The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  Although in the case of the Shakya girls, the doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences would not be administering the two finger test to determine virginity, the enquiry as to their sexual proclivity was worth paying attention to. It showed that Shukla believed, and imagined that the doctors believed, the long-held myth about the hymen – that it breaks after a woman’s first vaginal penetration. In fact, as medical experts have long held, the virginity test is a sham procedure. ‘You can tell if someone has had a vaginal delivery but to tell if someone has had vaginal intercourse is not possible,’147 a doctor told the New York Times.

  Shukla’s desire for a hymen test showed that while he may have had a scientific temperament it was only relative to those around him. He wanted to confirm if the girls were sexually active at the time of death, because then the call between Lalli and Pappu, in which she invited him to the fields that last night, and the fact of their meeting itself, would make a whole lot of sense.

  Of course, there was no way of knowing this, and by asking the doctors to find out, the investigating officer was only sending them on a wild goose chase – no different from the one Lalli’s father had earlier sent him on.

  142 Scarlett Keeling: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/ 7426821.stm

  143 some internal organs … hadn’t been put back: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/8067134.stm

  144 jail plus hard labour: theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/man-sentenced-to-10-years-hard-labour-over-death-of-scarlett-keeling

  145 ‘others must come to know of her conduct’: indiankanoon.org/docfragment/76278/?formInput=%22habituated%20to%20sex%22%20%20sortby%3A%20leastrecent

  146 An affirmative report … was not proof of consent: thehindu.com/news/national/No-two-finger-test-for-rape-SC/article12141055.ece

  147 ‘to tell if someone has had vaginal intercourse’: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/health/ti-daughter-virginity-test.html?searchResultPosition=2

  A Mother Goes ‘Mad’

  The woman in the courtyard refused to speak. She sat with her back to the wall with her face covered. At first it was the reporters she shooed away, like they were settling flies. Then she stopped speaking to her children. If they tried to console her she grew frustrated by their lack of understanding. Lalli’s mother then refused all food. The roti stuck to the roof of her mouth, she told her only living daughter, Phoolan Devi. The young woman had arrived with her children within hours of the bodies being found on 28 May, and here she still was, weeks later, ministering to her mother’s needs. Phoolan Devi should just leave her and mind her own family, her mother said.

  At unexpected times, Siya Devi opened her mouth as though to say something. Then she shouted.

  The men kept their distance.

  Padma’s stepmother went about her business as usual. She still had to feed her husband. And Ram Babu’s wife had her seven children to care for. Even though they came by as often as they could there wasn’t much they could do. When Siya Devi started on one of her rants, the women turned their faces in despair.

  Phoolan Devi had seen her mother cry over the death of a child before. Phoolan Devi’s elder sister, Sunita, had died while she was pregnant with her second child. The child, too, had died. It was Siya Devi who had then asked Phoolan to marry her widowed brother-in-law. There was a toddler to look after, a girl named Khushboo, perfume. A child needs a mother, Siya Devi had said.

  Phoolan was only eighteen then, and she did as she was told, she married her sister’s husband to look after their child. Her new home was a village where people were poorer than any she had ever seen. The children attached string to the filthy plastic bags they had foraged from the dump and called them kites. Although she grew accustomed to her new family and soon had a child of her own, Phoolan Devi’s state of mind was clear when she said things like, ‘Dil ke arman dil mein reh jaate hain.’ The desires of the heart stay in the heart.

  Phoolan Devi understood something of what her mother was going through and delivered what comfort she could. She would later remember those days as the time her mother ‘went mad’.

  Around the two women, the courtyard bristled with activity. Reporters with camera crews and photographers, production fixers and translators; people who introduced themselves as leaders, lawyers and activists came and went as they pleased. They wanted an accounting of every toilet in the village, a list of all the politicians who had come by. They asked for tours of the mango orchard. Sohan Lal lost count of the number of times he was made to pose for photographs under the tree where his daughter was found.

  One day the family counted twenty broadcasting vans. Another day they ran out of tea to give to reporters.

  The reporters asked for pictures of the girls, but how many times could the Shakyas explain that people like them didn’t take photographs? The only photo they had of the girls together was of them hanging in the tree. Someone had given them a copy and Sohan Lal had stuck it on the back of his door.

  Then Sohan Lal remembered that Padma and Lalli had been photographed for some school forms. He asked the teacher for them back and had them copied in the bazaar.

  In her photo, Padma’s gleaming hair is neatly parted and smoothed away from her face. A red dupatta is draped modestly over her shoulders. She isn’t smiling, but neither does she appear unhappy. It is as though when the photographer told her to stay still she responded by calming all the turmoil within. Lalli wears earrings and a necklace. Her hair is a fuzzy halo. Her eyes are big and stunned.

  Sohan Lal handed out the postage-stamp-sized pictures to anyone who asked. Almost every day one tiny Padma and one tiny Lalli left the house in the palms of a stranger.

  In the hamlet next door, the Yadav house was secured with a padlock. The relatives down the road were looking after their two buffaloes. Veere told reporters that if his boys were guilty of the crimes they were accused of then they should be punished.148 ‘But,’ he said, choking up, ‘if they are innocent they should be set free.’ He alleged that his family had been forced out of Jati. ‘[The Katra villagers] didn’t let us stay,’ he said. ‘They came with lathis.’ He and his wife now lived with a friend some villages away. Their daughter-in-law and her baby lived separately. All their children were in jail.

  The family’s lives had been dismantled once, by the River Ganga. Now, it seemed to them, they were again without a place to call home.

  148 if his boys were guilty … they should be punished: youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2rG5trGw4

  Visitors to the Jail

  The Budaun District Jail had been built in 1840, when the area was notorious for violent acts, particularly infanticide: the deliberate killing of newborns, almost always girls, with the consent of their parents. Even after the rate of reported deaths started to decrease, more than three decades later the district gazetteer noted, ‘less care is habitually taken of girls than of boys.’149

  In 1857, in the throes of India’s First War of Independence, a treasury guard broke open the gates and released 300 convicts.150 The jail was destroyed along with numerous other public buildings, possibly burned to the ground, which led the British to use a mausoleum to house some of the revolutionaries. After the redcoats crushed the war, they constructed a red-brick fortress where the original jail once stood.

  The new jail was still very small and could only accommodate a few hundred people, a tiny number relative to the convictions being handed out to the revolutionaries, cattle thieves and grain rioters. It became necessary to erect sheds to contain the overflow. In the 2000s, the jail could still only accommodate 529 people, but somehow squeezed in three times the number.151 Inmates were made to live barracks-style, side by side, on mattresses that were laid out in great halls. The jail regularly made the papers for stories of violent inmate attacks.

  In May 2014, a teenaged inmate was found hanging from an iron ventilator grille in a toile
t. He had been held on charges of kidnapping and raping a girl. Jail officials claimed that he had died by suicide, but the post-mortem – which showed at least nine injuries – concluded that the fifteen-year-old had been tortured and then strangulated. It was only when his family gathered en masse to protest – blocking the highway, disrupting traffic and attracting the attention of the media – that the police even agreed to open an investigation.152

  It was then confirmed that the boy had been found being intimate with the girl. Her family, to protect their daughter’s honour, had claimed that she had been raped. Then, to protect their honour, they had paid the jailer and some of his men to kill the boy.153

  The Yadav brothers knew to keep to themselves, but every twist in their case made the newspapers – and the warden taunted them by reading the reports out loud for everyone to hear. Very quickly the brothers came to be known as the infamous criminals behind ‘the Budaun double gang rape and murder’. This was despite the fact that it had now been established that the girls had not been raped. Agency officials, of course, also knew that Pappu’s brothers weren’t with him in the orchard that night.

  To stay out of sight and inconspicuous, as much as was possible, Avdesh and Urvesh volunteered in the jail kitchen.

  Their father came to see them, but they had never had much to say to each other. Yes, yes, Pappu was innocent, the older two nodded along as their father mumbled about the misfortune his small boy had stumbled into. But if it weren’t for him would they be here in the first place? ‘I have a child,’ Avdesh said. Urvesh would miss his tenth-class finals – again. The brief meeting ended on a sour note. Even when they did things right, everything went wrong. He couldn’t have prevented this, protested Veere. ‘As if boys tell their father anything.’

  Pappu wasn’t with his brothers. Veere had insisted that his youngest son was fifteen. He couldn’t prove it, but the police couldn’t disprove it at the time; so they kept Pappu separate, with the other juveniles. When Veere went to meet him, his son looked embarrassed to be publicly caught out over a matter of sex. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘I am innocent.’

  Elsewhere in the district jail, visits between the former head constable, Gangwar, and his wife were more conversational. She brought tiered steel containers packed with home-cooked food and listened as he complained – the entire mess involved other people’s children, he said. This one’s daughters, that one’s sons. And what of his children, who was asking after them?

  Like most Indian fathers, Gangwar was obsessed with his oldest son, the one who would carry on his name into future generations. The one who would look after him in his old age. All his children were wonderful. Even the girls, by the grace of the gods, were sharp, he always did say. But what about Manoj, he now asked his wife. Was Manoj eating well? Was Manoj sleeping?

  Manoj had wanted to study business. When his father was arrested, he was in Delhi, where he was about to sit an entrance exam for a prestigious college. He had skipped it to come home to his family. Gangwar held himself responsible and made it a point to pray out loud every day, begging the gods for forgiveness and for his freedom. His fellow inmates were impressed. ‘Daddu,’ they begged, ‘grandfather, pray for us.’ They were innocent too, they said.

  Gangwar concluded that his mistake, the sole reason why he was even here, was because he had accompanied Pappu out of the village. The sight of him with the Yadav boy angered the Shakyas, he said, and they had implicated him as punishment.

  ‘If I hadn’t taken him, I wouldn’t be here today,’ he said.

  But it wasn’t chance that had placed Gangwar on the motorcycle that morning. As second in rank only to his boss, he would have been the natural choice to visit the orchard at the first opportunity. And he would have been asked along if only he hadn’t been incapacitated by drink. Then, after the girls were found, he would have received a dressing-down from his superiors. He would have been transferred, just like the other officers had, but he wouldn’t be called a rapist and a murderer. And he wouldn’t be sitting here in jail.

  Now his pension was in jeopardy, and for someone who had two wives – one of whom he had never got round to divorcing – and five children, this was something to worry about.

  As it was, Gangwar couldn’t afford a lawyer.

  At first, he wondered if he and his former colleague, who was in the same jail, could split the cost. After all, they were in this together.

  Then he learned, through the grapevine, that Sarvesh had already hired a lawyer. His man was a member of the city’s wealthy new middle class. He wore western-style suits and a flashy gold chain and he drove a Japanese car with a personalised licence plate (‘Mathur’s’). Lawyer and client looked unnervingly alike, with the same closed fist of a face. But the lawyer was said to charge 10,000 rupees for a single appearance, and Sarvesh was a former constable who had earned 27,000 rupees a month.

  When Gangwar learned of the arrangement, he sighed. He might have lied for his friend, but Sarvesh had made it clear that they weren’t close. If someone asked how his former colleague could afford such expensive representation, Gangwar would tell the truth. And the other police officers would back him up.

  Sarvesh, alleged Gangwar, and the CBI later confirmed, didn’t keep track of the sand mafia’s comings and goings for the sake of the law. And he didn’t befriend the Yadav family just because they belonged to the same caste. He kept an eye on the mafia so he could demand bribes in exchange for his silence.

  Sarvesh was the most corrupt police officer in the chowki, and he had used the Yadav house as a lookout.

  149 less care … is taken of girls than of boys: archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.48010/2015.48010.Budaun---A-Gazetteer_djvu.txt

  150 released 300 convicts: ibid.

  151 squeezed in three times the number: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bareilly/-100-inmates-from-district-jails-to-be-shifted-to-bareilly-central-jail/articleshow/64324511.cms

  152 the police … agreed to open an investigation: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/35625314.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

  153 paid the jailer and some of his men to kill the boy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/lucknow/Rape-accused-murdered-in-Budaun-jail-report-says/articleshow/35612681.cms

  The Case of the Missing Phones

  The rains had been expected on 1 June, but they were already a fortnight behind schedule. The temperature climbed steadily. The air was as dense as wool. The rivers that irrigated land, in which people washed dishes, clothes, cattle and themselves were crusting up. In the villages, children walked long distances with their goats and buffaloes looking for water. In towns, many people turned to submersible pumps to dig water from the ground. Even expensive private schools told parents to keep children home unless they were willing to have them go to the toilet in the open. The pumps, fans, coolers and air-conditioners stretched the supply of power.

  The temperature hit 48.3 degrees Celsius.

  Farmers feared that a drought was inevitable.

  Then came the blackouts, which set off the riots.

  Thousands of enraged people stormed a power substation near Lucknow, holding workers hostage for eighteen hours before the police showed up, exhausted from settling skirmishes elsewhere. Other substations were also set on fire.154

  A working paper released by Harvard Business School that year showed a correlation between high temperatures and low rainfall in India and the risk of violent crimes and conflict.155 As tempers skyrocketed, a petition to the High Court in Allahabad alleged that the only areas in Uttar Pradesh with uninterrupted power were constituencies of politicians such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and members of Yadav’s ruling party.156 ‘Residents have been particularly angry about the power cuts after receiving reliable supplies throughout the Indian elections, which ended on 16
May,’ reported a paper.157

  When sticky winds finally started to circulate, a collective sigh of relief filled the air. Typically, the rains arrived with fanfare, tumbling in heavy grey sheets for at least two months. If the agency wanted to exhume the bodies, now was the time.

  One morning, investigators came to the courtyard of the Shakya house to enquire about the whereabouts of some phones. The first was the black and gold handset, which was the phone Padma had taken with her to the fields the night she disappeared. Although it was switched on when she left the house, by the time distraught family members started to call, it had been switched off. The second handset contained the recording of the call between Lalli and Pappu. This handset belonged to Lalli’s father Sohan Lal. After Lalli had used it, on the day she disappeared, she returned it to her father. Later that night, he had played the recording for numerous villagers. Several of them had told the agency about the recording, and the CBI naturally wanted to hear it for themselves.

  Sohan Lal said that no such phones existed.

  In fact, not only did he know where they were, he had engineered the disappearance of Padma’s phone that morning in the orchard, all those days ago. The investigators already knew this from a policewoman who had been on the scene.

  The idea came to Sohan Lal as he gazed up at his niece.