The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  But there was fact, and there was feeling. And the Shakyas felt that the CBI had failed them, perhaps because they had failed to point the finger at anyone at all. The brothers circulated the rumour that the agency had accepted a bribe from people sympathetic to the Yadavs to fix the case.

  Like the rumour that the girls were raped, the rumour that investigating officers were corrupt was entirely believable. The story gained traction when details of the supervising officer’s past started to circulate in the village.

  168 ‘they will … hang themselves to death’: ndtv.com/video/news/the-buck-stops-here/watch-complete-u-turn-in-Budaun-case-335409

  169 ‘I have no proof’: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/girls-family-to-challenge-cbi-conclusion-in-court/

  170 earlier acts of grave malfeasance: nytimes.com/2019/01/30/opinion/india-arms-deal-corruption-modi.html

  171 as the Supreme Court had declared: reuters.com/article/india-politics-cbi-coalgate/government-meddled-in-cbi-probe-says-supreme-court-idINDEE9470DZ20130508?irpc=932

  172 admitted to the rampage: independent.co.uk/news/world/outcry-in-delhi-over-kashmir-massacre-1477194.html

  173 ‘atrocities against women’: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/in-up-modi-takes-on-mulayam-says-sp-misleading-people-under-veil-of-secularism/

  The Rogue Officer

  Most people knew fifty-four-year-old Anil Girdhari Lal Kaul from the Aarushi Talwar case. It was Kaul’s investigation that led the teenager’s parents to be sentenced to life imprisonment. He alleged that they had murdered their child and the domestic help after finding them in an ‘objectionable position’174 – this was a euphemism for sex.

  In 2017, a higher court overturned the conviction.175 It emerged that Kaul had tampered with evidence to entrap the parents.176 In 2014, however, the Talwars were still in jail and it appeared as though the headline-making case that had obsessed the nation was solved. In theory, Kaul was successful, which might explain why he was in Katra.

  The agency followed a policy of participatory supervision, which meant that the supervisory officer actively participated in the investigation. Shukla was the investigating officer – this was his case – but his boss was right there beside him, or rather, in front of him, striding up and down the village with one hand tucked in his pocket as the other imperiously beckoned people forward for interviews. He scrutinised them carefully, and those who dared match his gaze saw tufts of white hair, narrow eyes and a double chin embedded in folds of skin that the blazing sun had roasted the colour of an aubergine. Kaul’s reading glasses dangled from a chain around his substantial neck. He carried several pens in the breast pocket of his billowing shirt. And whereas his English was fluent, when he heckled the people he was interviewing – which was often, the villagers said – it was always in Hindi, a language that afforded more colourful possibilities. After he was done, he walked briskly away, as though to signal that he was a man of many responsibilities.

  It was during the course of some interviews that the Shakya family got a taste of Kaul’s methods. His behaviour compounded their distrust of the CBI.

  Investigators had interrogated Pappu Yadav numerous times. He was even brought back to Katra village and made to retrace his steps on the night the girls went missing. It was still Nazru’s word against his on the matter of what exactly had happened, and on one occasion Pappu went out of his way to tell investigators that Padma had complained to him about Nazru. ‘Like he wanted to have sex with her.’

  On the night of 27 May, Pappu said, when Nazru came upon Pappu and the girls, he demanded that the girls have sex with him. When they refused, he dragged them away by force.

  Investigators had already established that Nazru was spying on the girls. At first, they thought he had planned to blackmail them. Then they wondered if he’d wanted to go further. They knew the girls hadn’t been raped the night they went missing, but had Nazru attempted to rape them? Then they heard the rumours about him being ‘neither completely male, nor completely female’ – they were taken aback.

  Kaul summoned Nazru to the field office and demanded that he submit himself to a medical examination. The young man gave his consent, but it’s unlikely he did so willingly. It was Dr Rajiv Gupta, who had led the post-mortem, who asked Nazru to pull down his trousers right there. He looked the tobacco farmer up and down and concluded that he had ‘a congenital deformity’.

  Dr Gupta couldn’t later recall the problem, though he was sure it had a ‘catchy name’, but he had told Kaul that it was impossible for Nazru to have intercourse with a woman. With that, Kaul lost interest in the idea of Nazru as a suspect. If he hadn’t attempted to rape the girls, he believed, Nazru had no reason to kill them to ensure their silence.

  Although he was no longer a suspect, Nazru was still an eyewitness, and still altering his story every time he was interviewed. One day, Kaul allegedly grew so furious with him that he grabbed him, held him down, and ordered a junior officer to beat him. Nazru claimed that Kaul had him beaten on two further occasions.

  When the allegations were put to Shukla, the investigating officer, he dismissed them as false. ‘I wouldn’t have allowed such behaviour,’ he said. ‘Not even a slap. We don’t believe in criminal force.’ Shukla let it slip that similar allegations had been made against Kaul before. ‘Knowing his temperament,’ he said, ‘I did not allow him to interfere. When he attempted to do so there were altercations.’ And, he said, there were so many eyes on the Katra case, that even Kaul would have held back from expressing himself in his customary ways.

  Then a second person accused Kaul of assault. This was Sohan Lal’s ten-year-old son, Parvesh. The sturdy, strong-featured boy was admired for his quick intelligence. He was studying in a private school. Like everyone else in his family he spoke Braj Bhasha and Hindi, but, unlike them, he had also mastered some English.

  Parvesh said that Kaul showed him a picture.

  Where was this, the officer demanded?

  The low-quality image taken on Sohan Lal’s mobile phone showed Parvesh nestled high up in a tree.

  The Shakyas had steadfastly maintained that the tree on which the girls were found was too high for them to climb. The foothold stood at nearly three feet, and while Padma was exactly five feet tall, Lalli was short that figure by three inches. Other people in the village disputed this. They said that village children frequently climbed the trees in the orchard, with the taller ones boosting littler ones. The tree on which Padma and Lalli were found, said Ramnath, who owned the mango orchard, was one that ‘even an eleven- or twelve-year-old could easily climb’.

  Investigators had tested this theory by getting two women of around the same height and build as the girls to climb the tree. They did so with ease.

  Kaul, it seems, was collecting proof to advance this argument. He wanted to show that children younger and smaller than Lalli could climb the tree. Someone such as her little brother, for example.

  In fact, the orchard was a wildly popular hang-out for the village children. It was their playground. They climbed up and down the trees like they were using stairs. If Parvesh had been asked nicely he would have said so. He would have said that climbing trees was a childhood habit for all the girls and boys in his family, including for his sister Lalli and his cousin Padma.

  But Parvesh couldn’t remember where the picture was taken. Rather than leaving it there, Kaul started to taunt him. Then, said Parvesh, the beefy investigator, who was more than four decades older, leaned over and slapped him. Sohan Lal, who was sitting right there, was stunned, but felt helpless to intervene. Kaul slapped Parvesh five or six times across the face. He then kicked the little boy in the ribs with the toe of his leather shoe. ‘You were in the fields the night your sister went missing,’ he shouted.

  ‘Who says so?’ replied a shocked Parvesh, picking himself up from the floor.
<
br />   ‘No one said so. I saw you.’

  ‘You saw me? When did you show up? And if I was in the fields, what could I have done? I’m a child!’

  ‘Where did you find this boy?’ Kaul turned to Sohan Lal. ‘Rich people have sons like this.’

  The backhanded compliment was lost on parent and child who left the CBI field office feeling revolted at the behaviour of this powerful man.

  Years later, when Parvesh was asked if he remembered his sister he sighed, ‘I was only a child.’ When he was asked if he remembered Kaul, his face tightened.

  ‘The things he said pinched our hearts.’

  174 an ‘objectionable position’: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Aarushi-and-Hemraj-were-in-objectionable-position-CBI/articleshow/19698674.cms

  175 a higher court overturned the conviction: hindustantimes.com/india-news/aarushi-hemraj-murder-case-rajesh-nupur-talwar-walk-free/story-VM79MJ2cDNA67OGJltIZsN.html

  176 Kaul had tampered with evidence: firstpost.com/india/aarushi-murder-case-allahabad-hc-judgment-answers-how-cbi-tampered-perjured-itself-and-wrecked-trial-against-talwars-4164221.html

  Friends, Not Strangers

  One day in July, Padma’s father was watering the crops. Lalli’s father was with Nazru, knee-deep in the upturned earth of his plot. Sunita Devi was washing dishes and Siya Devi was lying on the charpoy. Investigators gathered them to share the news. The call records had come in.

  The records showed an exchange of 377 calls between Pappu’s phone and one of the Shakya phones. The calls covered a period of six months. A further 48 calls were exchanged between Pappu’s phone and a second Shakya phone.

  The phone records helped to establish a timeline of events, especially when corroborated with eyewitness accounts. Pappu received a call from Lalli at 5.58 a.m. on the day she would disappear. He called back at 6.01 a.m. These times match the account of the relative, Prem Singh, who saw Lalli talking into Sohan Lal’s phone that morning. Lalli then returned the phone to her father who carried it with him to the oil distillation machine.

  According to family members, the girls left home for the fields around 9 p.m. The Yadav women said that it was around this time that Pappu went out. They assumed he planned to spend the night at his cousin’s. The girls dialled Pappu several times, most likely to alert him of their arrival and exact whereabouts in the fields.

  They called him at 9.04, 9.05, 9.16 and then at 9.18 p.m.

  At 9.18 p.m. Pappu called back.

  The teenagers met and shortly afterwards Nazru discovered them. Nazru may have followed Padma and Lalli to the meeting spot, but it’s just as likely that he was waiting for them at the same place he had seen them with Pappu earlier. According to both men a scuffle ensued. Nazru said that he was threatened with a gun, forcing him to retreat. He made straight for Jeevan Lal’s animal shelter on the edge of the fields. ‘Khet mein admi hai!’ he shouted. There are thieves in your field.

  Jeevan Lal raced to the fields with Nazru, phoning his brother Ram Babu on the way. It was 9.29 p.m. Ram Babu responded instantly. ‘Thieves in the tobacco! Thieves in the tobacco!’

  Over in Jati, Pappu walked into his cousin Raju’s hut complaining of having suffered a stomach upset from something he had eaten at the fair. He’d been to the fields, Pappu said. It was around 9.30 p.m., Raju later recalled. The youngsters shared some fruit and Raju, at least, fell asleep.

  No further calls were made from Padma’s phone, which had been switched off after that last call to Pappu, and presumably after Nazru’s exit. The handset was switched on again at 11.41 p.m., giving it enough time to grab data from seven calls that were made by worried family members. After a few seconds, the phone was switched off again, as call records established.

  The next time it would be switched on the girls would be dead. The phone would be in another village in the hands of Padma’s cousin who deleted the messages on the behest of Sohan Lal, who was concerned they would damage the family’s honour.

  By a quarter to ten on the night of 27 May, many of the Shakyas were at home. They were confused and afraid. Already, two Shakya brothers had gone in search of thieves and their wives had come running to tell them that the girls were missing. After Nazru identified Pappu as the culprit, Lalli’s mother, Siya Devi, ran home. Jeevan Lal called Sohan Lal, but his brother’s phone had died; so further calls were made to Harbans, the cousin.

  Thereafter, a group of men attempted to look for the girls. Sohan Lal arranged for transport and was back in Katra at 11.16 p.m. He joined the search party. The mystery motorcycle made an appearance. The voice recording, heard by multiple witnesses, established that the girls knew the boy in the hamlet next door.

  A similar set of data helped to account for the movement of the five suspects, but only to a partial extent. The first call that Pappu received on 27 May was from Lalli. Thereafter, his phone was in use seventeen times. The last call he received that day was at 9.23 p.m., when he should have been on his way to his cousin Raju’s shack. It lasted a second, so perhaps it was a misdial. Call records didn’t register a number.

  What is clear is that Pappu didn’t speak to his brother Avdesh or the two police suspects at any time on 27 May. His brother Urvesh didn’t have a phone, but Avdesh did. The eldest Yadav boy was in the hamlet, cutting tobacco plants for a neighbour alongside his wife. Although he received four calls that day, none of them were from people who would be later associated with the case.

  However, two days earlier, on 25 May, Avdesh had phoned Constable Sarvesh at 12 p.m. The call lasted fifty-two seconds. It would be impossible to verify the nature of the call, but according to Avdesh he was the officer’s lookout. Whenever he saw activity seemingly connected to the mining of sand, he made sure to inform his friend in the chowki.

  Avdesh next heard from the officer on the morning of 28 May at 3.04 a.m. According to the chowki policemen, the villagers of Katra had approached them between 2 and 2.30 a.m. Keeping in mind that the officers dallied, first in responding to the cries of help, and then in getting ready, it’s possible to speculate that the call was meant to forewarn the Yadavs that the police were on their way.

  At 5.01 a.m., it was Avdesh’s turn to dial the officer. ‘We are hearing,’ he said sketchily, ‘that the girls have been found in the orchard.’ Avdesh dialled Sarvesh a second time that morning, at 7.37 a.m. By then the constable had left Katra, taking Pappu with him to the police station in Ushait.

  After investigators had delivered the information about the call records to the Shakyas, they left the village, and the family returned to work. It was now early evening. A hot breeze was blowing. A bright-red dirt-caked tractor revved its way through the fields. The potatoes are good this year, someone said as he walked passed Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal. The brothers nodded. Yes, it was true. The potatoes were good.

  August passed in heat and rain. The orchard was picked clean of fruit. The investigation continued.

  In September, Sohan Lal’s brother, Ram Babu, officially retracted his false eyewitness testimony in which he had claimed to have seen Pappu and some men take the girls.

  That month, the suspects were set to be released on bail. The investigators might have asked the court for more time, but they didn’t. ‘The CBI is not filing a chargesheet presently against the five accused who are in custody because forensic tests have ruled out sexual assault,’ said a CBI spokesperson. ‘However, we have not given a clean chit to anyone. Though rape has been ruled out, murder has not. We are investigating the matter.’177

  In the hamlet of Jati, Pappu’s father, who had by now returned home, was unclear about how to proceed. He had hired a lawyer for his sons, but when he didn’t pay the man, the lawyer blocked his calls. ‘Yes, someone read out to me the CBI’s announcement yesterday,’ Veere told a reporter. ‘But I do not know how to go about the bail application and I will have to sell one of the two buffa
loes I own for money.’178

  The first to receive bail, on 1 September, were the policemen. Former Head Constable Gangwar went back to the flat that came with his job – even though he had been fired – hoping his former bosses would forget to have him evicted. He stayed indoors virtually all day long to avoid being seen and even refrained from using the air cooler – the loud noise might attract attention. His former colleague Sarvesh went home to his family’s farm in Etah district and when reporters phoned he swore at them, called them fucking scum and hung up.

  On 4 September, it was the turn of the Yadav brothers to be presented in court.179 They weren’t in handcuffs, because there weren’t enough handcuffs to go around. They were secured with a length of rope, like cattle. Pappu was in trackpants, hair close-shaven, feet bare. His cheekbones poked out of his face like chips of concrete.

  Once out, the brothers went back to work on the other side of the river, tending to their watermelons. Their father still beckoned them to join him outside on the charpoy some evenings, but now they refused to oblige.

  177 ‘We are investigating the matter’: indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/girls-family-to-challenge-cbi-conclusion-in-court/

  178 ‘how to go about the bail application’: ibid.

  179 the turn of the Yadav brothers: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-29062228

  Pappu and Nazru Face to Face

  On the morning of 10 October, Anil Girdhari Lal Kaul died of a heart attack. An obituary in the papers described the supervising officer on the Katra case as ‘a noble gentleman and an honest officer, full of zest for life, committed to his profession of serving the country’.180