The Good Girls Page 6

  The others knew better.

  ‘We were weeping unstoppably,’ Padma’s stepmother would remember.

  Nazru Changes His Story, Again

  Over in the fields, the men were baffled. The persistent chirp of crickets aside, there were now no signs of life. Where were those two?

  The situation felt so surreal that one member of the search party was convinced he was sleepwalking. Around this time, someone started prodding the Shakyas for details. Where exactly did the girls go? Did anyone see them? Was there anything else they remembered?

  Now, finally – and perhaps only because they weren’t getting anywhere – did Ram Babu tell the truth. The girls hadn’t disappeared. A Yadav from next door had taken them. His cousin Nazru had said so.

  The news landed like a thunderclap. The girls had been kidnapped, the family knew who was responsible, and yet here they were roaming impotently with sticks?

  The Shakyas wouldn’t budge. What if the Yadavs had guns? By confronting Pappu, they would jeopardise the safety of their clan, they said. Better to let the girls show up. Then the matter would be over, and no one need mention it again.

  The village men looked at one another as though to say, are you listening to this. The Shakya brothers were making no sense at all. A man who took a girl did not return her in one piece.

  The two groups started to argue: go, stay, go, stay. They bickered and grumbled in the darkness. Then, as suddenly as he had gone, Nazru reappeared and sidled up to his cousins. Sohan Lal threw an arm around him. The oldest Shakya brother had arrived late to the scene and wanted to know everything from the start.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  He’d been snacking on some corn, Nazru started, keeping watch for wild animals when he heard voices near Jeevan Lal’s plot. ‘I thought they were women talking among themselves,’ he told the group. But, listening carefully, he realised that the women were screaming for help. He moved quickly, looking here and there and shining his torch into the darkness. In the weak light, he saw something startling. ‘What’s that? Four men scuffling. With Padma and Lalli!’ He recognised one of the men, it was that troublemaker Pappu. He was forcing the girls to go with them! ‘Padma and Lalli called out, “mujhe bacha do! Save me!” ’ Nazru flung himself at Pappu, throwing him to the ground. Then Pappu’s friend pulled out a gun.

  ‘If I’d known they had a tamancha,’ Nazru told the villagers, ‘I would have first attempted to snatch it and then rescue the girls.’

  But he had to save himself, didn’t he? He had to run.

  Jeevan Lal and Ram Babu were taken aback. This latest story bore no resemblance to the ones Nazru had told before. At first, he claimed to see thieves. Then, to the family’s horror, he had said that Pappu took the girls. Now he had modified his story yet again, adding four men and a gun. What was he up to?

  But the brothers didn’t make a scene. The essential fact was the same. The girls were gone. And what was more, Nazru was here now. All night the young man had slipped in and out of the search party like he had better things to do.

  ‘If you’re sure it was Pappu, we should go to his house,’ said Vijay Singh, a hawk-faced farmer with a no-nonsense directness. Before the Shakyas could protest, the thirty-six-year-old picked up his iron rod and called for a friend to accompany him. They cut quickly through the dark.

  The Yadav house gleamed in the moonlight.

  A single bulb flickered at the front door.

  ‘Pappu!’ Singh called out. ‘Pappu!’

  Pappu’s elder brother stirred.

  ‘What is the matter?’ Urvesh said, heaving himself up from the charpoy outside the front door. ‘Why are you calling Pappu?’

  ‘I have some urgent business.’

  Urvesh yelled thickly down the road, ‘Pappu! Ai, Pappu!’

  Pappu emerged from his uncle’s shack. He was wearing a vest and trousers. According to his cousin Raju, they had nodded off on a charpoy after eating a watermelon from the harvest supply.

  ‘Kya yahan par koi chalta purza hai?’ Vijay Singh asked. Are there any busybodies around?

  By using the term busybody, he was asking the Yadav boy whether he’d seen any troublemakers in the area. It was, of course, just an excuse to confirm whether Pappu had been at home.

  ‘There’s no one here,’ Pappu replied, rubbing his eyes.

  His mother, Jhalla Devi, stepped out of the house – to draw water from the handpump, she would later claim.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said from behind her sari veil. The men from Katra waved her away. ‘It’s nothing.’

  Avdesh, the oldest Yadav son, climbed down from the terrace. After a desultory back and forth the outsiders took their leave.

  ‘What’s going on?’ one of the brothers said to Pappu.

  ‘I had kind of a fight with Nazru,’ Pappu replied sheepishly.

  ‘When will you stop playing the fool,’ his brother scolded.

  If anything further was said, the family later kept it to themselves.

  Pappu turned back. Urvesh lay down, closed his eyes and brought his knees up to his chest in his usual position of sleep. Avdesh climbed up the stairs. Their mother scuttled in and bolted the door behind her.

  The villagers went on looking.

  ‘The orchard,’ Singh later recalled, ticking off the places they searched next. ‘The eucalyptus grove.’ But some members of the party remembered it differently. After this encounter, they said, they limited their search to the vicinity of the Yadav house. They saw nothing. They heard nothing.

  Sometime later, the men decided to take a break under an enormous quince tree. They wiped their faces and hands and shared a drink of water.

  Another one of the Shakya cousins then spoke up.

  A little before 6 a.m. that morning, Prem Singh said, he had driven his tractor up to Sohan Lal’s plot to load the farmer’s mint harvest. The thirty-two-year-old’s grocery store was losing money like you wouldn’t believe, and he made up the deficit by transporting people and goods for cash. As he chatted with Nazru, who also happened to be hanging around, he had seen Sohan Lal’s daughter, Lalli, speaking into a mobile phone.

  The search party leaned in with interest.

  This titbit promised to revive their energies. Perhaps it was a clue that could be mined for leads.

  But Prem Singh hadn’t heard the conversation. ‘I thought she was talking to a relative,’ he shrugged. He’d only mentioned it in case it meant something to her father. Lalli’s father remembered that he had asked his daughter to make a call for him that morning. Then he’d wandered off, leaving his phone with her.

  ‘Check the recorded calls,’ Sohan Lal ordered Yogendra, Prem Singh’s brother.

  The list showed three calls. Two were outgoing, one was incoming. The incoming conversation had taken place at 6.01 a.m. that morning.

  ‘I played the recording,’ Yogendra would remember. ‘And everyone present heard it.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Lalli asked.

  ‘Across the bridge,’ said a reedy voice. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the fields. They are cutting the crops.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to the fair?’

  ‘Did you give us money to go?’

  ‘I’ll give you money, go to the fair. And when will I get the chance to enjoy myself?’

  ‘Meet us in the evening. You will enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Bastards, Go Look for Them Yourselves’

  The contents of the call were so shocking that after the night had finally passed, the brothers would sometimes claim that they hadn’t heard it. As though willing it out of existence, they spoke about it only in vague terms, as something that might have been but of which they themselves had no direct knowledge. In fact, someone had anticipated the conversation and then switched on the phone’s recording facility. This Made in China hands
et, like the one Sohan Lal had given to Padma, could record calls – but it wasn’t pre-activated to do so.

  As the men stared down at their feet, Jeevan Lal declared that he was going home. Ram Babu offered to accompany him.

  The two brothers walked off. No one blamed them. The voice on the other end of the line had belonged to a boy, a boy like Pappu.

  The police chowki was located in an alleyway just opposite a government nursery school. To get there, Sohan Lal and the others in the search party had to cross the bazaar. Upon arrival, the metal gate was padlocked, and inside, an oil lamp placed on a table had long died out. Attired in night clothes, the five police officers were sprawled on charpoys, legs outstretched and potbellies heaving. It was between 2 and 2.30 a.m. The night was cold. The moonlight was thin.

  The villagers rattled the gate.

  ‘Sahib,’ they called out deferentially. ‘Sahib, wake up, sahib!’

  One of the officers opened his eyes but showed no signs of moving. The group raised its collective voice.

  A frustrated Sohan Lal tried another tactic.

  Srikrishen Shakya lived down the road. As he saw the officers come and go, Srikrishen did them small favours to keep in their good graces and they in turn grew friendly with him. Knowing this, Sohan Lal hurried over to his house. By this time the group was making such a racket that while the police continued to sleep – or pretend to sleep – Srikrishen had jumped out of bed, wondering what on earth was going on. He was fumbling for a light when Sohan Lal arrived at his doorstep.

  ‘My girls are gone,’ Sohan Lal said. ‘The police won’t wake up. Time is being wasted.’

  Srikrishen agreed to accompany Sohan Lal to the chowki.

  ‘Babuji,’ he cried to the sleeping officers. ‘Babuji!’

  It was only now, on the urging of a familiar voice, that the police roused themselves. ‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Sub-Inspector Ram Vilas Yadav, the top-ranking officer at the chowki.

  Barrel-bellied and heavily moustached, Ram Vilas had an unfortunate speech impediment that made him sound as though he had two tongues. He stammered and slurred. Strangers reacted with open rudeness, dismissing him offhand. His colleagues were kinder, pointing out that it required just a little patience to figure out what he was saying. But even they avoided him at mealtimes. ‘Watching him eat could make you vomit,’ one officer said, referring to the manner in which lentils tended to dribble out of Ram Vilas’s mouth, soaking his collar.

  Ram Vilas also had visible scars that some people attributed to brave encounters with bandits. In fact, said his colleagues, he was a drunk who had been involved in seven motorcycle accidents in one year. This didn’t influence any promotions that he was due. Even the villagers judged him less harshly for his drunkenness than his speech – every police officer they had ever known was a drunkard. And the fifty-seven-year-old man was said to be fair. The villagers respectfully called him ‘darogaji’, police chief.

  Sohan Lal kept it brief. His girls were missing, he said. Pappu Yadav of Jati had them. Would they please come with him to Pappu’s house?

  ‘He listened to us,’ Lalli’s father later said. ‘But no one listened to him.’ He meant some of the other policemen, who acted as though the complaint was entirely made-up.

  One of them was a lanky man with stiff grey hair and pitted cheeks named Chattrapal Singh Gangwar. Gangwar had recently been promoted to head constable. The good news, arriving shortly before he was to retire at the age of sixty, had given him an excuse to exceed his daily quota of alcohol. He had cut loose that day, spending several hours on duty downing cheap whisky at a roadside eatery.

  As Ram Vilas prodded Gangwar – saying, ‘utho yaar,’ wake up – his subordinate shot back in language that shocked his colleagues. ‘His behaviour was indecent,’ said Raghunandan Singh, the other officer who went on to help the family.

  Ram Vilas wasn’t deterred.

  ‘Get up!’ he shouted.

  Again, Gangwar swore.

  One of the villagers claimed to smell his alcohol-laced breath all the way from the gate.

  The older man shared a friendly relationship with his boss, and the two were known to engage in what was considered playful banter of the sister-mother variety – casually swapping digs that invoked sex and sexual violence. But now, Gangwar was mistakenly under the impression that his boss was pulling his leg, the way he did when they got drunk together in the chowki.

  Finally, he gave in.

  ‘Nothing but drama,’ he groaned.

  The fourth officer in the chowki was Constable Sarvesh Kumar Yadav, then thirty-nine years old, with a jutting mouth and a stubborn disposition. Sarvesh was used to doing as he pleased. He thrashed around a bit but remained where he was. ‘Bastards,’ he muttered at the villagers. ‘Go look for them yourselves.’

  In the back and forth, some of the officers had changed into their uniforms. They climbed onto their motorbikes and made for Pappu’s house, less than half a kilometre away. The villagers trudged on foot. Sarvesh and Gangwar were taking far too long to sort themselves out and were left behind.

  The village was eerily quiet, the fifth officer present that night later recalled. ‘It felt desolate,’ Satinder Pal Yadav said. It was as though the people had left, the animals had wandered off and all the birds had flown away.

  A Finger Is Pointed

  Outside the Yadav house, a figure lay curled on a charpoy. Ram Vilas demanded to see Pappu. For the second time that night, Pappu’s brother Urvesh scrambled up. This time he knew better than to yell, and he walked quickly down the road.

  There the boy was, tightly asleep beside his cousin.

  ‘Wh-wh-what’s your name?’ Ram Vilas stammered.

  ‘Pappu,’ replied the startled young man.

  ‘Wh-wh-what’s your fa-father’s name?’

  ‘Veerpal Yadav.’

  ‘I-I-I need some information from you.’

  As Pappu pulled on a shirt, Ram Vilas pointed to Urvesh and ordered him to follow. Avdesh came down from the terrace and was also told to come along to the chowki. Ram Vilas offered no explanation and it wouldn’t have occurred to the brothers to ask. There was no point antagonising the police, as it was they made life hell.

  A Yadav neighbour peered out the door. ‘What has Pappu done,’ he protested.

  Padma’s father Jeevan Lal and her uncle Ram Babu, who had returned to the fields to keep an eye on the Yadav house, now emerged from the shadows and blended in with the group of villagers.

  A motorcycle then came to a screeching halt. Sarvesh and his colleague dismounted. Bleary-eyed Gangwar had little to say for himself, but Sarvesh presented himself as the protector of the Yadav brothers. ‘Pappu is right here, idiots! Would he be here if he’d been out kidnapping girls? You people don’t keep an eye on your children and then harass us.’

  He turned to his boss. ‘Let Pappu go. I will answer for him. Bunch of motherfuckers. Are we really going to listen to these sister-fuckers?’

  ‘It was clear Sarvesh felt sympathetic towards the Yadavs,’ a fellow officer would dryly recall.

  Sohan Lal didn’t react to the abuse. It was all one could expect from the police. They treated the poor like insects to be squashed under their shoes. But the suggestion that Pappu should be exempt from questioning made him lightheaded.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ he begged. If Pappu was allowed to stay back, whatever chance the family had to find the children would be lost, he said. If the boy had abducted the girls, who knows what he would do to them.

  Ram Vilas agreed.

  With the three Yadavs huddling it was hard to say which was which. The ragged sameness of their faces and slight limbs prompted some confusion.

  ‘Which one was it?’ squinted Constable Raghunandan. Which one took your girls, he meant.

  It was his cousin Nazru who had seen them, Sohan Lal explain
ed. But he was at home. Should they go get him?

  In the chowki courtyard, Ram Vilas got down to business. He slapped Pappu across the face. ‘Where are the girls?’ he shouted.

  As the crying teenager clutched his cheek, Ram Vilas drew out the strip of rubber he kept for one purpose only.

  He started to whip Pappu, bringing the rubber down on the teenager’s thighs, knees and ankles, places that filled the body with a severe and stinging, but outwardly invisible, pain.

  ‘I’m in my vest,’ Pappu squealed, trying to convey that since he was partially dressed at the time the police came for him, he was obviously asleep then and not wandering around somewhere. With this response he made it clear that he didn’t have to be told what he was being accused of; he knew.

  ‘Idiot!’ snapped Constable Raghunandan. ‘Does it take years to take off a shirt?’

  ‘It was him!’ Nazru said, sitting on a charpoy. The older Yadav brothers sat on the edge of a second charpoy. The villagers spread out; some stood, others squatted by the chowki gates. Tired and red-eyed from lack of sleep, every one of them was determined to see this through.

  At the gates, Sohan Lal pulled up the recording on his phone. Several more people now heard it.

  The beating continued with Ram Vilas shouting, ‘Where are the girls? Where are the girls? Where are the girls?’ Pappu responded with more squeals. The villagers watched without flinching. The fellow was only getting what he deserved. Beat him, beat him; what else was there to do?

  Only one person reacted viscerally.

  Nazru put his head in his hands and howled.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ said Constable Raghunandan. ‘No one is saying anything to you. No one is even asking you questions.’

  Ram Vilas made it clear that the beating wouldn’t stop until Pappu started to talk.

  Finally, he got what he wanted.

  ‘They were with me,’ Pappu admitted, tears rolling down his face. He’d met them that evening, at around 9.30 p.m., to give them money for the mela. A hundred rupees each.