The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  The second body was then removed from the van and, as the Shakya brothers looked on, its seal was opened too. The girls were now back where they had been all day.

  They were placed side by side at the foot of the tree.

  The Shakyas had waited for their leader, anticipation building hour after hour. They wanted comfort certainly and also direction. But when Kumar arrived, the scene in the orchard took him aback. He stood there in his politician’s white kurta pyjama, his boyish face crinkled in confusion, his double chin dipping into the folds of his neck. Although he was up to date on the day’s drama, he was at a loss for words when he saw the girls staring up at him. ‘Calm down,’ he told their family members, wiping a hand across his moustache. ‘Let the law take its course. Arguments won’t get you anywhere.’

  A long-anticipated moment passed within minutes.

  Kumar led the entourage out of the village in his Toyota SUV. The van with the bodies and the brothers rattled behind. As many as twenty-five cars, including several police jeeps and news trucks followed. Village men jumped into whatever vehicle they could find. No one thought to ask Padma and Lalli’s mothers if they wanted to come along. They were women, what would they do there.

  When the convoy had left the crowd far enough behind it came to a halt. The children were lying exposed on the floor of the van. Their bodies hadn’t been resealed to avoid giving people yet another opportunity to delay matters.

  Once again Padma and Lalli were covered, the pieces of cloth sealed and stamped. The cars set off over the bridge that led out of the district. Beneath them the Ganga River gently flowed, shimmering and rustling. The riverbank was covered with burial mounds, and stray dogs panted at the water’s edge.

  The convoy was soon caught in a traffic jam, lodged between trucks piled with timber and carts drawn by horses. The police activated their sirens but it was just for show, there wasn’t an inch of space. They would wait, same as the frustrated drivers slamming their horns, same as the farmers bringing down their whips, same as the daily wage labourers grimacing as they pushed forward on their cycles.

  The politician’s air-conditioned car was ice-cold, but the Shakya brothers crammed into the van with the bodies of their children were barely able to breathe.

  Windows down, windows down, one of them begged.

  From the side of the road vendors came running up to the car offering fizzy drinks, whole roasted corn and boiled eggs. The Shakyas looked over their heads at the hospitals, the banquet halls and the car showrooms that lined the road in a boast of prosperity.

  By the time the men reached the city of Budaun, two hours had passed and the day was leaching out. But even here, in this relatively well-off urban area, there were no lights along the road. The houses too were dark. Everything was as filthy as though a storm had blown in all the garbage of the world. In the sky, birds were screeching.

  A Sweeper and a ‘Weaker’ Doctor

  The post-mortem house was located in a buffalo field. On one side flowed a river, on the other a track whistled with passenger trains.

  News of the hangings had reached the man in charge, Lala Ram, early that afternoon when he had happened to switch on the TV in his office, around twenty minutes’ walking distance from the house. At fifty-one, Lala Ram had lost most of his hair but he had retained his calm disposition. Sitting with the hospital pharmacist, A. K. Singh, sipping milky tea during a rare break from the chaos of government hospital life, he didn’t find anything unusual to comment on. He didn’t know where Katra was, but he knew such things happened.

  About an hour later, Lala Ram received a call from the physician who was on post-mortem supervision duty that day. Dr Rajiv Gupta told him to get hold of surgical gloves, glass slides and a pack of cotton buds for swabs. Even such small essentials were often out of stock at the hospital, and had to be ordered in advance. They were to examine the bodies from Katra, he said.

  Dr Gupta then made a second phone call, this time to the chief medical officer of the hospital. He told his boss that he had heard the girls were raped. He had very little experience of rape cases, he said. They should summon a female doctor.

  The administration couldn’t get any of the female doctors in the hospital to volunteer for the job. ‘The case was too high-profile,’ Ansari, the politician’s aide, later learned. No one wanted to touch it. ‘Only the weaker doctors had no choice but to do as told.’

  Pushpa Pant Tripathi – who was fifty-one, and from the nearby Women’s Hospital – was that doctor. She was ‘weaker’ because she didn’t assert her authority. She said yes when others said no. Dr Tripathi was a general practitioner and had never performed a post-mortem.

  The hospital performed on average two or three post-mortems a day, primarily on victims of violent or suspicious deaths. A man pulled under his own tractor, a female baby discarded in a garbage heap. One rule of thumb with regard to how many post-mortems a person should conduct in a year was 250; at the most, 325.61 This was to prevent errors. Lala Ram said there was ‘no limit’ as to how many post-mortems he was expected to do. Padma and Lalli were the eighth and ninth such examinations he was to perform that day.

  Lala Ram had been doing this job for almost two decades, but he wasn’t at all qualified to do it. For years he had worked alongside his father, Bulaki, skipping school to tend to animals and crops. When he read an advertisement for a job at the hospital, he thought, why not? He would get to move to the city. He would be a salaried man.

  In 1992, he was sweeping, washing and disinfecting the hospital wards. Three years later, when the person whose job it was to examine dead bodies quit, Lala Ram was asked to step in. He obviously didn’t have a medical degree, but neither did his predecessor. There were famously few pathologists in the country and most government hospitals entrusted the job to people like Lala Ram. Hospital records continued to list him as a ‘grade four’ employee, a category reserved for unskilled labourers of low rank, such as sweepers.

  The first time Lala Ram found himself alone in the post-mortem house he looked around for a set of medical instruments. He found none, because the hospital couldn’t afford them. So, just like the man before him, he set off to the bazaar and purchased knives, a hammer, a wooden mallet, some needles, a spool of thread and a set of scales from a vegetable vendor. He bought an apron and a bag of latex gloves. He liked to work in slippers because blood washed easily from rubber.

  Lala Ram was hardly fastidious, but the post-mortem house was too filthy even for him. The great metal bed was inches deep in dirt, bloodstains and the red welts of the wax sticks that were used to seal medical reports. With loose wires hanging dangerously all over the place, he took to examining bodies outdoors. It was easy to do, in terms of visibility at least, because post-mortems were usually carried out in the day.

  The outdoor table, however, was a British colonial-era relic. At the first incision, flies descended, clustering thickly. Even after he’d wrapped the body in cloth, running a needle to secure it in place, the insects persisted, clinging to the blood that soaked through the fabric. As birds circled overhead, Lala Ram joked about not wanting to feed them between meals.

  But out here, at least, he could catch the breeze – and on hot days, of which there were plenty, this lifted his spirits.

  In the early 2000s, the hospital’s chief medical officer had agreed that the situation was untenable, and approved the construction of a new post-mortem house adjoining the current one. With a price tag of several million rupees, the new addition promised to have cutting-edge facilities.

  In 2014, the building was finally ready, and hospital doctors flocked to admire the well-equipped rooms. The tiled floors glistened and sunshine flooded in through the large windows. There was to be power and running water twenty-four hours a day. It was one of the few ‘good’ buildings in Budaun, the doctors agreed – a euphemism for fully functional. They looked forward to working there. />
  But it was inevitable that things wouldn’t go according to plan. The location of the building, in an isolated buffalo field, began to attract the same sort of supernatural rumours that shrouded the original post-mortem house next door. Hospital personnel claimed they couldn’t find anyone to guard it at night. The police shared responsibility for the place; but constables always found an excuse to slip off by sundown.

  Thieves pounced. They drilled out the metal window grilles. They took medical equipment, light fittings, washbasins and even plug points. Before the first post-mortem was scheduled, the place was picked clean. The empty rooms attracted a new menace. Now drug users came to shoot up. By the end of the year there had been at least three break-ins. One lot of desperate thieves took a rake and spade the gardener had tucked away in a crook of the now-deserted building.

  It was only a matter of time, the beleaguered Lala Ram said, before they marched off with the front door.

  61 250; at the most, 325: propublica.org/getinvolved/how-to-investigate-coroners-and-medical-examiners/

  The Post-Mortem

  When the convoy of vehicles from Katra drew up at the gates of the post-mortem house, it was only around 6.30 p.m. but the place was soaked in darkness. The district magistrate had to be petitioned for a power generator. Then paperwork had to be filed. And then, the police had to find digital cassettes to record the examination. Finally, someone offered the police his wedding video to tape over. It had now been more than twelve hours since the girls’ bodies were found.

  At 7.05 p.m. the camera lens was focused on the post-mortem bed around which were five people: three doctors, one videographer, out of shot, and Lala Ram, who had stripped down to his vest to avoid soiling his shirt. A. K. Singh, the hospital pharmacist, was also present, but he was waiting in the adjoining room.

  The police had asked Dr Rajiv Gupta, who was leading the post-mortem, to record the cause of death, the time of death and to say whether or not the girls were raped.

  The process was immediately beset with problems. Dr Gupta’s job wasn’t to perform the post-mortem; he wasn’t a pathologist and made it a point to never touch a dead body. Lala Ram, of course, wasn’t a pathologist either, but as per their usual routine the doctor gestured instructions at Lala Ram. This evening, as the generator juddered with noise, Lala Ram struggled to focus. ‘I couldn’t hear a thing,’ he later said.

  So he did what he knew. He took scissors to the girls’ clothes. Then he picked up a knife.

  On one of the hottest days on record, the team was working in a small, airless room with camera lights that radiated heat. There was no air-conditioning and no fan. Lala Ram’s hands skated with sweat. Someone threw open a window, but this made things worse. The team had been cocooned from the convoy from Katra. Now they were exposed to it. Dr Tripathi, who was wearing a salwar kameez with a dupatta flung around her neck, excused herself to get some air. She would later say that the sight of the crowd gathered outside ‘scared’ her.

  Padma’s tongue was protruding. Her eyes were congested and there was stool present around her anus. Lalli was in a similar state. There was post-mortem staining on the bodies, which were in rigor mortis.

  A cable news channel had reported that the children had ‘injury marks all over them’. Lalli’s father, Sohan Lal, claimed to have seen blood. Cousin Manju remembered thorns. But apart from dust, ‘an abnormal amount’, the doctors saw no visible injuries. There was no blood and no scratches. The girls’ hair was neat. Their glass bangles were intact.

  Then Lala Ram noted that the ‘little girl’, meaning Lalli, had bled from her vagina.

  The tape ran out and the videographer slipped in a new one. This second tape had been used to record a music and dance performance.

  ‘Hurry up Lala Ram,’ Dr Gupta chided. ‘It’s very hot.’

  Lalli’s post-mortem took fifty minutes, which was a brief span of time given the circumstances. Padma’s examination was shorter by ten minutes. By 9.15 p.m. the doctors gathered in the adjoining room to collate their notes in the presence of the hospital pharmacist. They concluded that Padma and Lalli were sixteen years old and fourteen years old respectively. The cause of death was hanging. They put the time of death at 2.30 a.m., or around the time the search party was banging on the gates of the chowki, attempting to wake the police.

  Dr Tripathi, who had been called in specifically to determine whether a sexual assault had taken place, felt that the clotted blood ‘in and around [Lalli’s] vaginal orifice’ – which Lala Ram had pointed out to her – as well as the presence of ‘abrasions’ in the area, indicated exactly such a possibility. She didn’t mention the number or the size of the abrasions in the post-mortem report.

  There was no blood on Padma, but the doctor noted what appeared as abnormalities: a bluish and swollen hymen, a vaginal tear and some discharge. She instructed Lala Ram to take vaginal swabs.

  Two months earlier the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare had published a set of guidelines for doctors examining survivors and victims of sexual violence.62 Like the changes to the rape laws, they were framed in response to the 2012 Delhi bus rape.63

  Among other things, the guidelines stated that the purpose of a forensic medical examination was to ascertain whether a sexual act had been ‘attempted or completed’, whether such an act was recently committed and whether harm was caused to the survivor’s body. These guidelines also contained a reminder that the decision on whether a rape had occurred was to be left to the court. ‘A medical opinion cannot be given on whether “rape” occurred because “rape” is a legal term.’

  Dr Tripathi – who was unaware of the guidelines – told Dr Gupta, who was writing the report, to record that the ‘findings’ on both girls were ‘suggestive of rape’. Dr Gupta, as her supervisor on the post-mortem, should have corrected the error, except that he didn’t know the guidelines either. ‘To be honest,’ he said later, ‘I only learned that “rape” was a legal term afterwards.’ He had come upon it while browsing the Internet.

  In fact, Dr Tripathi didn’t know if the girls had been raped or not. ‘As soon as she saw signs of blood on the vagina,’ said a doctor brought in to assess the post-mortem, and in whom she confided, ‘she made up her mind that the crowd outside were right, that the girl had been raped. She did not wait to look further.’

  Her conclusions leaked immediately to the anxious crowd. The tragedy they had named had come true.

  Left behind with the bodies, Lala Ram cleared up as usual. Then he picked up the girls’ clothes to bag them for the police. That’s when he found the money. There was no question of giving it to the police, they would only pocket it. Instead, when he stepped outside to wash the medical instruments under the tap in the garden, he asked to talk to some family members and quietly slipped it to them.

  The amount he gave them – two notes of a hundred rupees each – was the exact amount that Pappu said he gave the girls when they met the previous night.

  62 guidelines for doctors: https://main.mohfw.gov.in/reports/guidelines-and-protocols-medico-legal-care-survivors-victims-sexual-violence

  63 response to the 2012 Delhi bus rape: scroll.in/pulse/851783/health-centres-are-still-failing-rape-survivors-three-years-after-guidelines-on-unbiased-treatment

  Farewell Padma Lalli

  It was shortly after midnight when the police brought the bodies back to Katra. They were followed by Sinod Kumar, the politician, the Shakya brothers in the van and the villagers who had accompanied them. The sky was an enormous jaw that threatened to swallow them whole. The sound was of whispers; the smell was woodsmoke and tobacco leaves.

  Siya Devi surged forward. She was carrying clothes for the children. But the bodies had been resealed in cloth, and although the girls’ faces were partially visible, it was less than Lalli’s mother had expected. She thought that once the post-mortem was done she would have her child ba
ck, to hold one last time.

  She sobbed in fury.

  In normal circumstances the family would have invited priests. They would have washed the bodies and shrouded them in white sheets. But they didn’t know how to deal with what was before their eyes.

  Hindus were usually cremated; their corpses covered in clarified butter, laid across wood, then lit on fire. But the rules were different for babies and for children under three – they were buried or submerged in a holy river, their bodies tied with bricks so they would sink. A child’s soul was never in the body long enough to develop an attachment, it was said; whereas adults, weighed down with the baggage of their sins, must be cremated to help the soul separate from the body. In some communities, this rule extended to those who were unmarried, and now the gathered villagers started to argue over whether Padma and Lalli should be buried or cremated by the Ganga.

  The argument ended quickly – it was decided that they would be buried. Those who might have objected were now too tired to make a case against it. ‘We have to go home,’ someone said. ‘We’ve been hungry and thirsty since morning.’

  Inspector Ganga Singh said that anyone who wanted to come along to attend the funeral proceedings had better hurry up and follow his car. As doors started to slam, Siya Devi stepped back. Hinduism didn’t strictly forbid women from participating in death rituals, but they weren’t encouraged. The village erred on the side of conservatism, and Siya Devi knew better than to ask permission from her husband who still hadn’t come up to her.

  She watched the convoy, now comprising nearly thirty cars, pull away. Even the news trucks went, but she had to stay behind. The River Ganga was walking distance, but as far as she was concerned, it could have been the end of the world.

  At a length of 2,500 km, there is no one Ganga. Starting in the Himalayas and emptying out in the Bay of Bengal, the river takes on different forms in different places. Its colour reflected the sewage, pesticide and industrial waste that was regularly poured into it. It was known to be ‘highly contaminated’ with ‘carcinogenic and poisonous heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury and arsenic’. According to one scientist, 200 tonnes of half-burnt human flesh were discharged into the river every year.64 In this part of Uttar Pradesh the holy river was fish-grey and bubbled like stew.