The Good Girls

by Sonia Faleiro

  All around them, people had moved on. Little cousin Manju, now fourteen years old, had learned more about loss. Her mother had died of cancer. Manju was still in school, hoping to stay there, but her father was doubtful. ‘I’m just a tailor,’ he had told her.

  Tragedy had also visited Kanhaiya Lal, Padma’s maternal uncle, who lived in Nabiganj village. He had lost a baby boy. The doctors, he said, couldn’t diagnose the cause of death.

  Somwati, sixteen when she strolled through the fair with the girls, was now a married woman. She lived in a village in Gujarat with her husband who worked in a cotton field. Rekha, the other friend who had met the girls at the fair, now lived some villages away. Her in-laws didn’t like her to talk about Padma and Lalli; perhaps they were concerned about bringing home bad luck. ‘I didn’t see them that day,’ Rekha could be heard telling people. ‘I barely even knew them.’

  One of Lalli’s classmates now went to a private school and would possibly graduate, because her brother also studied there. They would walk to and fro together, which made her parents think she was safe. But Lalli’s other friends, all sixteen, were sewing wall hangings and decorating handmade fans for family members to remember them by. Soon they would be married. Then they would belong to their husbands and would need permission to visit home.

  The sun broke through that spring, when Padma’s stepmother gave birth to her first child. It had taken years and years, but delivered on a bed in a private hospital, the timing – like the baby – was perfect. They named her Saraswati after the goddess of knowledge and music, arts and nature, but since she was too little to comfortably wear such a grand name, for now she was Kajol. They slipped bangles on her wrists and lined her brown eyes with kajol. They anointed her with concoctions to stay safe and well.

  With Kajol curled up under a piece of cloth on a shaded charpoy – snoozy, warm and delicious with that new baby smell – it was impossible for anyone in the family, even Siya Devi, to keep the smile from reaching their eyes.

  Many new parents experienced immediate, boundless love for their babies – but if some wondered whether sorrow or guilt over Padma’s death would force Jeevan Lal to be cautious with his heart, to give less than his full self, they were mistaken. He thrummed with joy at the sight of his baby. His voice was liquid gold.

  ‘She is the gods’ grace,’ he beamed.

  There was a new set of officers in the chowki. They weren’t any better trained than the last, but they didn’t drink during work hours. And they responded promptly to complaints. When a villager came running to say that a wedding guest was misbehaving with girls, the officers plucked the boy from the dancing crowd and cooled his head with some slaps.

  Their enthusiasm inspired the villagers to contribute bricks, cement and free labour to build the chowki a toilet. Akhilesh Yadav’s government sent around a brightly polished jeep so the men would no longer have to use their motorcycles to get around. Six hours away, in Delhi, Vijay Kumar Shukla was the newly garlanded recipient of the President’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service. The annual honour, which was bestowed on only six officers in 2016, was awarded to him for his work in Katra.

  Virender, Sohan Lal’s eldest son, was twenty-one and a farmer now. He had given up his factory job in Noida to support his father, whose shrunken frame was testimony to the toll the deaths had taken. Sohan Lal had trouble with the legalese in the cases he was fighting, so Virender, who could read and write, accompanied him to meet lawyers. He stepped forward to greet the politicians who still, sometimes, came to the village. He wondered if he might become a politician. All said, they had helped him. He developed a reputation as a man with a promising future, and the proposals started to come in.

  Weddings meant babies, and soon the house would be unable to comfortably hold them all in its embrace. Jeevan Lal started to build a new room for the family.

  Just as well, for the next year, Sunita Devi gave birth to a second child. They named her Anjali, ‘divine offering’.

  Although the Shakyas wouldn’t know it, around this time a woman in the hamlet next door also had a baby.

  Basanta, Avdesh’s wife, named her second daughter Kamini, beautiful. As before, the young mother still spent most of her time by herself, except that now there was one child fastened to her breast, and another to her waist.

  Pappu’s mother Jhalla Devi still poured her energy into maintaining the buffaloes. His father, Veere, was always across the river. Urvesh was even now trying to graduate tenth-class. In fact, they were all almost exactly where they had been before the events of that night, except that their business, and they, were now widely known. For people like them, who believed that survival lay in being inconspicuous, this was a severe punishment.

  The older brothers blamed the youngest for having been wrongfully accused of rape and murder. Their lives had been dismantled. And not one politician, they said, not even one of their own, had come to see them, never mind offer them assistance of any sort. Although they didn’t speak English, they still used the word ‘media trial’. This is what it meant to be poor, they said, low caste and above all, Yadav.

  The family took some comfort in the fact that no one in their hamlet had believed the accusations. To be a Yadav was to be easy prey, they had all agreed. Chalo, they said, whereas this time the police, politicians and media was with that lot, one day, they will be with us.

  As for Pappu, he was again out on bail.

  But the boy who had loved to roam around, chase girls and act ‘naughty’ was all but gone. The new Pappu kept to himself and focused on work, neighbours said.

  Whether by purpose or coincidence, Pappu’s family slowly started to fill their backyard. First the buffalo shelter was expanded, and then Veere allowed some other Yadavs to build shacks there. Now, it was no longer possible to stroll easily into the Katra fields. It was difficult even to see the orchard.

  Rebirth

  It was three years after the girls had died, after Ram Babu, Sohan Lal’s brother, had accepted a proposal on behalf of one of his boys, that they heard about the twins. The twins lived in a village named Nagla Khamani, an hour’s driving distance from Katra.

  One day, when the twins’ mother’s milk dried up, they were given buffalo milk. The strongly flavoured froth was unpalatable to the breastfed children and soon they were shitting all over the courtyard, driving their poor mother quite mad so that unable to help herself she cried, ‘where have you come from to torment me?’

  ‘We’ve come from Katra,’ they replied in unison.

  An astounded Raj Rani summoned her husband, and he told some men in the fields, and then it was only a matter of time before the news reached the Shakya family. The Shakyas didn’t believe for a minute that the twins’ mother might be a fantasist.

  Family patriarch Sohan Lal took it upon himself to go to the village on the pretext of inviting Raj Rani and her husband, neither of whom he had met before, to the wedding – but really he had gone to meet the girls.

  The twins had soft black hair, poker-straight fringes and enormous eyes. They were truly identical, he marvelled. Where one went, the other followed. When they saw him, he said, one of them cried, ‘Papa!’

  On the day of the Shakya wedding, the family was overwrought, but no one more so than Lalli’s mother, Siya Devi. She was yet to visit her daughter’s grave. Someone had told her that it was now covered with rubbish and impossible to distinguish from the others. But none of that mattered any more.

  If it were true!

  But what if it were true?

  The children had other parents.

  When Raj Rani entered the courtyard of the Shakya house, she smiled around at everyone and put her children down. They ran here and there with a vivid excitement that seemed to the Shakyas as proof that they were delighted to be home. They pointed at wall hangings that Padma and Lalli had made, then gestured at themselves as though to say, ‘I
made that!’

  When they touched their ears, family members wondered if the thorns they had seen embedded in the dead girls’ clothing were hurting the living children. And when they responded fussily to being picked up, it was clear that they were afraid they would be taken back to the orchard, the place where they had died.

  ‘Our children have been reborn!’ rejoiced Sohan Lal.

  Siya Devi waited for the twins to leave.

  Then she cried.

  Love, Hope, Vote

  Now, it was the day before the fourth anniversary of Padma and Lalli’s death. In the courtyard of the Shakya house, Lalli’s mother placed the leftovers from lunch in a bowl and covered it with a piece of cloth. Then she started washing the dishes. When they were done, she spread them in a row to dry in the sun.

  Next door, her niece Kajol let out a hungry cry.

  ‘Mama, roti.’

  ‘There are no more rotis,’ Sunita Devi replied.

  ‘Mama, roti!’ the toddler said, tears flowing down her face.

  ‘What did I just tell you?’

  ‘Mama ...’

  ‘Drink this,’ Sunita Devi said, offering the child some water.

  Siya Devi looked away.

  She hadn’t seen the twins since the wedding, but she thought about them often. Her child wasn’t buried in sand, or drifting in the orchard like some in the village said. The girls had been reborn. They were alive!

  Siya Devi would like to visit them. They were growing up so fast. They were sure to be laughing and chatting non-stop.

  But would she visit them?

  ‘My child has been born again,’ she told herself. She examined her hands. The long fingers, the tough brown skin, the lines on her palms. Heart. Life. What a life. Full of hardship and heartbreak. But love also, a life full of love.

  She hid her face in her sari.

  ‘Will they give her to me? Will they give her to me? No, she is now their child.’

  Outside, the village was bustling with life, for the harvest was under way. Once again the clouds boiled with heat. A hot, dry wind crackled through the standing crops. The sun had bleached the landscape and everyone who occupied it. Cyclists carried baskets of chickens. Pale horses pulled loads of sugar cane, mint and garlic. As farm animals barked and baaed, dusty-faced children chased a kite through the orchard.

  The tree they mostly avoided was festooned with a piece of white cloth, a man’s vest perhaps. They hadn’t been mischievous, the children swore, a monkey had raided someone’s washing line.

  The wheat and tobacco was gone, sold, leaving behind ruptures in the earth. But the disappointingly low rates this season had left the Shakya farmers talking dispiritedly among themselves as they worked on the taro and mint. Garlic was going for 500 rupees and tobacco for 900. Counting back from the money they had spent on irrigation, fertiliser, manpower and transport to the wholesaler, it didn’t seem worth it.

  Away from the chatter, keeping to himself, was a diligent labourer in a lungi, a goatee partially obscuring his face. Nazru’s father had died, which meant one less mouth to feed, but life was still unspeakably hard. This harvest he had again attached himself to the Shakyas, working for his cousins. It was with Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal that he passed the fourth death anniversary of Padma and Lalli. As music from the mela wafted into the orchard, Nazru hummed quietly to himself. Sometime later, his friend Rajiv Kumar would join him for their daily catch-up.

  The Shakya farmers had now moved on to politics. The new chief minister, Yogi Adityanath of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, was initially a source of humour – for he was besotted with cows and extolled the beneficial effects of bovine urine – but the cleric faced criminal charges for attempted murder and rioting.184 He was said to be ‘India’s most divisive and abusive politician’.185

  ‘The thing is,’ Sohan Lal said, ‘Akhilesh Yadav wasn’t all that bad, I’ll say it to his face. He worked hard for the farmers and for the poor. It was goondas, thugs, who claimed to speak for him, that made him look bad.’

  The refreshing attitude of the new chowki policemen aside, it didn’t seem to Sohan Lal that anything good had come out of the deaths. If the success of a protest was measured by what happened afterwards, then the Shakyas’ protest had only achieved short-term gains. By keeping the children’s bodies in the tree, the family attracted a great deal of attention, police, politicians and, thereafter, three investigations – but each one had left them disappointed. They were given some money, and a non-profit built a few toilets, but many of the villagers used the closed-door latrines to safeguard their harvest. Even the Shakyas, who did use their toilet, let one or two of the goats inside on very hot days.

  The two court cases, the one in which Pappu was accused of rape, and the other, in which the Shakya family had accused all five men of rape and murder, would likely continue for years, decades even. By the time the courts delivered their judgments, if they ever did, Jeevan Lal’s daughters would very likely be as old as their sister Padma had once been.

  Sohan Lal had finally accepted that Padma and Pappu had what he called a ‘love affair’. Padma had taken her own life, he agreed. But he didn’t understand why his daughter Lalli had taken hers.

  Whatever it was he planned to see the cases through. It was a matter of honour, after all, and what message would it send to back out now.

  And, if the newspapers were accurate, crimes against women across India continued unabated. It was impossible to know just how bad it was because the National Crime Records Bureau, for the first time since 1953, had failed to publish its annual crime report.186 The move was widely seen as a part of a government effort to suppress negative data.187 That summer a poll released by the Thompson Reuters Foundation declared that India was the most dangerous place in the world for women.188 Six years after the Delhi bus rape, women in India were at a greater risk of sexual violence and human trafficking than women in war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.189

  A lot of the bad news these days involved the prime minister. Narendra Modi had come to power promising achhe din, good days, but these days were worse than ever before. The economy had slowed to a crawl190 and employment was at its lowest in forty-five years.191

  The government had even reneged on a promise to build the required number of rape crisis centres. After initially agreeing to build one centre in every district, it now proposed to build only one in every state. Or, rather than 660 centres nationwide, there would be 36.192 Given the size of some states, such as Uttar Pradesh, and the population density, such a step made no sense at all. According to a report, the Prime Minister’s Office ‘remarked that the police are sensitive enough and that there is no need for such centres’.193 Meanwhile, the Nirbhaya Fund, a ten billion rupee corpus created by the previous government to bolster women’s safety initiatives lay almost entirely unused.194 Activists alleged that the funds were being diverted elsewhere. Atrocities against women, they said, had witnessed ‘a spike under the BJP dispensation’.195

  The prime minister was even accused of using the CBI to harass opponents, and the agency’s reputation was at its lowest ebb.196 But Modi’s own colleagues were committing crimes. One Bharatiya Janata Party politician had raped a young woman in Uttar Pradesh. When she told him she would go to the police, he threatened to kill her father and four-year-old brother. She complained to the police anyhow, on thirty-three different occasions, until the politician’s brother and some aides beat her father – in front of the police. He died a few days later in custody. Finally, in despair, the girl marched to the chief minister’s residence and threatened to set herself on fire.197

  What was there to do, the Shakyas said, but to keep voting for people like them. Such people, though they may be rich now, had gone hungry once. Only such people would know the lengths the Shakyas went to keep that gnawing feeling away.

  Keep voting, keep hoping.

&nbs
p; Hope was a hard thing to hold on to in times such as these, as slippery as the snakes that frequented the village fields.

  Why, just the other day, near the capital city of the state no less, a girl who had gone missing was found hanging in a tree.198

  184 criminal charges for attempted murder and rioting: bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-39403778

  185 ‘whip up anti-Muslim hysteria’: ibid.

  186 failed to publish its annual crime report: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/surat/ncrb-fails-to-publish-crime-in-india-report-even-after-year/articleshow/67445165.cms

  187 effort to suppress negative data: newsclick.in/NCRB-DATA-Crime-India

  188 most dangerous place in the world for women: poll2018.trust.org/stories/item/?id=e52a1260-260c-47e0-94fc-a636b1956da7

  189 at a greater risk of sexual violence: poll2018.trust.org/country/?id=india

  190 The economy had slowed to a crawl: ft.com/content/c697cf60-1813-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385

  191 unemployment was at its highest: reuters.com/article/us-india-economy-jobs/indian-jobless-rate-at-multi-decade-high-report-says-in-blow-to-modi-idUSKCN1PP0FX

  192 https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-modi-government-says-no-to-rape-crisis-centres-in-every-district-2063977

  193 https://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-modi-government-says-no-to-rape-crisis-centres-in-every-district-2063977

  194 https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/nearly-90-of-nirbhaya-fund-lying-unused-govt-data/articleshow/72421059.cms

  195 https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/atrocities-on-womenhave-spiked-under-bjp-govt-women-organisations-119031400951_1.html