The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  ‘How could he have died?’ Sohan Lal wondered, grinning from ear to ear. ‘He told me he was God.’

  A few days later, investigators were back for Pappu. They picked him up in Jati and took him to their field office.

  It was time to fill in the blanks.

  They had met in the fields grazing animals, Pappu told them. He was with his buffaloes, he claimed, they with their goats. They didn’t tell him their real names. The one who called herself Rajni was, he now knew, actually named Padma. The younger one called herself Rina. ‘Padma said she wanted to be friends. Their grandmother was sitting close by. I was so scared I barely spoke.’ They happened to meet at the same spot a few days later, and this time the girls gave him a mobile number. They would give him a missed call, they said, and then, and only then, was he to call them back.

  They started meeting regularly in the fields. They teased him about his shyness. Then they had sex, he and Padma. Lalli was the lookout. One time, he claimed, Lalli asked if they could try. Then Padma told him he would have to choose. He chose Padma.

  On the morning of 27 May, he said, Lalli gave him a missed call. He called her back. He asked her where she was, and whether she would visit the fair. They bantered, agreeing to meet later.

  That night, it was Padma’s turn to call, to invite him to the fields, near the family plots. He was wearing trousers and a vest and carrying money, which he handed over. ‘We embraced and got ready to have sex. Then the younger girl said she could hear someone approach. By then Padma and I were sitting on the ground. We immediately stood up. I pulled up my trousers and Padma also made herself presentable.’

  ‘Get out of here!’ she said.

  It was too late.

  ‘Nazru slapped me twice or thrice and threw me to the ground. We scuffled for a bit. I saw Lalli run. I don’t know where Padma went. Then Nazru flashed his torch on my face and took my name. “Pappu!” In that time, I disentangled myself and ran away. I went to my cousin’s where I fell asleep.’

  He didn’t know whether the girls went back with Nazru or not, he admitted. ‘The last time I saw them alive was when Nazru threw me down.’

  Padma had asked him to marry her, he said.

  ‘That day, she asked if I loved her. I said “yes”. ’

  A teenaged vegetable vendor named Pintoo Shakya came forward to say that on the night of 27 May he was walking through the fields to go to the toilet when, somewhere between the Shakya plots, at a distance of about forty paces, he saw a figure picking himself up from the ground as though he’d just been in a fight.

  ‘Is it you, Rajiv?’ the man said.

  ‘Not Rajiv, Pintoo.’

  ‘Aah,’ Nazru replied. He scrambled up and ran off in the direction of the village.

  Rajiv Kumar was Nazru’s friend, the man who had seen the girls talking on the phone and had complained about it.

  Then another villager said that at around 9.30 p.m. the sound of running footsteps had alerted his dog, who started to bark.

  ‘My mother checked to see who it was, and it was Nazru.’

  And so, it became clear beyond any doubt that an encounter of some sort involving Nazru had indeed taken place. But Nazru had said that some men had kidnapped the girls.

  To sort out the contradictory statements, investigators fell back on a technique called amna samna, face to face. Pappu and Nazru were brought together at the agency’s field office and made to sit, quite literally, face to face. They would go through their stories before agency officers and the proceedings would be recorded on video. There would also be a neutral witness present to prevent either of the two men from later misrepresenting the meeting in their respective communities.

  The witness was Neksu Lal. He was Sohan Lal’s uncle, and therefore, not technically neutral at all. One of his sons, Yogendra, had helped Sohan Lal buy Padma a phone. Another son, Prem Singh, had overheard Lalli talking on the phone with Pappu. He himself had helped look for the girls. But Neksu Lal was first and foremost a prosperous landlord with a large house, three toilets, two tractors and one SUV. He did business with the villagers of both Katra and Jati and was respected across caste lines.

  Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal were also present.

  As the camera whirred, Pappu once again described the events of the night the girls disappeared. He was alone when he had come to meet them, he said.

  This time, Nazru acknowledged that it was indeed the case. ‘I saw a light near the [Shakya family] plots and tiptoed towards it,’ Nazru said. ‘I saw a boy and Padma. Neither of them was wearing the lower half of their clothing. I got there, grabbed the boy and gave him a few slaps. I threw him to the ground. I shined the torch on his face and when I saw who it was, I cried, “Pappu!” But then he freed himself and ran towards his house. I turned and ran towards Jeevan Lal’s house. I don’t know where the girls went.’

  There weren’t any other men with Pappu, he admitted. He’d made that up. And he’d also made up the part about the gun.

  ‘Why did you run?’ the investigators asked.

  ‘I was afraid that the girls would accuse me of something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what was on their mind. That’s why I was afraid and ran away. I’d caught them red-handed with Pappu. Naked. I was afraid they would accuse me of rape to save him.’

  He’d lied to Padma’s father, Jeevan Lal, about having seen thieves, he said, because he felt he had to say something to get him to come to the fields, but without implicating himself. Jeevan Lal must see what the girls were up to, otherwise they could accuse him of wrongdoing. But when the first search party saw nothing, and the girls still hadn’t returned home, Nazru believed that the girls were afraid of what he might have told their family.

  ‘They were in no position to return home,’ he said.

  Then it was Pappu’s turn to speak.

  ‘I lied,’ he admitted. Nazru didn’t demand that the girls have sex with him. He didn’t shout at them. And he didn’t drag them away.

  ‘So where did the girls go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  He hadn’t bothered to turn back and see what happened to them.

  180 ‘an honest officer’: statetimes.in/epaper/uploads/2014/10/19/2.pdf

  ‘Girls Are Honour of Family’

  On 21 October, the medical board submitted its report to the CBI. The post-mortem had declared that the girls had died by hanging, but a statement by the Forensic Science Laboratory in Lucknow had disputed this. This latest report, which was based primarily on the video recordings of the post-mortem, was meant to settle the matter.

  There was no evidence of struggle prior to death, the board said. There wasn’t a single injury on the bodies, other than the ligature marks. There were no internal injuries. The girls were not sexually assaulted prior to their deaths, which they concluded occurred between midnight on 27 May and 4 a.m. on 28 May.

  At midnight the search party was looking for the girls in the fields. At 2.30 a.m. they were at the chowki. At 4 a.m. they were arguing with the police over where the girls were.

  As to the cause of death, the board responded in medical terms. ‘The skin under ligature mark was flattened and parchmentised in appearance, tongue was protruded, and faecal matter was present around perineal region; these findings are suggestive of ante-mortem hanging. In view of the above observations, medical board is of the considered opinion that manner of death was suicidal.’

  Padma and Lalli, they said, had taken their own lives.

  The Shakyas rejected the report.

  ‘Why would they commit suicide?’ Lalli’s father asked the people around him. ‘Tell me. Give me one reason.’

  The villagers didn’t respond to his face, but they knew the answer as well as he did. ‘Girls are honour of family,’ Sohan Lal had told the forensic scientist Dr Asha Sriva
stava. It had been over for Padma the moment she was found with a boy, her salwar at her ankles. And for Lalli too, by association.

  Padma had been removed from school to be married, but no size of dowry could have now secured her a husband. The neighbours who had welcomed her arrival as a baby, who had watched her learn how to walk, who had admired her fine embroidery, would have refused to let their girls near her, or Lalli. The village men would refuse to do business with their fathers, the women would gossip about their mothers. The dishonour would be insurmountable by this generation of Shakyas at the very least.

  The question, the villagers declared when the Shakya brothers’ backs were turned, wasn’t why Padma and Lalli had taken their lives. It was how they could have not.

  Dr Adarsh Kumar, who led the board, agreed. He believed that the girls ran away and hid themselves, and that when they saw the villagers looking frantically for them ‘searchlights everywhere … for three, four hours … they were so much afraid’. They were sure that the search party, even though it comprised their own fathers, uncles and cousins ‘would kill them if they found them’.

  Sohan Lal had said as much to Dr Srivastava. ‘If the girls were alive, what step would you have taken for the honour of the family?’ she had asked him. ‘We would have killed them,’ he had replied.

  It was impossible to know if Sohan Lal had meant what he said or if it was a knee-jerk reaction to honouring social codes. The villagers didn’t think he was that sort of man. But the dark sentiment was hardly uncommon in the area.

  Some members of the Shakya clan believed that the family was to blame for the deaths. This was at least according to Lalitha, who was married to the Shakyas’ cousin Yogendra Singh. First, they had allowed the girls to use phones. Then, she said, they had failed to provide them toilets.

  ‘If the girls had a toilet at home they would have had no reason to go out,’ she said. ‘If they did, family members could challenge them – “what for are you going out?” ’ Her father-in-law Neksu Lal had built three toilets, she said, and she never went anywhere.

  Then the Shakyas had given the girls permission to visit the mela, a place that her father-in-law, the most respected man in the village, prohibited her, even at her age, from stepping foot in. What was a mela but a dhakka mukki, a scrum, of men? Neksu Lal had built a large courtyard. When the women wanted to stretch their legs that’s as far as they went. When they craved shopping, Neksu Lal stuck his head out of the door and motioned for the shopkeepers sitting in the lane to bring over their wares for the women to browse through.

  But it wasn’t anyone’s place to say such things, for it would implicate the Shakya family, and the village too. After the girls went missing the Shakya men had privileged honour over everything else, but they hadn’t done anything that many of their neighbours wouldn’t do in the same circumstances.

  So, instead, the villagers said that whatever happened was terrible, and who knew who the culprit really was, but one thing was clear – the girls should not have died. And with this uniting sentiment they were able to comfort the family, and themselves also.

  November brought Diwali, the Festival of Lights, and some villagers celebrated with new clothes and sweets. Boys burst crackers in the fields. The Shakyas opened their doors and windows and lit a few diyas. The flickering golden light in their small earthen bowls symbolised the dispelling of darkness and the victory of good over evil.

  Then came winter. Fog filled the village like smoke. In the fields, farmers wrapped in blankets hunched over piles of rubbish to which they had set a flame. Sohan Lal was often among them, in a striped sweater and a white scarf, his fingers swollen blue and grey with the cold. Women walked quickly to and from their buffaloes. Children in monkey caps napped in animal shelters, for they were packed warm with livestock and hay. Everyone now carried a torch.

  Then came the winter rain, falling in icy ropes. The schools were shut, the roads impassable. The villagers calculated their stores of fodder, grain, lentils and oil. The case had gripped Katra for months, discussed up and down, but the cold was merciless, and every man had a family to feed.

  On 12 December, the agency closed the case with a final report it filed at the Court of the Special Judge in Budaun, which had been set up under a new child protection law.181 The report repeated the agency’s findings that the children had taken their own lives. The agency enclosed forty-two medical and forensic reports and interviews with over 200 people.

  In Jati, Pappu’s older brother said that the Yadavs had told the truth from the first day on. ‘We have nothing to hide,’ Avdesh told a reporter, while sitting on the charpoy outside his house. His mother, who was at his feet, looked grim. ‘It is by God’s grace that this CBI investigation has freed us,’ Avdesh went on. ‘Even if we had sold our land we wouldn’t have enough money to fight the case and prove our innocence.’

  The Shakya family rejected this report as well, but for an entirely justifiable reason.

  Although the CBI had interviewed Pappu, at least ten times by their own count, they didn’t act on one of the most crucial pieces of information that he gave them. The nineteen-year-old had admitted to repeatedly having sex with Padma – four times, he said – and to having attempted sex with Lalli. The previous year the age of consent had been increased from sixteen to eighteen by the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013,182 which had been passed in response to the Delhi bus rape.183

  Padma was sixteen, Lalli was fourteen, which meant that Pappu – by his own admission, and irrespective of consent – was guilty of statutory rape. He could also be charged with child sexual abuse.

  Instead, in their final report, investigators attacked the Shakya family. They concluded by saying that since the family had filed a false police complaint they had broken the law and committed criminal conspiracy. They were the ones who should be investigated.

  The family responded with a protest petition, which is a legal remedy that registers concerns over the quality of a police investigation and requests redressal. They were determined that Pappu should be punished – and it was perhaps because of this that their petition claimed, incorrectly, that on the night of 27 May when Pappu was brought to the police chowki, he had confessed to having raped and murdered the girls. As multiple Shakya villagers present at the time would attest, Pappu had said no such thing.

  The next year, in October, the court concluded that some of the CBI’s key findings were correct. All the evidence showed that Padma and Lalli had died by suicide. However, declared the judge, Pappu would be arrested and must stand trial for kidnapping, criminal assault and penetrative sexual assault of a minor.

  Shukla, the investigating officer, tried to justify his decision not to arrest Pappu. The boy hadn’t kidnapped the girls, he said. If anything, they had called him to the fields. As to the matter of rape, ‘Indian law doesn’t accept a confession to a police officer. The confession must be made to a magistrate.’

  Asked whether he had thought to take Pappu before a magistrate, he replied, ‘Nahin.’

  No.

  181 https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789 /2079/1/201232.pdf#search=Protection% 20of%20Children%20from%20Sexual%20Offences%20Act

  182 the age of consent had been increased: iitk.ac.in/wc/data/TheCriminalLaw.pdf

  183 in response to the Delhi bus rape: iitk.ac.in/wc/data/TheCriminalLaw.pdf; bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-21950197

  Pappu in Jail, the Shakyas in Court

  In Katra village, Nazru was back to his old ways. The police officer deputised to keep watch over him complained that the young man was ‘running around needlessly at night. It’s so hard to control him. He seeks out trouble.’ When the officer warned Nazru that he couldn’t just take off without informing him, Nazru didn’t appear to understand. ‘Ask him a question and he’ll give you the most upside-down answer imaginable,’ the officer groaned.

  The
villagers had turned against him. What need had there been to spy on the girls. Padma’s parents were about to get her married. Soon she would have gone away. Instead, Nazru had to make a point. To make himself feel big, he had scared the small girls so much that they couldn’t come home.

  On 26 January 2016, Pappu Yadav was arrested.

  The Shakya family used his arrest to file a petition in the Allahabad High Court against the four other men. If Pappu had committed a crime, they argued, he had done so with the help of his brothers and two police officers. The villagers of Katra didn’t understand why the family thought they would win this case, when the court in Budaun had already accepted the men’s innocence.

  But Sohan Lal had a secret.

  Nazru had recently approached him in confidence. This time he was certain of what he had seen, he said. And what he had seen were some men dragging away Padma and Lalli. He was sure of it. ‘I won’t change my testimony till the day I die,’ he promised.

  ‘We have an eyewitness,’ Sohan Lal, newly invigorated, told the villagers.

  Epilogue

  Birth

  It was 2016. The girls had been dead for two years.

  Asked how he was, Padma’s father Jeevan Lal said, ‘Theek hi to hain.’ I’m just about okay.

  And Lalli’s mother Siya Devi said, ‘I am as I am.’

  Or she would say that although she cooked and cleaned – for after all, she had other children – she would no longer go to the fields to help with the harvest, or graze the buffaloes, or meet the women. She could do what needed to be done, but it was too much to expect that she could be who she once was. ‘My hands and feet don’t really move as they should,’ she said.

  Padma’s stepmother Sunita Devi said, ‘it’s been so long’ or ‘what is there to say?’ or even ‘it’s hard to remember them’ – and in a corner, her stooped-over mother-in-law might agree that time had passed. But she never said that the memory of her granddaughters was waning. ‘I’m not dying,’ she wept, as tears slid down her face, ‘but I am not living.’