cycle puncture repairmen or tonga drivers. They sold vegetables, chickens and country liquor. They broke the law to mine sand from riverbanks. A few well-off families had tractors that they leased out. About a third of the men had a piece of land. It was just a few bighas, never quite an acre, but whatever it was, it was theirs.

  Land was security, from which everything flowed – it put dal in the katori, clothes on the back. Land was power. It attracted a good quality of bride who would bring a good dowry. This would increase their security and social standing. Above all, land was identity. It made them cultivators. Without it, the men were reduced to landless labourers. They were destined to go wherever there was work, for whatever they were offered. They could be compared to the Yadav cattle herders in the neighbouring hamlet of whom it was said, they are rooted to nothing and committed to no one.

  The men of Katra spent almost all day in the fields. The children studied here since the good school, which taught English, was near the orchard. In the evenings when the edges of the clouds softened and blurred and a cool breeze rippled through the crops, women came back down from the village to draw water and socialise. Boys teased the limping dogs, and the limping dogs chased rats. Girls huddled. The smell was heat, husks and buffalo droppings.

  After night hooded the fields men dragged their charpoys over and hunkered down under blankets, bamboo poles at the ready, same as farmers up and down the district this time of year. They would protect their harvest with their lives if they had to, whether from the gun-slinging bandits who came for motorbikes or the herds of nilgai who sought seeds and stems.

  Everything was here. Everything happened here. And so naturally it was here, in the fields, that the rumour started.

  1 The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.

  Rabi

  Spring, 2014

  An Accusation Is Made

  Rajiv Kumar had a side job as a government teacher, but his real job was farming. While working his land he had observed Padma and Lalli. They were as alike as two grains of rice, and they spent all day in the fields. Now one girl, he couldn’t tell which, had a phone to her ear. He didn’t like it.

  Some villages in Uttar Pradesh forbade unmarried women from using phones.2 A phone was a key to a door that led outside the village via calls and messaging apps. The villagers were afraid of what would happen if women stepped through this door. They might get ideas such as whom to marry.

  Records showed that 95 per cent of Indians still married within their caste,3 and anyone who didn’t attracted attention. In 2013 a young woman from Katra village took off with a man from a different caste. Her father was so ashamed he couldn’t
show his face, people said. The woman had chosen to marry against his will, to have what was known as a love marriage rather than leaving it to her father to arrange a partner for her. She had violated the honour code and would never see her parents again – for their safety, and certainly hers. A few months after that, it was the turn of a girl from the next-door hamlet of Jati.

  The news of the elopements moved like a swarm of whirring insects, landing first here and then there until all the nearby villages were warned: change is coming, be vigilant, be ready to act.

  In 2014, for the first time, the National Crime Records Bureau, which publishes the number of cases registered for crimes, published data on honour killings. Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country,4 but everyone knew the true number was hundreds, if not thousands, more. Girls were killed for marrying outside their caste or outside their religion and sometimes having premarital sex was reason enough.

  With the killing the family’s honour was reclaimed or, at least, the other villagers were given notice that the family had taken the errant behaviour seriously and done their best to right a wrong. The Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years, said one father who was accused of killing his daughter.5

  In Katra, the rule was that boys could own phones, but girls had to get permission to use them.

  Even so, Padma and Lalli knew what to do with a phone better than their mothers who could identify neither letters nor numbers. Padma often called her maternal uncles, reciprocating the effort they had put into keeping in touch after their only sister, Padma’s biological mother, had died. Lalli texted her elder brother who worked for a car parts manufacturer far away. The girls used the torch feature to light their way into the pit of the night.

  Rajiv Kumar didn’t know this, because he didn’t know them. He didn’t even know their parents beyond the usual ‘sab theek?’ – all well? – but a girl’s life was everyone’s business. He was determined to do his duty. His plot was near some land owned by a close relative of the girls named Babu ‘Nazru’ Ram. With his bowl cut, paan-stained teeth and sloppy smile Nazru was approachable. At twenty-six, he wasn’t that much older than the girls.