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Summary
Summary
By the award-winning writer of Beautiful Thing , The Good Girls is a masterly inquest into how the mysterious deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation.
On a summer night in 2014, Padma and Lalli went missing from Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh. Hours later they were found hanging in the orchard behind their home. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind.
Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of their short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: What is the human cost of shame?
Author Notes
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, The Observer, The Sunday Times, NPR and The Economist, and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a cooperative of award-winning writers creating narrative journalism about the world. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Centre and The Investigative Fund, and appears in the New York Times, The Financial Times, Granta, 1843, The California Sunday Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and Harper's. She lives in London.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this powerful account, Faleiro (Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars) tells the tragic story of two cousins, 16-year-old Padma Shakya and 14-year-old Lalli Shakya, who grew up in a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Padma and Lalli, who tended the family's goats, disappeared one night in 2014. They were found the next morning hanging from a mango tree. Was it rape and murder, or suicide? Months of bungling police, corrupt politicians, lying witnesses, and missing evidence resulted in the arrests of Padma's boyfriend, his two brothers, and two police officers in a case of a gang rape gone wrong. When officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation, India's equivalent of the FBI, took over the botched case, they concluded it was suicide, not murder, and the girls took their own lives out of shame after being caught in a field with a boy. In incisive prose, Faleiro, who offers no opinion on what actually happened, examines India's family honor system and the grueling lives of lower caste women. True crime buffs will be fascinated. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
Booklist Review
International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as "the rape capital of the world," spurring award-winning journalist Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to "find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India." She finds her narrative focus in another gory story that emerged in May 2014 from Katra, a remote village six hours from Delhi. "People called them Padma Lalli like they were one person," writes Faleiro as she introduces cousins Padma, 16, and Lalli, 14. Their horrific double assault--they were raped and murdered--set social media afire with graphic images of their hanging bodies. Investigations continued for months, but procedures were repeatedly "botched" (a word so often repeated about criminal investigations, it's familiar even to non-English speakers) so that months passed before answers were finally revealed. Faleiro's meticulous reconstruction ("[n]o scenes or dialogue in this book were invented," she assures) moves far beyond the Katra events, dovetailing countless gruesome crimes, disclosing shocking data, divulging pervasive incompetence, and exposing widespread corruption. These contextual extras, while unarguably urgent, prove excessive, eventually overwhelming the girls' tragedy.
Guardian Review
Two teenage girls go missing. They are discovered hanging from a mango tree. Sexual activity may or may not have taken place, prior to their deaths. Were they killed or did they kill themselves? There are eyewitnesses who may be the aggressors - their stories don't match up. To add to this, there is a defining visual image. The dead bodies hang from the tree for days, knocking against each other in repetitive, heart-breaking camaraderie, while the grieving women of the village form a circle around the tree trunk, to prevent the girls from being taken down. If they come down, Padma and Lalli (not their real names) will be forgotten. As long as the corpses retain the power to horrify, they are protected from indifference. "Place is the crossroads of circumstance," Eudora Welty wrote in her 1957 essay "Place in Fiction" - "the proving ground of, what happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" In the The Good Girls, the shifting answers to these questions form a morass of half-truths and lies, freighting the ancient fields of Katra Sadatganj - an "eyeblink of a village" in Uttar Pradesh, north India - with existential threat. This ancestral land, a marker of power and identity for those who work in it, "put dal in the katori, clothes on the back ¿ It made them cultivators. Without it they were landless labourers". Those who inhabit it "believed they would sense if something was amiss, just as one can sense a change in the texture of one's palm. But this was not the case." What follows, in this shocking, mesmerising book by Sonia Faleiro, is an unravelling of shared hubris. Faleiro uses the structures of a true crime narrative. The need in the reader to understand these painfully premature deaths and make sense of the world, means that the real objective of The Good Girls - to turn and face the factual horror of inequality - is skilfully masked. "Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments," was the verdict of Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer (1989); "The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art." In this sense, Faleiro is a judicious writer: as with her nonfiction debut Beautiful Thing - a portrait of the table dancers of Bombay - the prose in The Good Girls is full of precise intention. Facts are presented without the electric burn of outrage. The reader plays detective as the story unfolds, piecing together "evidence" that is remembered from earlier chapters - a phone call, a text, a snatch of overheard conversation, an admission that might later be denied. The author will not hold your hand as you navigate this mystery; instead you are encouraged to solve it yourself. At the heart of the book, and crucial to interpretation of events, is the question of consent - more specifically, of consensual desire. Padma and Lalli are referred to repeatedly by relatives and politicians as family assets - tangible, walking, breathing manifestations of family honour. There are multiple discussions as to whether they have been raped - at one point the media reports declare this to be incontrovertible, and yet the evidence does not support it beyond reasonable doubt. Vital evidence is tampered with, in the name of saving family honour: phone recordings are deleted, witnesses are told to revise their stories, and the number of potential rapists swells from one to five and back again. The idea that the girls might have had their own romantic lives with boys from the village is crushed in the white noise of gossip and misinformation. Faleiro's subjects are numerous and interconnected - from India's corrupt politicians and media to the deleterious effects of caste prejudice and the systemic rot scouring its way through the police force. But her core subject is that of entrapment, and she returns again and again to the lack of agency that the girls have over their own lives, banned as they are from wandering freely around the village and its environs. The author concludes that "an Indian woman's first challenge was surviving her own home". The girls' nightly journey to squat in the fields after dinner to relieve themselves emerges as the only gap in a system set up to put them under constant surveillance. And it is this gap of possibility, at Welty's "crossroads of circumstance" that Padma and Lalli enter flushed with life, only to die hours later. The Good Girls is a beautifully calibrated book, full of suspense to the final pages, urging us to walk into that night and listen.
Kirkus Review
A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India. In the summer of 2014, two teenagers, whom Faleiro calls Padma and Lalli, left their homes in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh, walking to a nearby orchard. Not long after, they were found hanging from a tree. An autopsy was inconclusive, but it seemed likely that the girls had been raped. Consequently, the village was swept up in a vortex of contending views on religion, caste, gender roles, women's rights, and other thorny issues, all cogently explored by the author. The principal suspects were members of a low caste. "Their lives had been dismantled," writes Faleiro, a sympathetic yet unrelenting investigator. "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….This is what it meant to be poor." Other issues were at play, including the fact that the girls had dared use their cellphones in public--an act that proved, according to a society where women are untrustworthy, that they were seeking dangerous liaisons. As Faleiro carefully documents, the disappearance of the girls was not extraordinary: "In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India." In a recent case, a wealthy businessman had murdered at least 17 people, some of them children, whose disappearances the police had not paid attention to precisely because they were poor. Padma's and Lalli's graves suffered a final indignity during a devastating flood, and while their case seems to resist definitive resolution, it shows that, "for the poor, who have always suffered the most, India hasn't changed all that much." A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be "the worst place in the world to be a woman." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Faleiro (Beautiful Thing) tells the story of the infamous deaths of two girls in Katra, Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2014. The teenage girls vanished one night and were found hanging from a tree the next morning. The case gained international media and social media attention, especially after the medical examiner reported evidence of rape. Part true-crime tale, part social commentary, Faleiro's account guides readers through the evidence and potential explanations for the girls' deaths as investigators uncover new evidence. In the first part of the book, Faleiro introduces the key players while reflecting on the effects of poverty on the rural community in Katra and the political climate in India. Later, Faleiro uses the ongoing investigation to reflect on the status of women in India, particularly surrounding issues of rape, caste, and the community's rigid code of honor. She explains the history of Uttar Pradesh, including occasional independent movements, in order to provide more context about the region and its close ties to Nepal, while also shedding insight into how others in India view the province. VERDICT An interesting look into women's lives in India. Recommended for readers interested in women's issues.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Table of Contents
| Prologue: Good Days Are Coming Soon | p. xix |
| Rabi: Spring, 2014 | |
| An Accusation Is Made | p. 3 |
| Lalli's Father Buys a Phone | p. 8 |
| Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange | p. 11 |
| Nazru Sees It Too | p. 16 |
| Unspeakable Things | p. 19 |
| The Naughty Boy | p. 24 |
| The Invisible Women | p. 27 |
| Lalli Asks for a Memento | p. 29 |
| The Fair Comes to the Village | p. 32 |
| Padma Lalli, Gone | p. 38 |
| Thieves in the Tobacco | p. 42 |
| Where Are They? | p. 46 |
| Every Eight Minutes | p. 49 |
| Jeevan Lal's Secret | p. 52 |
| Adrenaline in the Fields, Tears at Home | p. 54 |
| Nazru Changes His Story, Again | p. 57 |
| 'Bastards, Go Look for Them Yourselves' | p. 62 |
| A Finger Is Pointed | p. 66 |
| Sohan Lal Storms Out | p. 71 |
| Finally, News | p. 73 |
| 'An Unspeakable Sight' | p. 76 |
| A Policeman's Suspicion | p. 78 |
| The Poster Child for a New India | p. 83 |
| A Reporter's Big Break | p. 87 |
| The Matter Will End' | p. 91 |
| The First Politician Arrives | p. 96 |
| The Matter Should Be Settled | p. 100 |
| Someone to Solve Their Problems | p. 102 |
| The Politician's Aide | p. 108 |
| 'Liars, Thieves and Fucking Scum' | p. 113 |
| Cable Wars in the Katra Fields | p. 118 |
| Complaints Are Written, Then Torn | p. 123 |
| The Bodies Come Down | p. 127 |
| A Sweeper and a 'Weaker' Doctor | p. 132 |
| The Post-Mortem | p. 136 |
| Farewell Padma Lalli | p. 140 |
| Kharif: Summer, 2014 | |
| The Worst Place in the World | p. 147 |
| The Women Who Changed India | p. 154 |
| The Zero Tolerance Policy | p. 160 |
| A Broken System Exposed | p. 164 |
| Separate Milk From Water | p. 170 |
| A Red Flag | p. 176 |
| The Villagers Talk | p. 179 |
| The False Eyewitness | p. 183 |
| Purity and Pollution | p. 187 |
| A Post-mortem Undone | p. 192 |
| 'Habitual of Sexual Intercourse' | p. 196 |
| A Mother Goes 'Mad' | p. 200 |
| Visitors to the Jail | p. 203 |
| The Case of the Missing Phones | p. 208 |
| The Truth About the Phone | p. 214 |
| 'She Is All I Have' | p. 217 |
| 'There Is No Need to Go Here and There' | p. 223 |
| 'Did You Kill Padma and Lalli?' | p. 227 |
| 'Machines Don't Lie' | p. 232 |
| 'Have You Ever Been in Love?' | p. 235 |
| DROWNED | p. 238 |
| Results and Rumours | p. 243 |
| The Rogue Officer | p. 249 |
| Friends, Not Strangers | p. 254 |
| Pappu and Nazru Face to Face | p. 259 |
| 'Girls Are Honour of Family | p. 264 |
| Pappu in Jail, the Shakyas in Court | p. 270 |
| Epilogue | |
| Birth | p. 273 |
| Rebirth | p. 278 |
| Love, Hope, Vote | p. 280 |
| Author's Note | p. 285 |
| Notes | p. 292 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 311 |
| Bibliography | p. 313 |
