The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  ‘Who knows what’s in the phone,’ he said to a relative. ‘Good or bad, it’s better to remove it. Whatever recordings and messages are on there should be deleted.’

  The relative was Padma’s oldest maternal uncle, Ram Chander, who lived in the village of Nabiganj. He and his four brothers had worked hard to maintain a relationship with their niece. In recent months their home had become a refuge for the teenager. But he understood what Sohan Lal was saying and agreed. Honour was at stake – his, hers, theirs. The elderly man slipped his hand into his niece’s kameez and retrieved the phone.

  Standing by, watching, was Padma’s father Jeevan Lal. There were plenty of other eyewitnesses to this removal of evidence. ‘The villagers said that the phone contained conversations between Pappu and Padma,’ remembered one bystander.

  Sohan Lal apparently wasn’t familiar with GPS, or how technology embedded in the phone made its coordinates easily available. He was sure that if the phone was hidden, it could not be found. He asked Padma’s uncle to take it home with him. Nabiganj village was two hours away, no one would think to look for it there.

  The battery was dead, and when the phone was plugged in to charge, ‘messages poured in,’ Ram Chander’s eighteen-year-old son, Ram Avtar later recalled. The five or six new messages all expressed concern for Padma’s whereabouts. ‘Padma, we’re trying to reach you,’ was a typical example. Ram Avtar didn’t recognise the numbers offhand, but it was almost certain, given the content, that they belonged to relatives. Even so, he deleted them, just as Sohan Lal had asked. ‘I wanted to protect Padma’s family from scandal,’ he explained.

  By the next day Sohan Lal had changed his mind. The phone was better off with him, where he could keep an eye on it. He had taken Padma and Lalli’s slippers from the base of the tree – to keep them safe from the crowd, he later said – and perhaps, he now told his brothers, he should have also taken the phone. He brought it home and stuck it in some cow dung piled up in a corner of the courtyard.

  Investigators didn’t want to confront Sohan Lal just yet, so they went to Nabiganj to meet Padma’s uncles first. They threatened to arrest them if they didn’t tell the truth. The horrified men cursed Sohan Lal. He had sent wolves to their door! The investigators softened their tone. The phone was a potential clue to the identity of their niece’s killer. Didn’t they want to know who had done it? They wanted those men behind bars, didn’t they?

  After the investigators left, one of the brothers phoned Sohan Lal. It was 20 June, around a week into the investigation.

  ‘We’re in trouble because of you,’ Kanhaiya Lal said. ‘If you don’t hand over the phone to the CBI by tomorrow morning, we will cut off all relations with your family.’

  In a community that was as closely bound as theirs, this was the gravest threat one could make.

  Sohan Lal agreed to do as he was told, but then pushed the matter out of his mind. He had bigger worries at the moment. Some villagers were now telling the reporters who roamed Katra in search of a fresh angle that the girls’ deaths may have been an honour killing. These men said ‘girls shouldn’t use phones’ and ‘good girls don’t talk to boys’ and that those who did brought dishonour to the village. ‘If they had been my girls,’ said one man in a boastful voice, ‘I would have shot them dead.’

  Padma’s uncles in Nabiganj were aware of the pressure that Sohan Lal was under – he was famous. Everyone knew who he was. They had an opinion about what had happened to his girls. The only way he could make his case was through the media – and, they had heard, he spoke to whoever walked through the door even though he wasn’t always convinced that they were who they claimed. On more than one occasion, he had asked reporters if they were working undercover for the CBI.

  Still, they refused to be fobbed off.

  Kanhaiya Lal phoned Lalli’s father again, and this time he made it clear that the brothers were wondering if there was some other reason he was refusing to give up the phone.

  ‘We won’t stand by you if you hide the truth,’ he said. ‘And if you’ve done something wrong, be sure you will be punished.’ Kanhaiya Lal wasn’t talking about criminal justice. He meant that the gods would punish Sohan Lal.

  The investigators also kept up the pressure. They told the brothers that the police were running a background check on Sohan Lal and some family members to see if they had a criminal record. (They didn’t.)

  Then one night, agency men picked up Ram Chander, the uncle who had removed the phone from Padma’s kameez, and drove him to Katra village. They had concluded that the only way to get the truth was through a face-to-face confrontation. Now, they stood in the courtyard of the Shakya house as everyone watched – family members, friends and neighbours.

  ‘He made me do it,’ Ram Chander said.

  ‘Nahin ji,’ Sohan Lal shot back. ‘Jhoot.’ No sir, all lies.

  ‘You made me return it the next day!’

  ‘Theek hai, maybe it’s somewhere in the house.’

  It was the middle of the night. He brought his hands together and swore to personally scour the house in the morning, but the investigators refused to be put off again. The phone was evidence of something that Sohan Lal wanted to keep hidden. Shukla, the investigating officer, believed that given the opportunity, Lalli’s father would destroy it. He instructed his team to search the house. They looked and looked, but when they passed the pile of cow dung, they crinkled their noses and quickly sidestepped.

  154 Other substations were also set on fire: scotsman.com/news/world/anger-boils-indian-power-cuts-fuel-heat-misery-1534751

  155 a correlation between high temperatures … and the risk of violent crimes: hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/14-067_45092fee-b164-4662-894b-5d28471fa69b.pdf

  156 constituencies of politicians: scotsman.com/news/world/anger-boils-indian-power-cuts-fuel-heat-misery-1534751

  157 ‘Residents have been particularly angry’: ibid.

  The Truth About the Phone

  Sohan Lal stuck his hand into the cow dung. He pulled out the phone that Padma was carrying with her at the time of her death. He wiped it clean, and then struck it on the ground repeatedly to disgorge its contents. He broke the battery, the keypad and steel frame. The manufacturer’s label peeled off. All the many pieces now fitted into the palms of his hands. He slipped them into a polythene bag and quietly knotted it.

  The handset was in ‘flakes’, said a report from the Forensic Science Laboratory in the western state of Gujarat. Sohan Lal had also handed over his phone, the one with the recording between Lalli and Pappu. This phone was physically intact but missing the original memory card, without which it was impossible to hear the recorded call.

  Although he admitted to tampering with the phones, Sohan Lal at first refused to say why. He did say that the phone he had newly bought was always meant for Padma. ‘She asked me to,’ he said. ‘She could read and write a little, and most of the calls that came were for her anyway.’

  This was not a satisfactory explanation, as far as Shukla was concerned. Girls in the village used phones, but they did not own them. And Sohan Lal was hardly progressive. If his niece was getting calls, he would have been annoyed.

  Now, as before, members of Sohan Lal’s own family came forward to contradict him, perhaps concerned that his stubbornness was hurting the investigation. One of them was Sohan Lal’s eldest son, Virender, who told investigators that his father had ‘smashed the phone’ because he was angry that it had been used to ‘contact the girls and meet them’.

  Shukla believed that Sohan Lal had bought the phone to spy on Padma, possibly intending to confront her. He had destroyed it to get rid of any evidence that linked her to Pappu, therefore putting an end to the matter. When he had called for an investigation by the CBI, this was not one of the things he had imagined would come to light.

  Looking for confirmation about
his theory, Shukla then sent some men to Keshav Communications. On 26 June, Keshav presented them with a bill of sale in the name of a fifty-one-year-old woman named Vidyawati. The investigators were taken aback. Who was this?

  Keshav looked embarrassed. He had copied some details from another customer’s identity card, he said, but only to help Sohan Lal. The old man wasn’t carrying ID. Keshav had assumed he didn’t have any. That wasn’t true, the officers told him. Sohan Lal had a voting card that he got three years ago.

  Keshav shrugged. In his experience, most people didn’t break the law because they were criminals; they broke the law because they thought they could get away with it, just as he had thought that he could.

  No lies now, investigators said. What kind of phone was it?

  Sohan Lal had asked to see phones with a good battery life, Keshav replied. There was nothing unusual about the request. It wasn’t like the village had many power sockets.

  What else?

  Keshav swallowed hard. He had never interacted with a police officer before. And these investigators scrutinised him in disbelieving silence. It was clear they thought him the lying sort. Keshav didn’t want more trouble. Once again, he thought about his dead father, his widowed mother, the uncle to whom he was in debt and so on, until his forehead burned. He started talking very fast. ‘I was half-minded,’ he later recalled, terrified that the CBI would arrest him for fraud.

  Keshav talked so much that he lost track of what he was saying. At one point, he felt his mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words coming out. But of everything he said there was just one thing that really interested the CBI.

  ‘Sohan Lal wanted a phone that could record calls at length.’

  ‘She Is All I Have’

  Ram Sakhi was only a teenager when she was dispatched to marry. She was eighteen, maybe nineteen – a bit on the older side – but the match was a good one even though she didn’t know it, having never seen her future husband’s face.

  What his name was even, it didn’t matter, because she wouldn’t call him anything but the father of her children.

  The groom, Jeevan Lal, owned some land and a house. He didn’t drink. He had no debt, and no known history of criminal activity. He was stringy but healthy, with high cheekbones, a neatly pruned moustache and protruding ears. He was soft-spoken and seemed gentle in his ways, which made him stand out in these parts where machismo was a necessary show of strength and belonging.

  Over time, the differences between their families started to emerge. Ram Sakhi was illiterate, but her brothers could write their names in two languages, Hindi and English. Jeevan Lal identified himself with a thumbprint. As the years accumulated, Ram Sakhi’s brothers travelled. One went to Punjab, to work on a farm, another made a living on construction sites in Haryana. Jeevan Lal stayed home. New experiences meant new ways, and the brothers built a toilet in their house. But even when her belly was as full as a sack of watermelons, they bitterly recalled, their sister had to roam the fields for a place to squat.

  Ram Sakhi had a daughter, Padma, who was dearly loved – but girls were a prelude to better things. The second child would be a boy, everyone said, and if not, then the third. But the couple never made it that far, for just as Ram Sakhi was about to give birth a second time she fell ill. As his wife lay confined to her bed in a village without doctors, and with neither cars nor phones, Jeevan Lal worriedly cracked his knuckles. When the baby was ready to be born, he rushed his wife to hospital, where she died. He didn’t know how – he couldn’t understand the doctors, he said.

  The baby died too.

  He had been a longed-for boy, and the loss struck Jeevan Lal like a physical blow to his heart. His mother moved in to cook for him and two-year-old Padma. Jeevan Lal went mechanically back and forth from the fields. His family was certain he would never again smile.

  Ram Sakhi’s brothers had always got along with Jeevan Lal, but the death of their sister created a predictable distance, they said. ‘We wanted a relationship with our niece,’ Kanhaiya Lal, the youngest brother, recalled. ‘But the relationship with the others felt like it was over.’

  Although they continued to refer to Jeevan Lal as their bahnoi, brother-in-law, they didn’t like visiting him any more.

  He was still in his twenties, and he married again. His new wife was well suited to him. She said very little; in part because she was traditionally bound to keep her face concealed and with it her opinions too. The silences were comfortable. They got along, the rest of the family observed with a sigh of relief.

  As the youngest of the daughters-in-law, Sunita Devi occupied the low end of the totem pole, bringing up the rear after the men, her mother-in-law and the older daughters-in-law. She was above the children, but as the boys grew, their gender would propel them higher up the family hierarchy and their wishes would supersede hers. She was aware of her place. She huddled and bent as she tended to the fire, the buffaloes, the pots and pans. If she wanted something from the others, she whispered in her husband’s ear, and he advocated on her behalf.

  It was soon clear that theirs was a partnership, as much as was possible given the circumstances. Perhaps grateful for this second chance at life, Jeevan Lal took his new wife’s side in all matters.

  Ram Sakhi’s brothers worried that their niece would be neglected in favour of the new wife’s biological children. They asked if Padma could stay with them. Jeevan Lal, understandably, refused. ‘She is my reason for living,’ he said.

  Over the years the brothers heard rumours. Padma called her stepmother ‘mummy’, but Sunita Devi wasn’t bringing her up. The entirety of the task still fell to Padma’s grandmother. Sunita Devi didn’t even cook for the child. Jeevan Lal was forced to come out and explain. ‘My mother and daughter eat food such as fish,’ he said. ‘But my wife is a pure vegetarian.’ By touching fish she could pollute herself.

  The household was also affected by a more private turmoil. Jeevan Lal and Sunita Devi were trying for children, but Sunita Devi repeatedly suffered miscarriages. The village doctors didn’t have medical degrees and were jokingly referred to by those who spoke some English as ‘temporary’ – meaning they would have to do for now – but Sunita Devi went to them anyway. She also went to herbalists, whose concoctions sometimes killed patients. And to actual doctors, in Budaun and beyond. She took anything anyone would give her. Her aching heart, her tired body, the eyes of everyone on her – now she barely spoke at all.

  The uncles then enrolled Padma in a school in their village, hoping to convince her father to give her up. But although she attended some classes, Jeevan Lal soon came back for her. A friend she made at the time later recalled that while Padma spoke fondly of her grandmother, she never mentioned having a stepmother.

  When Padma completed class eight in 2013, her father said she should stay home from now on. There was no secondary school in the village. This was true, but because it was also true that some families sent their girls to schools outside the village, her uncles concluded that Jeevan Lal wanted to marry Padma off.

  They again approached him. ‘We told him to wait,’ one said. ‘Let her study, let her grow up.’ There were half a dozen school-going children in their family. Their niece would be happy if she lived with them. The brothers would send her to secondary school and pay for it besides. Jeevan Lal again refused.

  ‘We are not in a position,’ he said firmly.

  Jeevan Lal would later say that it was his reluctance to educate his daughter further that had caused tension in the family. But Padma had told cousin Manju that she didn’t enjoy school. The teachers at Saraswati Gyan Mandir practised the usual rote method with emphasis on repetition rather than learning. Corporal punishment was standard. Padma wasn’t always attentive, and her attitude was reflected in her results. Her eighth-class English teacher called her a ‘medium’ girl. She wasn’t his best, and she wasn’t the worst.

  By th
e spring of 2014, relations between Padma and her stepmother, and consequently her father too, had become worse. When she came to visit her uncles in March it was without a leaving date. The latest fight, they heard, was a ‘roti paani’ argument with Sunita Devi over how long Padma had taken to serve a meal. These fights, over seemingly trivial things, had by now become so routine that the brothers didn’t pay them much heed. Anyway, they didn’t even know what to believe.

  When she was with them, there was nothing Padma wouldn’t do. She was so conscientious that when a cousin fell ill, it was the teenager – of everyone present – who took it upon herself to look after the sick girl. As much as she scrubbed dishes, she also enjoyed a game of Ludo with the other children. She embroidered quietly when the adults talked. The last thing she had made them was a parrot with a chunky green belly and a furry red beak. After dinner, when members of the thirty-strong joint family competed against one another in singing games, Padma was the most enthusiastic performer of all. In their midst, she radiated joy.

  A perfect guest. A lovely child. A good girl.

  A fortnight passed.

  Holi, a joyful festival that was celebrated with family, came and went.

  Then an exasperated Jeevan Lal showed up on the back of a motorcycle to retrieve his daughter.

  The brothers were unclear about the nature of Padma’s alleged infractions, but it was a father’s right, they felt, to discipline her. On the other hand, it was apparent that the environment in Katra was toxic.

  Again, they asked to keep her. Again, Jeevan Lal refused.

  ‘She is all I have,’ he said.

  ‘There Is No Need to Go Here and There’

  In Katra, there were more fights. The reason, ostensibly, was the friendship between Padma and Lalli. ‘You roam around together all day,’ Jeevan Lal scolded. ‘Why don’t you focus on your responsibilities?’