The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  ‘I don’t want you going to other people’s houses,’ he said another time. ‘Be it my brother’s or anyone else’s. Stay at home. There is no need to go here and there.’

  The tensions took some villagers aback. It was normal practice to encourage girls to develop friendships within the family. That way they wouldn’t seek out others for company. And Padma and Lalli were first cousins who lived next door to each other. It was their parents who had made them graze their animals together. The fact that Padma’s parents were expressing agitation – whereas Lalli’s weren’t, as yet – didn’t surprise anyone. Padma was older. She had arrived at that place of no return, marriageable age. The rumours then escalated, and Sunita Devi was forced to defend herself. ‘When I saw Padma doing something wrong, or when she left the house without permission, then yes, I would scold her,’ she said.

  ‘She didn’t love Padma,’ observed a family friend. ‘That’s why Padma mostly stayed away.’

  Their last fight took place in May, a fortnight before the girls went missing. ‘You don’t work,’ Jeevan Lal had shouted.

  He’d had enough. His daughter was no longer to sit with her cousin or to set foot outside with her. A distraught Padma threw some clothes into a bag and ran into the bazaar, intending to find a ride to her uncles’. Her grandmother hobbled after her. They sat by the roadside. In the village, this was a spectacle.

  A woman named Vishaka, who happened to be idling outside her house, was struck by the expression on the wisp of a girl. ‘She looked so sad,’ she said. No cars were headed in their direction. Vishaka grew concerned. What would people say?

  ‘Come inside,’ she begged.

  ‘They’ve made my life hell,’ Padma wept. Her father called her names. Her stepmother accused her of all kinds of things.

  Vishaka’s husband walked in with hay for the buffaloes. He insisted on calling Jeevan Lal right away. ‘Your daughter wants to go to her uncle’s house, by herself. Should I stop her or let her go?’

  ‘Don’t let her go!’ Jeevan Lal exclaimed. He was in the fields. ‘I’ll be right there.’

  At first Jeevan Lal blamed his mother. ‘She carries tales and gets the women fighting among each other.’ But to the couple standing before him it was obvious that the old lady wasn’t to blame.

  He had told his daughter to stop going to his brother’s house, Jeevan Lal said, but she wouldn’t listen. ‘This girl roams around all day. What can I do but scold her?’

  Another villager now walked in to pick up some boxes of country liquor, which he stored in the house for a small fee. Padma hasn’t eaten in several days, the man heard her grandmother say. She used the words ‘illicit relations’ to describe the accusations that Padma’s stepmother had levelled against the teenager. The villager was alarmed. In Katra, there was no polite way to describe unmarried girls who were sexually active.

  With the arrival of the newcomer, it was virtually ensured that the matter would become public. He would tell his boss at the liquor shop, and their customers too. A matter of sex was always a scandal.

  Vishaka and her husband would talk as well, bringing it up in phone calls to their daughters who were married in villages far away, and certainly while talking to their sons over dinner later that evening.

  And so the news would circulate. It would serve as an indictment of Jeevan Lal’s parenting skills and Sunita Devi’s failure to avoid becoming the stereotypical cruel stepmother. Everyone would wonder how things had been allowed to come to this. They had one child!

  Girls had to be kept in control, for their sake, for the sake of society, people would say. After all, one bad fish can dirty the whole pond. What was happening in the Shakya household wouldn’t just be judged a failure of parenting, but of citizenship.

  The newcomer grew angry. ‘If you can’t control her,’ he shouted, ‘marry her off.’

  The squabbles between parents and child dragged on. They soured the days, throwing up new challenges at an already taxing time. Jeevan Lal’s eighteen-year-old niece was to be married soon, and the groom’s list of dowry demands included pots and pans, a cupboard and a cycle. Then there were the saris, sandals and face powder that the bride must take with her so that her in-laws couldn’t accuse her of being a burden from the get-go. As many as a hundred people were invited to attend. Six large cars would ferry them back and forth. The expense was sure to be enormous, and all the Shakya brothers were expected to contribute.

  There was no question of taking on the burden of another wedding. But it was clear to Jeevan Lal that his child could no longer sit at home.

  The best place to look for a groom was a wedding. A few days later, at a wedding in another village, Jeevan Lal scoured the crowd of invitees for a potential son-in-law. He visited two more villages but didn’t care for any of the boys he was introduced to. They met the basic criteria – they were Hindu and they belonged to the same caste, and the same sub-caste, which meant that they did the same kind of work as the Shakya men and ate the same kind of food as the Shakya women cooked, celebrated the same festivals, and shared the same social values and judgements, all of which would minimise the risks that were already sewn into an agreement that was expected to last a lifetime even though it was between complete strangers.

  But like any father, Jeevan Lal wanted more for his child, his only daughter, the one who carried the imprint of the woman he had loved. He wanted a good boy.

  Two days after he went looking, his daughter was dead.

  ‘Did You Kill Padma and Lalli?’

  With the major Shakya family interventions finally laid bare, the investigation now picked up pace. Then, in mid-June, the CBI team took a call that was rather strange.

  They sent the five suspects for a polygraph, a lie detector test which remains so controversial that any statements that emerge from it are not admissible as evidence at the trial stage – this is true as much for India as it is in many parts of the world.

  Dr Asha Srivastava was an experienced forensic scientist who had worked at the agency’s Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Delhi for more than two decades. She ran the Forensic Psychology Division and was responsible for conducting polygraph tests, voice analysis and psychological assessments.

  The previous year, in 2013, she was invited by the Mumbai police to examine the suspects in India’s latest high-profile rape case.158 The Shakti Mills gang rape, as it came to be known, took place in August, eight months after the Delhi bus rape. The victim was a twenty-two-year-old photojournalist with a city magazine. She was with a colleague, looking to take photographs for an essay on abandoned buildings.

  Although Shakti Mills, a former cotton mill, was derelict, it was located in downtown Mumbai, in an area that was thronging with office workers. Around an hour before sunset, two men approached the journalists and offered to show them around. They left them alone to take photographs, but then returned with a third man, who said, ‘Our boss has seen you, and you have to come with us now.’ Later, he thrust a broken beer bottle at the woman. ‘You don’t know what a bastard I am,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first girl I’ve raped.’159

  Mumbai had a certain reputation for women’s safety, relative to the rest of India, and the headline case shocked people. The police, acting swiftly, arrested all five suspects within days. They lived in slums near the mill. One culprit’s mother later told a paper, ‘Obviously, the fault is the girl’s. Why did she have to go to that jungle? It’s her fault, too. Also, she was wearing skimpy clothes.’160

  Srivastava’s job was to talk to the men involved in the Shakti Mills gang rape to understand their motives, to predict their risk of future violence, and to share this information with the court in order to help with sentencing. After spending time with them, she became convinced that this wasn’t the first time they had raped someone. They had carefully selected the mill for its location, she said, as a place to easily ambush women, and on
ce they achieved success, they repeated the strategy over and over. ‘Brain-wise they were very sharp,’ she concluded.

  When an eighteen-year-old telephone operator came forward to accuse three of the men of having raped her in the same location, Srivastava’s observations were shown to be correct. The men had also raped a scavenger, a sex worker and a transvestite. In all, the police later concluded, they had raped at least ten people in a span of five or six months.161 The rapists had referred to their victims as ‘prey’ and recorded the crimes on their phones to blackmail them into silence.

  One of the culprits told the police that after the first two rapes weren’t reported, they had been ‘emboldened’ to commit more.162 ‘They often lurked in the mills in the evenings and laid traps for unsuspecting women,’ said an officer.163

  In early 2014, the court declared all five men guilty. The new rape laws punished repeat offenders with the death sentence, and three of the five men received this sentence.

  Srivastava was catching up with her backlog of cases when she was asked to join the investigation in Katra. The CBI wanted her to run polygraph tests on the five suspects, as well as to offer her assessment on their states of mind.

  On 24 June, she sat down alongside an associate to explain the process to Pappu Yadav. Two expandable tubes would be attached to his chest and abdomen, she said, to record perspiration. A blood pressure monitor would note his systolic and diastolic blood pressure and pulse rate, and electrodes, on his ring finger and forefinger, would measure his response to a questionnaire that had been formulated by the investigating officer. Pappu could only answer yes or no and he would have twenty-five seconds to recover between questions. Further tests would take the form of a more flexible question and answer session.

  ‘Did Padma call you on the day of the incident?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pappu replied.

  ‘Is it true that on the day of the incident you got into a shoving match with Nazru?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it true that after this shoving match with Nazru you ran away from the spot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the day of the incident did Nazru take the girls away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you kill Padma and Lalli?’

  ‘No.’

  Pappu maintained good eye contact, Srivastava said. Having examined his responses to the lie detector test, she concluded that he was telling the truth.

  She was wrong. At least one of these answers, as Pappu himself would later admit, was a lie.

  When his eldest brother Avdesh was tested, the question of whether he’d participated in the alleged rape and murder of the teenagers was put to him in several ways. Did he assist his brother in kidnapping Padma and Lalli, raping them and hanging them? Did he help the police kill them? Did he know who killed them? Did he rape them? Did he kill them?

  No, Avdesh said. No, no, no.

  He was being truthful, Srivastava concluded. And he was open and relaxed, until he was asked about his ‘brother’s activities’.

  ‘Whenever his brother Pappu’s name comes, he breaks eye contact in frustration stating that because of him, they all are suffering.’

  The other men also acquitted themselves in Srivastava’s eyes. They claimed their innocence and she found them to be truthful. Just one answer, by former Constable Sarvesh, resisted interpretation.

  The question was straightforward.

  ‘Do you know who killed Padma and Lalli?’

  He had answered no, Srivastava later recalled, but she had found it hard to say whether he was telling the truth.

  ‘Perhaps he was nervous,’ she shrugged.

  158 India’s latest high-profile rape case: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Two-forensic-labs-from-outside-state-called-upon-to-collect-fresh-evidence/articleshow/22083726.cms

  159 ‘not the first girl I’ve raped’: Ellen Barry and Mansi Choksi, ‘Gang Rape, Routine and Invisible’, New York Times, 27 October 2013, nytimes.com/2013/10/27/world/asia/gang-rape-in-india-routine-and-invisible.html

  160 ‘she was wearing skimpy clothes’: ibid.

  161 raped at least ten people: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Shakti-Mills-gang-rape-accused-assaulted-10-women-in-6-months/articleshow/22273845.cms

  162 ‘emboldened’ to commit more: ibid.

  163 ‘traps for unsuspecting women’: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/22273845.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

  ‘Machines Don’t Lie’

  Scientific and legal organisations have disputed the reliability of the polygraph machine since it was invented in Berkeley, California in 1921.

  Among specialists, there’s almost unanimous agreement that it is at best a stress test. The test catches symptoms of fear – an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, sweating and breathing – and interprets these as indicative of deception. It was entirely possible for an innocent person to react negatively to being interrogated, and for a practised liar to do well under scrutiny. ‘Polygraph tests can be easily beaten,’ one expert told the BBC in 2013. ‘You don’t have to be a trained spy or a sociopath. You just have to understand how to recognise the control questions and augment reactions to them with techniques such as biting the side of your tongue.’164

  Srivastava disagreed. ‘Machines don’t lie,’ she said, echoing a common phrase in the CBI. ‘Human physiology is the same, hardened criminal or not. It’s very difficult to manipulate a polygraph test. As long as an expert conducts the test, 100 per cent results will come. The results will be 100 per cent accurate.’

  But although India’s foremost investigative agency believed that lie detector tests were reliable – 100 per cent of the time – they only used the results when it suited them.

  In the Aarushi case, the tests had established that the teenager’s parents were telling the truth when they denied having anything to do with her murder. The CBI nevertheless – wrongly, as it turned out – pursued the theory that they were guilty.

  The agency, clarified a former top CBI officer, actually used the test for ‘direction’. ‘If someone is wobbling, if his heart rate goes up when I ask difficult questions, then he becomes a suspect,’ he said. ‘But this by itself doesn’t condemn him as the accused. I have to find additional evidence.’

  In fact, lie detector tests served another purpose for the agency, and this became clear when the results of the polygraphs were leaked to the media.

  As far as most people were concerned, certainly outside the village, the case was open and shut. The Yadav brothers had raped and then killed the girls with the collusion of the police. All the CBI had to do, these people said, was file a chargesheet listing the charges against the suspects and the laws they had breached – then the case could go to trial. But the CBI knew that the facts so far didn’t back this popular theory. And the way they saw it, they were faced with not just one obvious challenge, which was to learn what had happened, but a second, more delicate one.

  If they became convinced that Pappu Yadav was innocent, they would then have to find a way to convince the media and the public. This wasn’t part of their job, but it would make it easier to get on with things. While many people admired the agency, there were others who publicly disparaged them for making mistakes or allowing themselves to be manipulated by politicians. The word ‘botched’ was so often repeated on cable news channels in relation to agency news stories that even investigators who didn’t speak fluent English were familiar with it.

  The CBI could show that the post-mortem was riddled with errors, as was so often the case. That the girls had not been raped, as Dr Tripathi had by now concluded. And that Dr Gupta, who had led the post-mortem, said that they had died by their own hands.

  They could also show that Nazru had repeatedly lied about what he had seen. Althou
gh they believed that he had come across Pappu in the fields with the girls, as far as what happened next, it was his word against Pappu’s. Furthermore, Nazru had not then seen the two policemen in the fields who now stood accused of rape and murder, or for that matter Pappu’s brothers, and neither had anyone else. These people were being accused of crimes of extreme violence, but the evidence pointed to nothing more than a meeting between a teenaged boy and two teenaged girls who had sought privacy.

  Would it make a difference?

  The theory of what had happened to Padma and Lalli had been repeated over and over for weeks now. It was everywhere one looked, on TV, online and in newspapers, in many languages. The theory was so well established that it would be virtually impossible to dislodge. By leaking the lie detector test results, the CBI hoped to plant the idea of Pappu’s innocence as a tiny seed in the public imagination – whether or not they believed the science behind it was immaterial.

  164 ‘how to recognise the control questions’: bbc.com/news/magazine-22467640

  ‘Have You Ever Been in Love?’

  ‘Have you ever been to Bombay?’ Srivastava, the forensic scientist, asked Lalli’s father.

  It was 7 July; two weeks after the five suspects had taken lie detector tests. Sohan Lal had undergone the same preliminaries as they had but he didn’t completely grasp what was happening.

  The doctor-lady attached medical equipment to him, he later said, of the sort they used to diagnose a fever. (He was possibly comparing the pneumograph, which measures breathing patterns, to a stethoscope.) She ordered him to breathe in and out. And then she asked him odd questions and insisted on only yes or no answers.

  Why was he asked whether he’d been to Bombay? What did that have to do with the death of his child?

  ‘No sir,’ he replied, not sure what to call Srivastava.