The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  196 the agency’s reputation was at its lowest ebb: huffingtonpost.in/2018/10/25/modi-doval-manipulating-and-misusing-cvc-and-cbi-says-ex-bjp-leader-yashwant-sinha_a_23571426/; huffingtonpost.in/2018/10/24/modi-govt-affecting-independence-of-cbi-ousted-director-alok-verma-tells-supreme-court_a_23570596/

  197 threatened to set herself on fire: nytimes.com/2019/07/31/world/asia/unnao-india-rape-case.html?searchResultPosition=2

  198 a girl … was found hanging in a tree: hindustantimes.com/india-news/six-year-old-girl-found-hanging-from-tree-on-outskirts-of-lucknow/story-svO8B11hDnoWmUoxFHfj4N.html

  Author’s Note

  I didn’t know the Delhi bus rape victim, but like many Indian women, when she died in the winter of 2012, I felt as though I had lost someone. I had lived in Delhi until my mid-twenties, first as a student and later as a journalist. An exciting period full of dreams and opportunities was tarnished by the behaviour of men. It seemed to me that it was only a matter of time before the filthy comments and hard pinches would escalate. The friends who had already been assaulted, on streets and on public transport, advised me to carry chilli powder. One opened her handbag to reveal a kitchen knife.

  Although Delhi was notoriously unsafe, stories about sexual assault didn’t often make the news. This changed with the bus rape because of the particularly shocking nature of the crime, and also because of the victim herself – at only twenty-three the medical student had already achieved what so many of her peers dream of. In a country that systematically keeps women back, the porter’s daughter from Uttar Pradesh had surged forward.

  The victim’s death introduced an unprecedented cultural shift – for one thing, the subject of sexual assault entered the national conversation. The outpouring of sentiment encouraged the media to cover similar incidents and they did so with such diligence that soon Delhi came to be known as the rape capital of the world. A culture of violence had always existed, but even I found myself wondering what was going on. Who were these men carrying out all these rapes, and why wasn’t anyone stopping them? I decided to find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India.

  In May 2014, the Katra case made headlines. I first heard about it on Twitter, where the deeply disturbing image of the hanging children was circulated with reports that they had been raped and murdered by dominant-caste men. The case was compared, for sheer depravity, with the Delhi bus rape. In fact, it became the highest profile sexual assault case since the incident in the national capital and this was why I decided to make it the centrepiece of my study. In accordance with the same Indian law that did not permit the media to name the Delhi bus rape victim, I chose to call the girls Padma and Lalli.

  In the spring of 2015, one year after the children were found, I left London, where I was now living, for my old home, Delhi. I drove to Katra directly from the airport, a journey that took over six hours.

  Creating a record meant returning to it, and after several years of the back and forth, I realised that the story I now had was very different from the one I had initially heard.

  I had spent months interviewing the Shakya family, but I had also combed Katra. Then I visited the villages in the immediate vicinity, and later went further still. Uttar Pradesh is the size of a large country – it’s been compared to Brazil – and there were days when I could conduct just one interview. This slowed my pace considerably and a reporting exercise that should have been completed in perhaps two years, ended up taking four.

  But what I had come to learn was this – that while the Delhi bus rape had shown just how deadly public places were for women, the story of Padma and Lalli revealed something more terrible still – that an Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home.

  To reconstruct the events in this book, I interviewed more than a hundred people. All of these interviews were recorded on tape, some also on video. A small number of interviews were captured in handwritten notes because of the subject’s reluctance to be recorded. The material I gathered between 2015 and 2018 forms the foundation of The Good Girls.

  I supplemented this material with hundreds of records and investigation files that the CBI submitted to the court. The files contained interview transcripts, forensic results, crime scene investigation reports, minutes of meetings, letters, memos and more totalling 3,272 pages.

  When quotation marks are used, or when I ascribe a statement to someone’s thoughts, the source is either the person, a witness, or a transcript. In addition, I worked with a factchecker and consulted with a lawyer. I speak Hindi fluently, but used the assistance of a translator for interviews that contained Braj Bhasha.

  It is often the case that a recurring visit from a journalist signifies to some sources that the journalist will prioritise their version of the story. But I wanted to give readers an objective view of the girls’ lives and the events surrounding their deaths. I didn’t want to present just one or two people’s opinion, however sympathetic or compelling they may have been. And I wanted to interview as many people as possible. To ensure there was no misunderstanding I made it a point to say as much to the Shakya family. I extended a similar courtesy to the Yadavs, the police and investigators.

  Here, now, are some examples of how I reconstructed the more vivid scenes in the book. The episode in the police chowki, during which Pappu is beaten by Sub-Inspector Ram Vilas, was based on interviews I recorded with Ram Vilas, as well as his former colleagues Chattrapal Singh Gangwar, Raghunandan Singh and Satinder Pal Singh. There were numerous other people present besides, and I interviewed many of them, including the Shakya brothers – Sohan Lal, Jeevan Lal and Ram Babu, their relatives Nazru, Neksu Lal, Yogendra Singh and Prem Singh, and Pappu’s brothers Avdesh and Urvesh Yadav.

  The scene in the Katra fields on the day that the girls were found was also based on recorded interviews – among the individuals involved, the Shakya family and members of their clan, politicians like Sinod Kumar Shakya, his aide Shareef Ahmed Ansari, and officers Ganga Singh, Mukesh Kumar Saxena and Maan Singh Chauhan.

  Again, I was able to reconstruct the post-mortem scene by speaking to those who were present at the time – Dr Rajiv Gupta, who led the exam, his associate Dr Avdhesh Kumar, the hospital pharmacist A. K. Singh, and of course, Lala Ram. The CBI, in its investigation files, had said that Lala Ram had examined the girls with a ‘butcher’s knife’. The post-mortem, the agency said, ‘was conducted in a despicable condition in the absence of proper light, autopsy instruments and water supply’. This sounded like an exaggeration to me, and so I requested permission to watch Lala Ram at work.

  One morning in 2015 when I was visiting Budaun, Lala Ram phoned and said that I should hurry up and come over to the post-mortem house. A young man had been pulled under the wheels of his own tractor and the police had brought his body over for an exam. As I watched, Lala Ram stripped down to his undershirt, and started examining the body in the back garden of the post-mortem house. The instruments he used were indeed butcher’s knives – he told me so – and as he sliced and scooped, he washed the excess blood by dipping the knives in a pail of water that he had filled from the tap in the garden. I sat through the entire post-mortem and then watched as Lala Ram washed his instruments, his hands and feet under the garden tap.

  To draw a portrait of the girls – their daily life, their pastimes, their joys and frustrations – I spoke to their parents, older siblings Virender and Phoolan Devi, friends such as Rekha, and cousin Manju who lives in Noida. Padma’s maternal uncles in Nabiganj were a vital source of information. They loved their niece and were devastated by her death.

  It was inevitable, given the attention around the case, and also the many highly publicised mistakes, that not everyone would want to speak to me. Dr Pushpa Pant Tripathi declined to be interviewed. And when I phoned former constable Sarvesh Yadav he called me various unprintable names and threatened me, warning me never to phone him again. A sec
ond request made on a later trip, this time through Constable Raghunandan, received the same response.

  As for Pappu, I went to his house every time I visited the little hamlet where he lived, but he was never there. His family insisted that he was around. Then, one day I found myself in what remains of Badam Nagla, where I interviewed Veere’s older brother. A man came up to me and asked who I was. He had a peaked face, a shock of very black hair and he was small, like a boy. I told him my name and asked him his, but he didn’t reply. ‘Are you Pappu?’ I said. ‘No,’ he replied and walked off, and I never saw him again.

  The CBI and the Shakya family didn’t see eye to eye, and when I first read out transcripts of the family’s interviews with the agency back to them, they claimed that they had been deliberately misquoted. I was alarmed. Then I started to see a pattern.

  Sohan Lal told me that he hadn’t hidden and then destroyed evidence and that the CBI was lying by claiming that he had. Shortly afterwards, Sohan Lal’s brother, Ram Babu, admitted to me that the CBI version was indeed correct. Ram Babu laughed sheepishly as he said this, perhaps because he knew that this behaviour had undermined the family’s position and their claim that they wanted the case solved. Padma’s maternal uncles told me about the roles they had played in the mystery, thus corroborating what the CBI had said.

  Thereafter, every time the family claimed that the agency had either misquoted them in transcripts or outright lied, I sought a trustworthy witness from their own clan to clarify the matter.

  As for Nazru, when I met him last, in 2018, I asked him whether he regretted changing his story so many times. He claimed that he had done no such thing. ‘You first said that you saw thieves,’ I reminded him. He grew agitated. ‘But they were thieves!’ he said.

  This is a story about women in modern India. But it’s also about what it means to be poor. India is changing; some say it is rapidly modernising. Yet for the poor, who have always suffered the most, India hasn’t changed all that much. In villages like Katra, just a few hours outside the national capital, people now have phones, but they don’t have toilets. Women have some education, but they are forbidden from working. Fear of social ostracism and mob justice forces people to waive their rights. They are held back and, sometimes, they keep others back too. No one is in a position to reach their full potential.

  The situation is only getting worse. According to numerous surveys, more women than men reported losing their jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic, more women expressed anxiety over their future and more women were set to perform unpaid care work. The BBC reported a rise in child marriage and trafficking.

  The promised change must start now. People need clean drinking water and nourishing food, safe housing and toilets. They need education, employment and empowerment. And their children need, and deserve, the right to hopes and dreams.

  Sonia Faleiro

  London, 2020

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you: Eduardo Faleiro and Muriel Faleiro, Shaila Faleiro and Nirmala Faleiro, Raoul Makkar and Samara Makkar.

  Negar Akhavi, Anne Alden, Anshul Avijit, Manica Singh Avijit, Bipin Pradip Aspatwar, Vikas Bajaj, Sidharth Bhatia, Fatima Bhutto, Julia Churchill, Chandrahas Choudhury, Elisabeth Dodds, Tom Daniel, Sujeet Singh Deo, Stephan Faris, Sarah Faulding, McKenzie Funk, Rajni George, Monica Gandhi, Vanessa Gezari, Marc Herman, Samar Halarnkar, Mira Kamdar, Adrian Levy, Phil McKnight, Katherine Kodama, Mary Mount, Pankaj Mishra, Sunil Menon, Shalini Menon, Richa Nigam, Vik Sharma, Arunava Sinha, Michael Shilman, Mary Shilman, Ruchika Soi, Rajesh Sharma, Amit Varma, Jasmine Shah Varma, Priyanka Vadra and Astrid Van Weyenberg.

  For generously sharing information, thank you Soutik Biswas, Jason Burke, Shashank Bengali, James Crabtree, Shoaib Daniyal, Naresh Fernandes, P. Kerim Friedman, Annie Gowen, Sarah Hafeez, Rustom Irani, Hari Kumar, Gargi Rawat, Daisy Rockwell, Betwa Sharma, Shashwati Talukdar and Abhishek Waghmare. For transcription and translation, thank you Bhaskar Tripathi.

  For early reads, and so much more, thank you Rahul Bhatia, Isaac Chotiner and Angela Saini.

  For everything you do, thank you Nikita Lalwani.

  Tracy Bohan is the agent of my dreams, and I’m also very grateful to Jin Auh and everyone at the Wylie Agency.

  I’m indebted to my brilliant editor Alexandra Pringle who encouraged me to use my voice. In India, Meru Gokhale, Manasi Subramaniam and Shiny Das were steadfast in their support. In the US, I was very lucky to have Elisabeth Schmitz on my team. I also owe profound thanks to Faiza Sultan Khan and Saba Ahmed for making this manuscript better and stronger. And I’m grateful to Angelique Tran Van Sang, Allegra Le Fanu, Lauren Whybrow, Yvonne Cha, Anne Collins and Amanda Betts, and their many superb colleagues at Bloomsbury UK, Grove Atlantic, Penguin Random House India and Penguin Random House Canada.

  Over the years I’ve been lucky to work with excellent editors. I’d particularly like to thank Ravi Agrawal, Rosie Blau, Emily Cooke, John Freeman, Yuka Igarashi, Bobbie Johnson, Joe Kent, Rachel Poser, Kit Rachlis, Parul Sehgal, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Sankarshan Thakur, Altaf Tyrewala and Simon Willis. I’m also thankful for the support of Tom Hundley and the Pulitzer Centre, as well as to The Investigative Fund.

  Thank you Ulrik McKnight, Indira Freya McKnight and Zoey Faleiro McKnight: I’m so lucky to call you mine.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr Rakesh Mishra, an exceptional scholar and beloved friend.

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  A Note on the Author

  Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, which was named a book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist and Time Out, and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a global cooperative of award-winning journalists. Her writing and photographs appear in the New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, 1843 and Harper’s. She lives in London.

  A Note on the Type

  The text of this book is set Adobe Garamond. It is one of several versions of Garamond based on the designs of Claude Garamond. It is thought that Garamond based his font on Bembo, cut in 1495 by Francesco Griffo in collaboration with the Italian printer Aldus Manutius. Garamond types were first used in books printed in Paris around 1532. Many of the present-day versions of this type are based on the Typi Academiae of Jean Jannon cut in Sedan in 1615.

  Claude Garamond was born in Paris in 1480. He learned how to cut type from his father and by the age of fifteen he was able to fashion steel punches the size of a pica with great precision. At the age of sixty he was commissioned by King Francis I to design a Greek alphabet, and for this he was given the honourable title of royal type founder. He died in 1561.