The Good Girls Page 7

  ‘Kiya maine kuch nahin,’ he sobbed. I didn’t do anything.

  ‘If you didn’t do anything,’ Ram Vilas shouted, ‘who did? Someone has them, otherwise they would be home, wouldn’t they! Idiot!’

  ‘I had just handed over the money to them when he pounced on me.’

  Everyone looked in the direction that Pappu was pointing at.

  Pappu’s finger pointed unwaveringly at Nazru.

  ‘He threw me to the ground,’ Pappu said. ‘I picked myself up and ran away. I don’t know where they are now, but when I left them, they were with him.’

  Constable Sarvesh barrelled towards Nazru as though to slap him.

  Sohan Lal couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Pappu just said he was with the girls,’ he cried. ‘Why are you involving one of our people? Pappu has been talking to our girls on the phone, I have proof!’

  The conflicting narratives set alight a firecracker of chaos.

  The village men shouted that Pappu was lying. Constable Sarvesh shouted that they were the liars. Everyone stood up to point fingers.

  The hours immediately after a child goes missing are critical: in that time, they may be sexually assaulted, transported out of the state for trafficking purposes or even killed.

  Some police officers responded to a report of a missing child with only an entry in the GD, or General Diary, a record of daily events. The previous year however, in 2013, the Supreme Court had ordered the police to also file an official FIR in all such cases. This was the document required to start an investigation.26 The decision had been made in response to the growing epidemic of missing children.

  Ram Vilas was only a chowki officer. He wasn’t authorised to file the report. But he might have done something.

  He might have looked for the girls.

  26 the document required to start an investigation: childrights.in/2013/07/fir-in-all-cases-of-missing-children.html

  Sohan Lal Storms Out

  Nazru’s tears were so relentless even the villagers were taken aback. The young man was crying as though a cobra had fallen into his lap.

  Only Sohan Lal was sympathetic. His cousin was being toyed with as a distraction, he said, to give Pappu the time to come up with an alibi. And what about Pappu’s brothers?

  Ram Vilas heaved with annoyance. ‘They have nothing to do with the matter,’ he replied. After all, Nazru hadn’t implicated the older Yadav boys in the night’s events. He hadn’t even seen them.

  Pappu, meanwhile, tried to make himself inconspicuous by saying nothing further.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Constable Sarvesh shouted, banging his chest theatrically. ‘The girls are not with him.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ declared Sohan Lal. He was fuming.

  Having started the night refusing to approach the police, notify the rest of the village or even raise his voice, Lalli’s father said he would go to Ushait. It was the closest town with a full-scale police station, and he could file an FIR.

  Sohan Lal took Nazru by the hand and walked out. ‘We won’t get justice here.’ They went looking for a car to take them.

  Some of the villagers lingered in the chowki, attempting to piece together the chronology of the night’s events. Pappu and the girls had met, but then Nazru surprised them – that much was settled. Then what? Pappu said he ran away leaving behind the girls, but Nazru claimed that he was the one who had run off. The last two people known to have seen Padma and Lalli were accusing each other of having taken the girls.

  The roosters crowed. The sky was shot through with light. The village awoke as if to an alarm. Fires were lit and tea brewed. The smell of boiling milk infused the air with sweetness.

  Then doors opened and people left their homes in ones and twos, rubbing the crusts of sleep from their eyes. Some carried round-mouthed lotas brimming with water. Others went to check on their animals.

  The night had passed, and they had no idea what had happened. These were the last quiet hours.

  The Shakya brothers had come to an agreement over the price of renting a neighbour’s car, a nine-seater Mahindra Maxx. Some of the villagers had changed their clothes; others had sprinkled water on their hair and slipped shoes over their feet. They were ready to look dreaded authority figures in the face. They squeezed into the car.

  A few young men, who by now felt personally invested in the case, insisted on following on motorbikes. They included Rajiv Kumar, the man who had set Nazru spying on the girls.

  As the sleeping village came to life, the cavalcade roared out of Katra.

  Finally, News

  There had been no question of Jhalla Devi sleeping that night. Now, finally, her sons were back. ‘Nazru is saying he got into a fight with Pappu,’ one of them told her. ‘He’s accusing Pappu of snatching Sohan and Jeevan’s daughters.’

  ‘How’s that possible?’ Jhalla Devi snapped. ‘When the village men came for him, he was at his uncle’s. When the police came for him, he was still at his uncle’s. How and when could he have taken the girls?’

  ‘I’m going to gather fodder,’ she said. Her daughter-in-law started to sweep the house, but her sons wandered off.

  Jhalla Devi was filling her arms with hay when a car full of men drove past. They shouted abuse at her, she would later claim. They called the Yadav family fucking scum and threatened to burn down their house. The timing would suggest that they were part of the convoy heading to the police station.

  Jhalla Devi slipped into the house and went to the backyard.

  ‘I was feeding the buffaloes,’ she later said, ‘when some crying women walked past.’

  What she heard startled her into dropping the hay. She ran quick as a shadow. ‘We have to leave,’ she told her daughter-in-law.

  The Yadav women were gathering their things when Avdesh and Urvesh returned home. At exactly one minute past five in the morning, Avdesh dialled his friend in the chowki, Sarvesh, with the news.

  As soon as he hung up, several family members packed whatever belongings they could carry on their head. They fled, but the others stayed awhile, leaving a little later.

  Constable Sarvesh had come to know the family over the past few months, ever since his boss, Ram Vilas, started sending him to Jati to keep an eye out for the sand mining mafia. The riverbank sand was trucked out to factories and mixed with concrete and bricks. It was a hugely profitable operation, sometimes deadly and entirely illegal.

  Sarvesh would take to striding up and down the road opposite the Yadav house. As he was only a few years older than Avdesh, the two got along. Many people saw them sharing tea, talking over dal and rotis.

  A friendship with a police officer was a coup. The relationship with Constable Sarvesh burnished the Yadav name, elevating the family of climate refugees in their new neighbourhood.

  Now, Sarvesh hung up the phone without asking further questions. He passed the information he had received on to his boss, who made preparations to leave. Ram Vilas took two officers with him, but told Sarvesh to stay back – ostensibly to keep an eye on Pappu, who was still hovering uncertainly, but really because Sarvesh was more trouble than he was worth.

  A man standing outside the police chowki saw the officers leave and was overcome with dread. ‘They have been found,’ he thought.

  Shortly afterwards, Prem Singh – the cousin who had overheard Lalli on the phone – was walking to the fields, when he heard a youngster shouting the news. Prem Singh immediately phoned his father.

  ‘The girls are in the aam ka bagh,’ he said. The mango orchard.

  The older man – part of the group on their way to Ushait – immediately told the others, but their phones were now ringing too. The car resounded with chimes as one after the other villager, friend and relative called to say: the girls are dead, the girls are dead, the girls are dead.

  ‘An Unspeakable Sight’
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br />   Lalli’s mother picked up the hem of her sari and ran. The news had spread and it seemed as though everyone around her was also running. The crowd was packed with men and women. Babies were at their mothers’ breasts; children hurried alongside in raggedy trousers and filthy dresses. Siya Devi’s ears filled with a thundering sound.

  Padma and Lalli were hanging from a mango tree.

  The tree had a broad base, with a trunk that branched off at a few inches short of three feet. Padma was higher up above the ground. One knot secured her dark green dupatta to the tree. A second knot, looped tightly around her neck, kept her aloft. Lalli was nearly two feet lower, secured in near-identical fashion. Their eyes were closed. Their hands sloped inwards. Their toes pointed to the earth.

  They looked like ‘dangling puppets’, a villager later recalled.

  Siya Devi didn’t cry. It was as though the forces that had extinguished her daughter’s life had taken her tongue with them.

  The last time she had seen the girls they were radiant. The visit to the fair had been a real treat, and she had come to accept that Padma and Lalli would chatter about it for days, driving her crazy. Yesterday was the best day of their lives, but today?

  ‘Kisne kiya,’ someone shouted. Who did it?

  One man said that he was about to have a heart attack.

  A teenager muttered, ‘They better hang the culprits.’

  A family friend turned away. ‘An unspeakable sight.’

  Padma and Lalli weren’t just cousins, someone said. They were best friends. Wasn’t Padma admired for her fine hand embroidery? She loved mangoes. She loved devotional songs.

  Lalli had wanted to be a doctor; no, she wanted to be a teacher. ‘I want to be something,’ she had always said. But Lalli would never be anything at all.

  Finally, Siya Devi found her voice.

  ‘My girl is hanging. Why? What did she do? She didn’t do anything. She didn’t go anywhere. She only used to graze the goats. Why did they hang her? Is she worth nothing? Do our children mean nothing?’

  No one expected Siya Devi to stay. She would go home, and they would carry her. In anticipation that she might faint, some men quickly moved in.

  But Siya Devi placed her lathi against the mango tree and lowered herself onto the bare ground. ‘Meri bacchi,’ she moaned. ‘My child, my child, my child, my child, my child, my child.’

  Padma’s mother Sunita Devi sat down too.

  The children’s grandmother sat with them.

  Other women came forward. Without question, without permission. Their faces were covered, but their intention was beyond a doubt.

  With their bodies they were guarding the bodies in the tree.

  A Policeman’s Suspicion

  The Shakya brothers had to push their way through the teeming crowd. A neighbour ran past clicking pictures.

  There they were, their children.

  ‘Maar dali ladkiyan hamari,’ Sohan Lal crumpled.

  ‘Maar di!’ Jeevan Lal echoed. ‘Maar di!’

  They have killed our daughters. Killed them.

  Friends rushed forward to steer the brothers to the protective awning of shady trees, far from the hanging bodies. Sohan Lal didn’t seek out his wife. He turned to the other men. ‘My daughter is dead. My daughter is dead,’ he said, as though wanting a contradiction.

  The men nodded and sighed.

  The Vedas had a prayer calling for people to die in the right order. Parents, always, before children. But you didn’t have to subscribe to a particular theology to know that no parent should have to bury a child. And yet, time and again, the Shakyas had done just that. Sohan Lal and Siya Devi had lost their eldest child after she gave birth. Jeevan Lal and Sunita Devi had suffered many miscarriages. And Sohan Lal’s mother had once had a daughter too, not just three sons. There were very few people in the village who didn’t understand the loss the family was going through. But here were two girls hanging from a tree. No one knew how to respond. Most stepped back and looked fearfully on from afar.

  Cousin Manju went up close. Lalli was covered in dust. Thorns poked out of her salwar kameez. ‘Someone killed her,’ she thought, with despair.

  A breeze started to blow through the orchard, scattering dust from the ground. It picked fallen leaves and shook the branches of trees. The breeze lifted the girls’ kameezes and they swayed gently from side to side as if they were jostling each other to share a secret, suno, listen, I have something to tell you.

  A neighbour picked up his lathi and hurried off. The dead were supposed to be still, he thought, but it was as if these girls were alive. The horror stalked him between the walls of his house all the way in the village. ‘All I could hear was moaning,’ he said.

  The searing heat started to smite people. ‘Manju,’ someone called, ‘run and get water for us.’

  By the time Manju was back, her father had come for her, having left the previous night. Despite his sister Siya Devi’s pleas that they stay, he refused. ‘What if the same thing that happened to your daughter happens to mine?’

  Padma’s maternal uncles, who lived in another village, arrived shortly afterwards. ‘I lost my mind when I saw her,’ Kanhaiya Lal later recalled. He threw his arms around the body of his niece. His ribs shone in the heat like copper wire. His eyes were pressed shut. He said something, but it was hard for the others to make out what. Then, it sounded to some like he had indeed lost his senses.

  ‘Your cousin saw you in a dream,’ he sobbed. ‘You were dead, she said. She asked me to bring you to us. But I didn’t. I didn’t even phone you. All I said was dreams don’t come true.’

  ‘Justice!’ someone called out.

  As Padma’s uncles found their way to the Shakya men, the gathered villagers took up the call on their behalf. ‘Justice!’ they said, lifting their voices. ‘Justice!’ they said, banging their lathis to the ground, stirring tiny dust storms.

  Members of the search party started talking, circulating their version of the night’s affair. Pappu was declared the culprit, the man who had killed Padma and Lalli. Constable Sarvesh, his protector.

  ‘Come forward, you cowards!’

  ‘Bring Pappu and Sarvesh, let’s hang them from a tree the way they hanged our girls. Only then will we get justice!’

  Sub-Inspector Ram Vilas phoned his subordinate.

  ‘The crowd is growing,’ he whispered. ‘They may kill Pappu. Go, hurry, drop him off at the station.’

  Ram Vilas had finally understood the gravity of the situation, if only through its potential impact on him. Sarvesh would manage; he was that sort of guy. But if the crowd got out of hand, they would lynch the Yadav boy. A lynching would lead to an investigation, and when Ram Vilas limped, stammered and slurred before his superior officers the game would be up for good.

  To make sure the teenager didn’t act funny, Head Constable Gangwar clasped Pappu firmly around the waist. The three men sped out of Katra on Sarvesh’s motorcycle, on their way to Ushait, as villagers watched in disgust. The officers had placed Pappu between them to protect him, they said.

  The news travelled quickly back to the orchard. A Yadav boy had killed the girls, and Yadav policemen – emboldened by the protections they received from Yadav politicians – were protecting the accused.

  ‘Maro police ko!’ someone shouted. ‘Maaro salon ko.’ Thrash the police. Thrash the bastards.

  ‘Let them be,’ Jeevan Lal mumbled. He didn’t need a fight breaking out.

  ‘He’s old,’ said his brother, gesturing at Ram Vilas.

  The villagers knew Ram Vilas well but now they assessed him. Look at those watery eyes, that saggy jaw, the belly that spilled out over his wrinkly brown trousers.

  Was he guarding the house of a politician or patrolling neighbourhoods where the rich lived? No, he had been offloaded on Katra, because the villagers were considered mere
keede makode, vermin, that deserved no better. They were despised.

  And now that they could do so openly, without fear of retribution, they expressed their true feelings for Ram Vilas. Darogaji, my foot. He was a good-for-nothing.

  A tailor, ordinarily a docile man, hurled himself against Ram Vilas, almost toppling him into a plot of mint. When the policeman’s colleague stepped forward to intervene, the tailor pushed him aside and made for Ram Vilas again.

  Ram Vilas shrank.

  ‘He was afraid,’ the colleague later recalled. ‘He must have thought, “I can’t even run, what will I do?” ’

  It was too much for Padma’s father.

  ‘Bacha nahin paonga,’ Jeevan Lal said, folding his hands pleadingly. I can’t protect you.

  But even as the Shakyas stood up for Ram Vilas, his feelings towards them changed. The moment he arrived in the orchard he asked himself one question – ‘yeh mar kaise gaye?’

  How did they die?

  Then he cycled through the evening’s events in his mind, hoping to recall something that would provide a clue to the truth. The Shakyas had behaved very oddly, he felt. Several hours had passed since the time their girls had gone missing and they had shown up to file a complaint. They hadn’t wanted a private matter to become public, theek hai, but was that the smart choice in a matter of life and death?

  Ram Vilas was a father of sons, but his daughters made him proud. They had left the village years ago and now lived in Noida in a flat that they shared. In his village, if a girl left home it was to marry. But Jyoti was a business student and Babli worked for a multinational company with Americans.

  He was in awe of those two. He loved them. If anyone dared to lay so much as a finger on them, he would peel off their skin.

  But when their girls went missing what did Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal do? They didn’t go to the police. Then they refused to let the police speak to the only witness to the girls’ meeting in the fields.