The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  The women in khaki looked here and there, and then looked away – there wasn’t much else for them to do.

  Chaturvedi was in time to hear the latest rumour. The girls, people were now saying, had been gang-raped and then hanged. There was no way anyone could have known this with the bodies still unexamined but the rumour spread fast.

  A local journalist posted a photograph on Facebook.56 It was through this highly emotive image that urban India learned what had happened.

  In the image that they saw, the girls appear to be asleep. Their heads droop, their chins tucking into the cove of their necks. Their shoulders slope downwards and their arms hang loose. Their hands look as though they are grasping for something. Their bare feet are grey with dust, but their clothes are as bright as blossoms.

  The image appears to have been captured from amid the group of mourners, for only women fill the bottom half of the frame. They are mostly seated on the ground, with their chins resting on their knees and their faces covered. There is a tiffin box, some bamboo sticks and a dog with pointy black ears.

  Some of the women would later become familiar to television viewers. The one in the widow’s white sari with the curly hair and overhanging buck teeth was the children’s grandmother. The one in red, with the broad nose and deep black wells under her eyes, was Padma’s stepmother. The fact that they weren’t crying, that they didn’t seem to be saying anything, made for a strikingly unusual portrait of grief. It was as though the women weren’t reacting in expected ways because they weren’t convinced that what they were seeing was real.

  In the photograph, you could see at the edge of the field, just walking out of the frame, a man with a piece of cloth roped around his head, trudging to work. Even when confronted with death, life must go on.

  The image migrated to Twitter where the outrage was viral. If social media conversations that morning were taken at face value, it seemed everyone was in favour of ending caste, patriarchy and gender violence, of bringing education, professional opportunities and toilets to rural women. If they had all these things, the comments implied, then none of this might have happened. The hashtag #BudaunRape, referring to the district in which Katra village was located, started to trend.

  The growing interest caught the attention of more cable news channels. They sent over local reporters at first. Then from Delhi, which was a six-hour drive, they dispatched recognisable faces. Soon, so many production vans had lined the road to Katra, disgorging so many teams of journalists, that village women seeking privacy were left stranded. They had to dig holes in the floors of their courtyards to urinate.

  ‘Move out of the way,’ shouted a reporter.

  ‘The first to reach here,’ crowed another.

  Some struggled to pronounce the name of this district that they had never been to before. They settled on ‘ba-dawn’. (It was actually ‘ba-da-yoo’.)

  A ‘media mela!’ Chaturvedi exclaimed, updating his Facebook feed in the midst of the chaos. He had got the shots he wanted and was pleased with himself.

  The media was ravenous for information and, at first, the family was eager to talk. A colleague of Chaturvedi’s at Aaj Tak pounced on Sohan Lal. Lalli’s father wore a white shirt, white trousers and a piece of checked cloth tied around his neck like a scarf. His clothes were worn out by repeated washings and his ribs were visible through the thin material.

  Other than Pappu who else is responsible, the reporter asked off camera.57

  ‘Veere,’ Sohan Lal replied. ‘[Pappu’s] father.’

  Someone in the crowd of men pressing around him offered a prompt: ‘Avdesh.’

  Sohan Lal nodded. ‘Avdesh, that’s one of the brother’s names.’

  Another prompt: ‘Urvesh.’

  ‘Urvesh.’ This was the other brother.

  Sohan Lal looked around expectantly. When no more names were forthcoming, he left it at that.

  ‘Three brothers,’ he said. ‘And the father.’

  Then someone mentioned Sarvesh, the constable.

  This set Sohan Lal off.

  ‘Sarvesh sipahi! Murder usne karwaya.’ Constable Sarvesh! He masterminded the murder.

  ‘And the staff,’ he added, referring to the chowki policemen.

  Now Sohan Lal’s brother, Jeevan Lal, was pulled in front of the cameras. He wore the same sort of clothes, but his scarf was hanging around his neck like a bath towel. His voice was low, his manner tentative. He always hung back, allowing his older brother to talk for him and in this terrible moment, too, he didn’t stray from his accustomed ways. When he was asked to name names, he hesitated. Sohan Lal, off-camera, impatiently cut in, shouting responses.

  Some hours passed, and even Sohan Lal’s face took on a hunted look. The police might have come in handy now, but they were still being kept at a distance. Every time Sohan Lal wanted to take a break he was reminded that this was what he had hoped for, that the media attention would make all the difference.

  Two months earlier, in March, four Dalit women in the neighbouring state of Haryana were abducted by upper-caste men. They were drugged, raped, then dumped at a railway station.58 The police arrested the men, but upper-caste groups ganged up on the victims and their village. Fearing for their lives, eighty Dalit families picked up their belongings and fled.

  But right here, in Katra, Sohan Lal was inundated with people who were anxious to hear his side of the story. They wanted to draw attention to the children’s deaths, so that he wouldn’t have to cry himself hoarse. They wanted to right a wrong – and for this he was grateful.

  Anyway, as he later said, left to themselves, who knows what they would have come up with.

  In that, he wasn’t wrong.

  Some journalists erroneously claimed that Head Constable Gangwar was a Yadav, even though his surname clearly stated his caste. Then they made an even greater blunder by claiming that the Shakyas were Dalits. Both errors, likely the result of the pressure to produce instant news that fed the appetites of viewers, had an impact on how these people were perceived by those on the outside. To declare the family Dalit was to sharpen their experience of victimisation. To call Gangwar a Yadav was to cement his status as a loutish thug.

  In a Delhi TV studio, a cable news anchor wiped away imaginary tears. Another shouted ‘gang rape, murder!’ ‘gang rape, murder!’ over and over. A third channel reconstructed the alleged crime, showing a woman being strangled. Two male actors set upon her, pulling apart her legs.

  Histrionics had been the main ingredient of several cable TV news channels for a while now, but this was the first time they had been applied to a story concerning the death of children. An editor at Times Now, the nation’s top-rated news channel, which had styled itself on America’s incendiary Fox News, later told a reporter, ‘We brought in a lot of what was happening in TV soap operas into the way we were treating our stories. We brought in alarmist music and a soundtrack to our reportage.’59

  The former bureau chief of another news channel said they had been greatly encouraged after making a half-hour show around a YouTube clip that they promoted with the words, ‘Eyes of Satan, watch the eyes of Satan’. ‘People couldn’t stop watching,’ he said.60

  55 5 per cent of the state force: bprd.nic.in/WriteReadData/userfiles/file/201607121235174125303FinalDATABOOKSMALL2015.pdf

  56 photograph on Facebook: lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/ 07/24/a-india-photo-hanging-reflection/

  57 who else is responsible: aajtak.intoday.in/video/sisters-gangraped-and-killed-in-uttar-pradesh-budaun-three-police---officers-suspend--1-765991.html

  58 drugged, raped, then dumped: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/dalits-flee-haryana-village-after-four-women-raped-seek-justice-in-delhi/

  59 ‘alarmist music and a sound track’: caravanmagazine.in/vantage/times-now-processes-embarrassing-debacles

 
60 ‘People couldn’t stop watching it’: openthemagazine.com/article/india/the-world-according-to-india-tv

  Complaints Are Written, Then Torn

  It was now the afternoon of 28 May. Sweat was pouring down people’s faces. They started to follow the shade. Old people and small children napped where they were. The Shakya brothers were still refusing to let the police remove the bodies; but they had lost support from some of the crowd. ‘It’s disrespectful to the girls,’ said one man. ‘The bodies are spoiling.’

  The Shakyas’ own neighbours openly speculated about the brothers’ involvement in the deaths. ‘They were fed up with the girls’ behaviour,’ one declared. ‘They killed them to protect the family from further dishonour.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t have happened if the girls hadn’t had sex with Pappu,’ said another.

  The superintendent of police decided to address the problem in a roundabout way. If the family filed a First Information Report, he would be empowered to start an investigation, Chauhan told the Shakya brothers. Wasn’t that what they wanted, to learn what had happened? What he didn’t say was that criminal death investigations were informed by post-mortems. Once the FIR was filed, the bodies would have to come down, by whatever means.

  Filing a First Information Report was the job of the police officers who had received the complaint, but without the chowki men to furnish details, the superintendent had to ask the Shakyas what had happened.

  This latest request presented a new problem for the family. The brothers couldn’t read or write. They could tell the police what had happened, but they didn’t trust them enough. ‘Police tod mor ke likhegi.’ They will twist our words and write what they want.

  Some friends were literate, but on being approached for help they made excuses. The Shakyas had made it clear that they intended to implicate the chowki officers. The villagers had no wish to be involved in such squabbles.

  A farmers’ union leader from a neighbouring village stepped forward. He settled down on the ground and took careful notes. Then he wrote up a complaint and read it out loud for the brothers’ approval. They responded with sighs of frustration. ‘It doesn’t sound right,’ one said, ‘tear it up.’ They dictated a second complaint. That didn’t sound right to them either. They walked off.

  A journalist was then handed a blank sheet of paper by a family friend and begged to intervene. But the man had watched the back and forth. ‘They are going to waste my time,’ he thought, excusing himself on the pretext that he was thirsty.

  As the eyewitness, Nazru should have been the one dictating the complaint. But the Shakya brothers weren’t bothered with him. If they had paid attention, they would have seen their cousin was acting stranger even than normal. He was coming apart like overripe fruit.

  It was still early afternoon when Ansari, the politician’s aide, started to sag with defeat. He had been dispatched to protect the family from the police, but who would protect the girls from their family? The blazing sun was frying his skin. What was it doing to the children? The bodies should have been examined hours ago, or refrigerated, at the very least.

  He was deeply sympathetic – of course he was. Their girls were dead and they were heartbroken, but they had to stop arguing over who was to blame. The family had changed three versions of their complaint and were just getting started on another when Ansari forced himself to intervene. ‘Tell me what to write,’ he begged.

  The Shakyas told Ansari that Pappu, his brothers, his father and the police had ‘raped the girls, killed them and hanged them’.

  Ansari hesitated. He had, many times by now, looked at the bodies up close. He had seen nothing to suggest that acts of such violence had taken place. ‘Only a doctor can prove whether they were raped,’ he said. ‘Let the post-mortem report come out. The matter will be clear.’

  Some villagers also stepped up. Veere wasn’t home last night, they pointed out gently. Pappu’s father had been across the river guarding his watermelons. Everyone knew this. If the Shakya brothers insisted on claiming otherwise they would embarrass themselves and the village.

  The brothers refused to listen.

  Eventually, Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal finalised their complaint. The three Yadav brothers, they said, had pounced on their daughters Padma and Lalli while they were in the fields. Their cousin Nazru and their brother Ram Babu happened to hear the girls’ cries for help and immediately intervened, but they were threatened with a gun. Then, when the family approached the police for help, Constable Sarvesh assaulted them. Later, along with his colleague, Head Constable Gangwar, he told them to go to the mango orchard, which is where they found the girls. (This last line was meant to suggest that the police officers already knew where the bodies were because they themselves had put them there.)

  Several villagers present were aware that this complaint was mostly made up, but it was not their place to say so, they told themselves. Time would pass, the truth might come out, but they would continue living in the village alongside the Shakya family. Good relations must be maintained.

  At 3.50 p.m. Sohan Lal handed over the complaint to the police. As soon as it was in his possession, Chauhan grew deaf to the brothers’ insistence that the bodies remain where they were. His men converged around the mango tree.

  For a while now, the orchard had echoed with the question, ‘Kab utrengi?’ When will they come down?

  Now, it seemed, there was an answer.

  The Bodies Come Down

  A local man volunteering with the police as a home guard was tasked with climbing the tree. He bounded up in his sports shoes.

  Leaning across a branch, he was able to easily unfasten the dark green dupatta. It had been attached by a simple single knot. He let go, and the child’s body floated into the outstretched arms of some female constables. They untied the second knot, around the neck.

  The home guard then attempted to free the other body, but it wasn’t so easy. This one was secured with a double knot. He tugged and tugged some more, but then he slipped, almost ripping his blue denim jeans. The branch wouldn’t take his weight for much longer.

  ‘Halka admi chadha dijiye,’ he called down. Get someone skinny to climb up here.

  The crowd groaned – was there no end to police incompetence?

  ‘Please help,’ said the home guard, catching Lalli’s older brother’s eye. Although he was small for his age, Virender was strong from years of helping his father in the fields. He was a good climber. The teenager stretched himself flat on the branch that held the second body. The knot really was tight, and he couldn’t undo it either. He sunk his teeth in, tearing into the skin of the cotton fabric until it loosened enough for him to use his hands. The body parachuted down. The moment passed in a blur.

  Later, Virender couldn’t remember which of the girls he had helped with. ‘It could have been the older girl,’ he said. ‘It was so crowded, there were so many people.’

  He was mistaken. The reddish-purple dupatta had belonged to Lalli.

  Virender’s confusion may have arisen from the fact that it was his second attempt at freeing his sister. Earlier in the day, he had briefly lost his head and darted up the tree. He had untied Lalli, but before he could do more, his mother had intervened, shouting at him from down below. The bodies mustn’t come down yet, Siya Devi said. ‘Leave your sister alone.’

  To be on the safe side, Virender then made a double knot.

  This wasn’t the only time the children’s bodies were manhandled. Padma’s mobile phone was no longer in her bra. Her gold chain was not at her neck – it would never be recovered. And both sets of slippers were now gone from the base of the tree.

  The police didn’t make any attempts to investigate further. ‘They wanted to send the bodies to the city,’ said Chaturvedi, the journalist. ‘It didn’t look like they were interested in evidence.’

  The inspector from Ushait, Ganga Singh, bla
med the crowd. ‘We needed time to observe the bodies and gather details,’ he said. ‘But it was chaos.’

  He did get started on an inquest panchnama – a written description of the scene in which a person believed to have died in suspicious circumstances was found. The panchnama was written by the investigating officer, now Ganga Singh, but it was based on witness testimony.

  Ganga Singh picked five men randomly from the crowd and asked them to look at the bodies up close. Observe the injuries, if any, he said. What was the apparent cause of death?

  To the men it appeared as though the girls had been killed. Why else would they be in a tree?

  ‘I agreed,’ Ganga Singh later said. The witnesses, who were not literate, inked their fingerprints on the panchnama.

  The bodies were then carried through the fields and into the main road where a van had been mobilised to take them to the post-mortem house. Ganga Singh wrapped the bodies in stiff white cloth. He dipped the police seal into a melted bar of red wax and stamped the cloth.

  The van was winding its way through the crowd when the promise of another upheaval presented itself. Ansari, the politician’s aide, received a call from his boss Sinod Kumar – who said that he was about to arrive. ‘I will reach in five minutes.’

  When Ansari passed on this information, the Shakya brothers couldn’t contain themselves. ‘Stop the car!’ one of them shouted. ‘Stop the car!’

  Someone reached into the moving van and plucked out the key. With the driver trapped in his seat, the crowd put all its weight onto the vehicle and started to push it back towards the orchard. The path was so uneven that during one particularly steep dip, a body rolled out of the back of the van and fell to the ground with a loud thud. The impact was so severe that the seal popped open, revealing the child.