The Good Girls Read online

  But this was not the case. They were unable to make out any telltale signs of intruder activity.

  The men dispersed, and so did Nazru.

  Congregated under a tree, the two brothers were dissecting the matter when some of the Shakya women emerged from the village, walking quickly towards them.

  ‘The girls aren’t back,’ cried Siya Devi.

  The horrified men started towards home. There they would plan how to proceed. The other women followed, but Siya Devi hung back.

  The first time Lalli’s mother saw Katra village was also the first time she saw the man she was to marry, whose name she then had inked on her hand as a sign that she now belonged to him. She was beautiful, with a straight nose, regal cheekbones and paper-gold skin. Sohan Lal was small and loud. He told her to shut up all the time – ‘chup kar, chup kar, tu chap kar!’ But although she was then only a teenager, she was no pushover. When she got angry, she turned her back to him. She shouted at others, when really, she was shouting at him. Whatever method she chose, the message was always received. Siya Devi was tough, she knew it, and you didn’t want to provoke her.

  The seasons rolled on, rabi, kharif, rabi, kharif, rabi, kharif over and over. She carried six babies to term. Children take their toll. Men take everything. She spent most of the day on her feet. And she was unsentimental. She refused to name her dogs because what was the point of naming something that would leave without saying goodbye?

  And now here she was, still only in her forties, but her hair was falling out and some teeth also. Her golden face was crinkled with gloom. But she was still beautiful, and she was still tough, more so now that she was the mother of a young woman. ‘Maine control mein rakha tha,’ Siya Devi said later, bleakly. I was firm with my girl.

  And so, even though she couldn’t imagine what had happened, her thoughts didn’t stray to dark places.

  Treading slowly through the indigo night, Siya Devi came upon her husband’s cousin, Nazru. The young man was urinating by the side of his house in the fields.

  ‘Was it really thieves you saw or something else?’

  Later, she didn’t explain what she had meant by ‘something else’. Nazru was known to muddle easily, to say one thing when he meant another.

  ‘Something else,’ he replied, zipping his trousers.

  ‘The children aren’t home yet.’

  ‘Pappu took them,’ he said. ‘Pappu Yadav.’

  Siya Devi ran home so fast her feet swallowed the earth.

  In the subsequent turmoil that engulfed the family, no one wondered aloud why Nazru hadn’t told the truth to begin with. Why did he say he saw thieves when what he actually saw was Pappu taking the girls?

  15 deaths from gun violence in India: indiaspend.com/cover-story/uttar-pradesh-awash-in-illegal-guns-shooting-deaths-80762

  Where Are They?

  The phone that Padma had been carrying was now switched off.

  Cousin Manju was shaken awake.

  ‘Did something happen at the fair?’

  ‘No,’ she replied groggily. Then she remembered something odd. ‘Padma didi was cursing at someone, but I don’t know whom.’

  Jeevan Lal turned to his mother, ‘You sent the girls to the fair!’

  This wasn’t true, of course; it was his sister-in-law Siya Devi who had given them permission to go.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he screamed.

  Then, because this was a matter far bigger than the sighting of thieves in the fields, far bigger than he could even imagine, he dialled his brother Sohan Lal, still many villages away.

  As it turned out, the oil extraction machine had broken down and Sohan Lal was unable to immediately process his harvest. By the time the matter was dealt with and he had twelve litres of oil in cans, darkness had embraced the unfamiliar village. A relative named Harbans, who lived nearby, urged him to spend the night instead of returning immediately to Katra. They had eaten dinner and then climbed up to the roof to sleep.

  ‘Bhai!’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Brother, the girls have disappeared. Come home quick!’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello?’

  Sohan Lal looked down at his phone. It was dead.

  In Katra, Jeevan Lal tried dialling a few more times. Then he called Harbans. The reception this far out was so poor, the calls kept dropping, and it was past 10 p.m. when Lalli’s father heard the full story.

  As was often the case, practical matters took priority. Sohan Lal needed to get home right away, but to wake early one went to bed early. And almost everyone around him was already asleep. So he called a cousin in Katra, the same man who had helped him buy his new phone.

  ‘I have to get home,’ he told Yogendra Singh, whose prosperous family owned several vehicles.

  ‘Is it an emergency?’

  Yogendra Singh’s white Mahindra Bolero SUV had been giving him steering trouble. He had a motorcycle, but Sohan Lal and Harbans were with two others, and a motorcycle could hardly accommodate all five of them. Then he remembered a problem with the chain of his bike, which was just as well.

  ‘I won’t come out at night,’ he said.

  There were no street lights in these parts. Some drivers compensated by turning on their high beams, even though it meant blinding oncoming traffic. But it was equally possible, Yogendra knew, that he might be waylaid, robbed and killed. What was an extreme scenario elsewhere was a legitimate concern here. Uttar Pradesh was the murder capital of India.16

  Beside Yogendra lay his wife – and at her breast, suckling contentedly, was their newborn daughter swaddled in a piece of sari cloth.

  ‘I won’t come alone,’ he said firmly.

  Sohan Lal hung up.

  Then curiosity got the better of Yogendra. Why would his cousin venture out in the dark?

  Taking along his father, Neksu Lal, and two brothers, he set off to investigate. The tall sturdy men carried torches to illuminate the inky night into which they now waded. Up and down, the unpaved streets were empty. All the doors were shut. Even the stray dogs that animated the hottest days with their relentless barks heaved with sleep.

  There were a number of people milling about the Shakya courtyard. Their girls had gone to the toilet, the newcomers were told. They hadn’t returned.

  The Shakyas didn’t say that someone had taken them.

  Even with this limited information it was clear that the matter was of the utmost seriousness. Girls didn’t disappear into thin air. But not a single person present suggested walking over to the police chowki that was located not five minutes away. If they were aware that there was a number they could call for help, they didn’t dial it.

  16 Uttar Pradesh was the murder capital of India: hindustantimes.com/lucknow/up-is-the-murder-capital-of-india/story-YXx35AZhrSvnXXHehbSNYP.html

  Every Eight Minutes

  To the Shakyas, the threshold of a police station could feel as insurmountable as a fortress wall. The Indian police were known for their dismissive attitude towards the poor. They were meant to serve and protect, but they were just as likely to kill.17 The roughly shaven, khaki-clad men of the local force had the most terrifying reputation of all. ‘UP police ka koi bharosa nahin,’ it was said. You never know with the UP police.

  There was plenty of truth to this notion. Around 2005, children from a slum in Noida started to disappear. The slum dwellers, who worked for the wealthy occupants of the city’s towering apartment blocks, repeatedly went to the police and begged them to intervene. To one distraught mother an officer said, ‘Why do you people have so many children if you can’t look after them?’18 Scrutinising the photograph of her missing twenty-year-old daughter, he declared, ‘She looks so beautiful. She probably eloped.’19

  Missing person cases continued to stream in, but by many accounts the police refused to t
ake them seriously.

  Then in 2006, officials found seventeen chopped-up bodies, including those of several children, in a sewer behind the home of a wealthy businessman who lived near the slum. The clothes of the missing young woman were also found there. The gruesome details made headlines, and only because of this was the case even investigated in the first place.20 The killers – the businessman and his domestic help – had gone undetected for years, most likely because they had chosen their victims from among the city’s poor.

  Since police stations were evaluated on the number of cases they solved, officers had an incentive to open only those with a chance of success. Solving the mystery of a missing child required time, manpower and resources – things that the police were generally short of. Between 2012 and 2014, the police filed FIRs – First Information Reports – in less than 60 per cent of such cases.21 This negligence contributed to an epidemic of missing and exploited children, many of them trafficked within and outside the country.22

  In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh,23 accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India. Across the country, one child went missing every eight minutes, said Kailash Satyarthi, who went on to jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai.24 And these were just the reported cases.

  The economist Abhijit Banerjee, who later also jointly won a Nobel Prize for his approach to alleviating global poverty, explained that ‘parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise.’ He added that this was likely ‘rampant’.25 In fact, some parents sold their children or deliberately allowed unwanted daughters to stray in busy marketplaces. No one reported them missing, and so, no one looked for them.

  Even in a tiny village like Katra where everyone was of the same social class, the Shakya family believed that the police would still take sides. They would choose to favour the person of their caste. And told that the culprit was Yadav, they would most likely wave away the Shakyas, being Yadavs themselves. ‘Raat gayi toh baat gayi,’ they would say, grunting back to sleep. The night has concluded and so has the incident.

  ‘It was easy to ask why we didn’t immediately go to the chowki,’ Jeevan Lal would later complain. Time was scarce and he preferred not to waste it on a thankless task.

  There was, however, another reason that Padma’s father held back.

  17 just as likely to kill: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12696470

  18 ‘Why do you people have so many children’: nytimes.com/2007/01/07/world/asia/07india.html

  19 Ibid.

  20 The gruesome details made headlines: ndtv.com/india-news/nithari-rape-and-murder-case-moninder-singh-pandher-surender-koli-sentenced-to-death-1728506

  21 FIRs … in less than 60 per cent of such cases: tribuneindia.com/news/sunday-special/kaleidoscope/wanted-most-wanted-search-for-kids/105492.html

  22 an epidemic of missing and exploited children: hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/india

  23 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh: ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/crime_in_india_table_additional_table_chapter_reports/Chapter%2023_2014.pdf

  24 one child went missing every eight minutes: straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/india-nobel-winner-in-new-campaign-for-abused-and-trafficked-children

  25 ‘a result of abuse’ … this was likely ‘rampant’: Sonia Faleiro, ‘Why Do So Many Indian Children Go Missing?’, New York Times, 20 November 2017, nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/missing-children-india.html

  Jeevan Lal’s Secret

  By 10.15 p.m., a dozen men were searching for Padma and Lalli in the Shakya family plots. Some in the group assumed that the girls were injured and unable to call for help. Around the search party, termites crawled, mosquitoes buzzed and moths fluttered. As the heat drained out, the field rustled with snakes slipping back into their holes. Nazru excused himself – to eat dinner, he said.

  The others waded through the upturned earth of Jeevan Lal’s property. They tramped into the orchard. They arrived at the dagger-leafed eucalyptus grove. They went as far as the tube well that adjoined the Yadav hamlet. They moved quickly and, at the request of Padma’s father, they didn’t call out the girls’ names. They were as quiet as they could be.

  A villager who lived some 400 feet from the Shakya plots had gone into the fields to empty his bladder several times that night, but when questioned about it later he said he didn’t hear or see anything. Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that a group of men armed with torches and tall, heavy sticks were in search of missing children.

  Jeevan Lal didn’t need to spell out what was at stake, but he did anyway: ‘Our daughters are unmarried,’ he said. ‘Why would we ruin their chances of finding a good match?’ The other villagers would have asked why the girls had been allowed out at night with a phone, and without a chaperone. ‘There’s no point crying after the birds have eaten the harvest,’ they would have said.

  But the girls had been taken by Pappu. Nazru had said so – and Jeevan Lal knew this, even if the others didn’t. ‘This is the sort of place where people cause a commotion over a missing goat,’ a village storekeeper later said. ‘If the girls were taken by Pappu, as Nazru said, why didn’t the family make any noise or call out to anyone?’

  They didn’t, because it wasn’t just the girls’ honour that was at stake, it was the family’s too. And the family had to live in the village.

  And so, just like that, in less than an hour since they were gone, Padma was no longer the quick-tempered one. Lalli was no longer the faithful partner in crime. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind.

  Adrenaline in the Fields, Tears at Home

  It was a quarter past eleven when Lalli’s father arrived in Katra. Every man that Sohan Lal had approached for help that night had turned him down, refusing to drive around in the darkness. His relative Harbans had finally persuaded a friend to bring out his motorcycle.

  The villagers were regrouping around Sohan Lal when they saw a light on the path adjoining the fields. They looked at it with interest, until they realised it was just another motorcycle. There were plenty around here. Most paid it no more heed. They still didn’t know that Pappu had the girls. But the two Shakya brothers, who did know the truth, grew agitated. The motorcycle was leaving Jati, where the Yadavs lived, for a road that led out of the district. If there was even the slightest chance that the girls were on it, now was the time to act. ‘Let’s go!’ they cried.

  Some of the men took off on foot, grunting through the crops. The brothers tried to get a car, but where to start? They quickly settled on a more easily available two-wheeler. But by the time they were back in the fields, fifteen minutes had passed, and the motorcycle was gone. Ram Babu who had led this effort looked helplessly around.

  At 11.30 p.m., Sohan Lal had a run-in with Rajiv Kumar, the man who had seen Padma and Lalli talking on the phone and had complained about it.

  ‘What’s the matter,’ Rajiv Kumar said, glancing curiously over at the gathered men. The men fell silent.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Sohan Lal replied. He didn’t want any more people getting involved. Understanding that he had been dismissed, Rajiv Kumar went home.

  The men continued searching, and it seemed to some like they were doing a thorough job. But while the plots were tiny, the fields were vast, deep and full of hiding places: groves of trees, ditches, piles of dung cakes. Haystacks, shacks and taro plants two feet high. A search party twice the size, with the benefit of daylight, would still have their task cut out for them. At night, only chance could reveal someone who wished to stay hidden.

  Two small girls, they could be anywhere.

  Later, a farmer said that the searc
h party didn’t venture into some partly constructed houses located in the fields. ‘There could have been any number of men hiding inside, and we wouldn’t have known,’ he said. They missed several plots of land just because they were full of dunghills. They didn’t even make it all the way into the orchard.

  At 12.30 a.m. on 28 May, members of the search party started to make their excuses and peel away. A friend said that he really must keep watch over his harvest. Another pressed his hands against his temple and complained of a headache. The relative, Harbans, fell asleep on a charpoy outside the Shakya house.

  Inside the house, the Shakya women were clustered in heaving groups. They didn’t know for sure, but they knew, nonetheless. With the men gone they relied on friends to call relatives and forewarn them.

  The caller who phoned Lalli’s older brother to pass on the news was so distraught that she couldn’t make herself understood. Virender was hours away in Noida and unable to be of immediate help. He dialled his older sister who lived with her husband in a village closer to home. ‘Something has happened,’ he said. ‘Call and find out what.’

  Phoolan Devi wasn’t in a position to help either. Her husband had a motorbike but there was no question of plunging into the night. ‘It would be good if they are found soon,’ she thought. ‘Our honour will be saved.’

  In Katra, their ten-year-old brother, Parvesh, ran to a neighbour’s house and begged him to try Padma’s phone. The neighbour called twice but the handset was still switched off.

  The girls’ grandmother had convinced herself that since Padma had left the house complaining of a stomach ache, the child was simply having trouble defecating. ‘Sometimes,’ mumbled the old lady, ‘if you delay too long it doesn’t come out.’