The Good Girls Read online

  By their early twenties, Katra boys were embedded in that stage of Hindu life known as grihastha, becoming a householder, maintaining a home and raising a family. Nazru was considered odd, but he was hard-working. With one brother gone, another ill and his father bedridden, the burden of feeding everyone – while tending to their only buffalo and all the tobacco – fell to him. He did what was needed. Why then was he still unmarried?

  Debating the causes behind twenty-six-year-old Nazru’s bachelorhood became a preoccupation among the villagers who found him annoying. Someone claimed that he was having an affair with a neighbour’s wife. When the neighbour was away, it was said, Nazru slipped into his wife’s bed. Someone else said that he was involved with several men’s wives. A third person claimed that Nazru carried pictures of underage girls in his wallet, making him sound like a pervert.

  Close relatives rubbished the rumours. He was not a pervert, the poor boy, he was a hijra, they said. They had come to this conclusion having seen him squat to urinate. The rumours grew and grew, and so the question was put to Nazru’s father. ‘My son,’ said the withered old fellow, ‘is neither a man nor a woman.’

  And so Nazru was left to do as he pleased. Every night after dinner, he set off. Animals, squatting women, teenagers being teenagers – no one was safe from the flashing light of Nazru’s Made in China torch.

  ‘I saw Padma and Pappu,’ he said later. The pair were in his wheat field. ‘They were signalling to each other.’

  Nazru saw them together again, and then a third time. ‘I didn’t like it,’ he said. ‘This sort of behaviour could destroy the reputation of our entire family.’

  Unspeakable Things

  Reputation was skin. And the residents of the next-door hamlet of Jati couldn’t shed theirs. Their reputation grew not so much out of things they said and did, as by stereotyped impressions of their Yadav caste.

  Like the Shakyas, the Yadavs came under a broad category known as ‘Other Backward Classes’. The OBCs were low-caste groups that upper-caste groups had systematically kept back. Once forcibly confined to agrarian jobs, Yadavs in Uttar Pradesh were not even allowed to sit on a charpoy occupied by a high-caste Brahmin. After India became independent they were the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action policies.

  The Shakyas and the Yadavs should have found common cause, except that now the Yadavs were politically powerful. The community, which made up an estimated 9 per cent of the population in the state of Uttar Pradesh, always voted strategically, in a bloc. Their leaders formed political alliances with other low-caste groups. And the Yadav-run Samajwadi Party employed the tactics of patronage politics ­– they were accused of distributing freebies like clothes, cooking pots and even cash6 to potential voters. In 2014, the party was in control of the state government, and its influence extended over the local bureaucracy and police.

  Uttar Pradesh was India’s largest and most powerful state, with a population of more than 200 million people. It sent eighty members to Parliament. ‘The road to Delhi,’ it was said, ‘passes through Lucknow,’ the capital city of Uttar Pradesh. In fact, eight out of India’s fourteen prime ministers were from this politically significant state. Even India’s new prime minister, who was from Gujarat, had contested the general elections from here in 2014.

  But living conditions in Uttar Pradesh reflected none of this. As many as 60 million people in the state were poor, said a World Bank report.7 The infant mortality rate was the same as in some war-torn countries. In times of drought, when crops perished, people ate grass to survive.8 Against this backdrop, one chief minister had spent taxpayers’ money on filling public parks with statues of herself.9

  A state bureaucrat attempted to explain why the system was so broken: ‘If you get a cow that gives you twenty litres of milk twice a day and you know you’ll own the cow for only a short period, what will you do?’

  The answer? Milk it dry.

  Two years earlier, in 2012, Akhilesh Yadav had become chief minister. Educated in Australia, where he received a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Sydney, the forty-one-year-old had often been photographed on his mobile phone or pecking away on his laptop. The media called him ‘tech-savvy’. This was shorthand for ‘likely to be smart’. His father, Mulayam Singh, a former mud wrestler who had founded the Samajwadi Party, didn’t think much of his son – but a senior advisor had pointed out the advantages of putting the young man forward. ‘Do any of you know who Hannah Montana is?’ he had said. ‘Ask Akhilesh. He knows. That’s why we need the young generation leading the party.’10

  Akhilesh had some good ideas to improve the state – more power, better roads and a pension scheme. But his cabinet ministers were old-school thugs. The Association for Democratic Reforms, an organisation that campaigns for better governance, showed that about a third of the politicians who were elected nationwide to Parliament in 2014 had a criminal record.11 In Akhilesh’s cabinet, over half the members had pending criminal cases.12 Critics were convinced that nothing was going to change.

  Soon his government, like the Yadav governments that preceded him, was also slapped with the label ‘goonda raj’: the rule of criminals.13 In the climate of fear and insecurity that subsequently developed, the phrase ‘raat gayi baat gayi’ – the night has concluded and so has the incident – circulated as often as it ever had before, meaning that victims of Yadav-led crimes might as well forget about getting justice. The reputation of this dabbang – thuggish – government tainted all Yadavs.

  The Yadavs in Jati, the hamlet that adjoined Katra village, occupied the opposite end of this power spectrum. They were climate refugees who were forced out of their homes on the banks of the River Ganga when it flooded. Ganga-kateves, people called them, those whose lands the Ganga has consumed. Having lost their homes and virtually everything they owned, they lived in hovels held up with bamboo sticks. They went barefoot. Their babies were naked. On hot days they slept out in the open, by the side of the road.

  But because they were Yadavs, some Katra villagers didn’t feel safe around them, especially after dark. ‘If they come with guns,’ someone said, ‘what will we do?’

  One of the Jati men, Veerpal Yadav, had a fearsome reputation.

  Veerpal, who was known as Veere, had moved to Jati four years earlier when his childhood home in the sandy hamlet of Badam Nagla was swept away, and with it the land on which he had grown corn, maize and taro root for five decades. He was left with a handful of watermelons salvaged from the alluvial soil of the riverbank.

  Badam Nagla was not a place to be missed. It was so isolated that when a notorious bandit, who stood accused of murdering eleven policemen, needed someplace to hide this was where he took cover. There wasn’t even a drainage system. When it rained heavily, the men stepped out without trousers, carrying their clothes in polythene bags that they balanced on their heads. They slipped them on again only once they were indoors. One former resident described living in Badam Nagla as ‘living like an animal’.

  Jati crouched at the mouth of Katra village, which had shops and two schools, with the closest town only twenty minutes away. And just as Katra was dominated by Shakyas, Jati, by some similar unspoken rule, was for Yadavs. Almost all the 187 families living in Jati were Yadav; some were related to Veere.

  One of them was Veere’s brother.

  To start with, this brother, a single man, was around constantly. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t. In next-door Katra a horrific rumour took root. Veere had shot dead his brother, people said. He had then burned the body and dug a hole in the nearby jungle to bury the remains, so he could snatch control of his brother’s property – which he did, they said, by moving in his family.

  Who knew where the story came from? No one claimed responsibility and no one informed the police. No one said they had witnessed the alleged killing or even that they had spoken to someone who did. But almost everyone in Katra hea
rd the rumour. Soon, it was a part of the frightening mythology that dogged the Yadavs next door.

  They were unspeakable things, people said, who sucked the blood of even kith and kin.

  6 clothes, cooking pots and even cash: dnaindia.com/india/report-mulayam-caught-bribing-voters-1238446

  7 World Bank report: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/187721467995647501/pdf/105884-BRI-P157572-ADD-SERIES-India-state-briefs-PUBLIC-UttarPradesh-Proverty.pdf

  8 people ate grass to survive: ndtv.com/india-news/in-drought-hit-uttar-pradesh-the-poor-are-eating-rotis-made-of-grass-1252317

  9 statues of herself: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-17254658

  10 ‘That’s why … young generation leading the party’: caravanmagazine.in/reportage/everybodys-brother-akhilesh-yadav

  11 a third of the politicians … had a criminal record: adrindia.org/content/lok-sabha-elections-2014-analysis-criminal-background-financial-education-gender-and-other

  12 this figure amounted to over half: rediff.com/news/report/fifty-four-pc-of-akhilesh-yadavs-cabinet-has-a-criminal-record/20120413.htm

  13 the rule of criminals: blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/03/20/samajwadi-partys-goonda-raj-appears-alive-and-well/

  The Naughty Boy

  In fact, Veere’s brother had died of complications from diabetes. Veere built the house he lived in from scratch, on land he had purchased years earlier. Even if he knew what the people in the neighbouring village were saying, what could he do.

  Every morning Veere and his three sons, Avdesh, Urvesh and Pappu, crossed the road and walked through the rice fields towards the Ganga River. Rolling up their trouser bottoms, they waded into the cold, fast-moving water. On that side of the bank, they grew watermelons and cucumbers on public land. But they also worked the land of better-off men in exchange for a portion of the harvest. In a good year the Yadav men brought home about 2 lakh rupees from their share of the wheat, garlic and tobacco that they sold in nearby market towns. To this they added the rent from a shop they had built alongside their house.

  Every rupee that wasn’t spent on food or treats like tobacco was kept aside to finish construction on the house. So far it had a sturdy entrance door, three rooms and a terrace roof. The men installed a handpump in the courtyard, stretched out a piece of rope for a clothes line and painted a bright green swastika for good luck. Veere’s wife Jhalla Devi would have liked a kitchen, but her husband asked what was wrong with cooking outdoors. There wasn’t even paint on the walls, he scolded.

  In the evenings, Veere planted himself on the charpoy just outside the house, rolling beedis and sipping chai. The thick milk cream sometimes stuck to his moustache, which he wore long and curved like a door handle.

  ‘Jai Ram ji ki,’ he called out to strolling Yadav men, taking in the evening air. All hail Sri Ram. ‘Come, come, sit,’ he nodded his grizzled head towards a second charpoy.

  The men set down their umbrellas. They pulled out beedis. Veere handed over a box.

  ‘And?’ he said, as they plucked out a match.

  Affairs in Lucknow were always discussed at length – of how so-and-so was only a puppet in the hands of that other so-and-so, then the sale price of the fruits and vegetables they grew, and then invariably someone would look up at the broad sheet of cloudless sky and complain that the monsoon was like a woman. She couldn’t be relied on to keep time. When would she arrive?

  Sometimes Veere remembered his sons.

  ‘Arre!’ he shouted.

  He treated them like boys, even though the eldest was himself a father. He didn’t let them speak. The boys had nothing to say to him either.

  They trooped out of the house sullen-faced, like their feet were made of cement.

  The older two were good boys, neighbours later said. They stayed close to home. One loved his wife, the other worshipped books. The youngest, on the other hand, was ‘naughty’, as even his father admitted to those around him. ‘He liked to roam around,’ one of the Yadavs said.

  But what did that even mean in Jati?

  Pappu had no money, no bicycle and no place to go. The next-door village didn’t like his type. The Yadavs on his side had less than he did. There wasn’t even a snack shop where he could sit and order a handful of hot roasted gram. The riverbank offered welcome relief for many, away from the chatter of the household, but to him it represented toil. There was the fair, but that came once a year.

  Even a naughty boy like him, what could he really get up to?

  The Invisible Women

  The women could do even less. If Veere’s wife, Jhalla Devi, stuck her head out the door, she went unacknowledged. If she lingered it was with the understanding that she’d better not open that mouth of hers.

  The invisible woman preferred her own company anyway, usually in the ditch opposite the house. There she sat, patting and shaping dung cakes for fertiliser, disinfectant and fuel, in the one sari she wore day and night wrapped around her like a sack, its pallu pulled over her like a hood. Her glass bangles tinkled and her silver toe rings gleamed, but her face simmered with resentment.

  The other Yadav woman didn’t even make it this far. Veere’s only daughter-in-law was so strictly regulated that her neighbours couldn’t say for sure what she looked like. In fact, Basanta was big-eyed and fleshy-lipped; an exhausted teenager with a scrawny one-year-old. Basanta cooked and cleaned for everyone. Early on she had even offered to help her mother-in-law pat dung, but Jhalla Devi had tilted up her pinched face and glared.

  Now, when Basanta was done with every possible chore in the near-empty house, she dropped to the floor. Flies nibbled at the sweat that soaked through the thin fabric of her dirty sari blouse. They clustered around her daughter’s leaking bottom, settling on her rose gold earlobes. By late afternoon, when the breezes started up, Basanta shook herself and took her little one to the back of the house. The family plot spilled into the Katra fields, with not even a fence in between. Here, the bored new mother could amuse baby Shivani without being accused by her mother-in-law and the men of flaunting herself before strangers.

  ‘Look, a farmer, see, grazing goats; listen, boys, look, a kite, listen, birds, see, a well. Moo, baa, bow-wow.’

  Straight ahead, at a distance covered in a few minutes on foot, was Ramnath’s orchard. That summer every one of his thirteen trees heaved richly with fruit. One was a fragrant-leafed fig tree; the others were mango.

  Lalli Asks for a Memento

  Lalli’s parents returned from their pilgrimage with presents of amulets and chains. Things went quiet for a while.

  Then one magical afternoon, everyone was out. Padma and Lalli asked cousin Manju to open her suitcase. They went through her clothes carefully. The blouses were brightly coloured and made of a soft fabric. They slipped like water between the girls’ fingers. The jeans were very, very tight. Did Manju really wear such clothes? Could she even sit in them? Here in the village, she had been as boring as they, sticking to roomy salwar kameezes.

  They decided to try on the clothes. They wriggled into the blouses and jeans and then turned to look. The same heart-shaped face, the same long hair. The solemn eyes. But the funny costumes pinched their bottoms and brought out the giggles.

  ‘You look smart,’ they said to each other when they had recovered their composure.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ shouted Siya Devi, walking through the door. ‘Show off your thighs!’ The jeans didn’t reveal the girls’ thighs; they only revealed that the girls had thighs. But it was more than Siya Devi allowed. She disparagingly referred to the outfits as ‘tiny clothes’, too provocative to wear, and ordered the children to change back into their salwar kameezes.

  Later, perhaps to show her gratitude, Lalli drew her younger cousin aside. ‘Yaar,’ she said, ‘you’ll go away. We should get a photo taken together at the bazaar.’ Manju brought up the
subject in a phone call to her mother who was back home in Noida. Her mother wasn’t keen, perhaps because money was tight. ‘What’s the hurry,’ she complained. ‘Are you dying sometime soon?’

  But Manju was pleased to be acknowledged by her cousin. And it had felt nice to share her clothes. The girls weren’t allowed in the bazaar, but they weren’t watched all the time either. ‘We went!’ Manju said later. ‘Chori chupke!’ On the sly.

  Out the door, down the lane. There it was, just ahead, a little bit further. They held hands, squeezed and then plunged forward.

  The road was packed with rows of tiny, peering shops that looked like the eyes of a dragonfly. The Katra shopkeepers sat in their undershirts, surrounded by sacks of rice, animal feed and barrels of cooking oil. They chatted on their mobile phones and read the newspaper, only looking up when a customer stopped by. Some of their customers were young men who took selfies against the background of nice cars that happened to be parked there, but most reminded the girls of their fathers. There was something so familiar about the way these men retrieved the thin roll of notes from their shirt pockets, almost in slow motion, and the care with which they counted the change they got back. That look of dread was familiar too. Too much was going out, too little was coming in, everything was fragile.

  There were too many men, the girls suddenly realised. They were shouting and laughing. They were roaring phat phat phat past in motorcycles. Into the shop, quickly now.

  The flash went POP.

  The girls blinked.

  The Fair Comes to the Village

  Everyone knew the fair had arrived because the music could be heard across the village and even in the fields. It was only devotional, for the annual event was organised by the local temple committee, but the Shakya girls were excited. They had never been to a mela. The highlight was a performance of the Ramlila, a theatrical enactment of the life of the Hindu god Ram, which culminated in the battle between Ram and his nemesis Ravana, the ten-headed demon king of Lanka.