Padma Shakya was sixteen and Lalli Shakya was fourteen when they died. The two girls were inseparable cousins, “as alike as two grains of rice,” as journalist Sonia Faleiro describes them in the exceptional true crime narrative The Good Girls. The cousins lived in the rural, patriarchal village of Katra in western Uttar Pradesh, India. The Shakyas belonged to a caste that fell within a governmental assemblage of disadvantaged classes called “Other Backward Castes.” These are castes that were not Dalits (formerly known broadly as untouchables), but were nonetheless educationally or socially disadvantaged.
While Padma was a quick-tempered dropout, Lalli wanted to study for the purposes of employment, even while knowing a job wouldn’t result because “a girl’s destiny lay in the hands of her husband.” The girls’ lives were laden with chores: sweeping the courtyard, milking buffalo, heating oil, kneading dough, pumping water, and tethering the goats in their shelters.
While cell phones were readily available in Katra, most families didn’t have toilets, running water, gas, or electricity. Village women could use cell phones with permission, but they did not own them: “A phone was a key to a door that led outside the village via calls and messaging apps. The villagers were afraid of what would happen if women stepped through this door. They might get ideas such as about whom to marry.” As Faleiro points out, 95% of Indians marry within their caste — and marrying against the will of one’s parents, particularly in villages, is a violation of an honor code that may bring shame upon the whole family.
The trouble The Good Girls uncovers began with the purchase of a cell phone a couple of years after the 2012 Delhi gang rape. A villager saw the girls with a phone and told the girls’ fathers’ first cousin Nazru, a man around whom rumors swirl, that he saw the girls with a phone. The stranger admonished Nazru to let their parents know, as a means of enforcing honor codes. Consequently, Nazru began watching the girls — Padma told a friend that he was ogling them. Meanwhile, Nazru saw a 19-year-old boy, Pappu, whose father was a watermelon farmer in a neighboring hamlet, herding his buffaloes. Not recognizing him, Nazru became suspicious of Pappu. As it turned out, Pappu was of a similar caste background to the Shakya girls, but his caste had political clout because it had organized its votes in a bloc.
On the day in question, the girls and their cousin went to a fair that Pappu and his friend separately attended. That night the girls complained of a stomach ache and their mothers let them to go the “toilet,” the field where villagers squatted. It was a half hour walk to the field, but the girls never came home.
[Left: Sonia Faleiro] Following their disappearance, Nazru claimed he saw them with Pappu. Villagers found the girls hung in a mango orchard two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office. The villagers Faleiro later interviewed were not forthcoming or especially credible about the events that transpired. Rather, conflicting accounts accumulate the longer the investigation goes on. Those closest to the events say one thing and then another, with no fear of consequences. A hope for justice continues through gripping, if labyrinthine, investigations, leading up to a tragic revelation that speaks to what the shame attached to sexual or romantic activity can do to women.
The epigraph of The Good Girls derives from one of the ancient Hindu texts, the Laws of Manu or the Manusmriti. It contains the key to understanding the overall context: “Women must particularly be guarded against evil inclinations, however trifling (they may appear); for if they are not guarded, they will bring sorrow on two families.” The Manusmriti prescribes misogynistic and derogatory ideas about gender, along with commandments about intercaste relationships and entitlements based on one’s caste position in the hierarchy of varnas. Dating back to ancient times, the religious text was used to justify violent caste discrimination. Just as one example of how horrifyingly misogynistic and caste-ist this particular religious text is, it states that men from the top three levels of the system might be allowed inter-caste marriages, but even in distress they should not marry Shudra, or low-caste, women. The epigraph is a sharp encapsulation of the underlying forces of shame that led to Padma and Lalli’s deaths.
At the beating heart of The Good Girls is an exploration of shame. On the subcontinent, and sometimes off of it, shame is a potent force used to subjugate people to a social order. Historically, discrimination and abuse were committed by those at the pinnacle of the hierarchy — Brahmins, the priest-caste, a numerically small group with various class backgrounds who were empowered to bar others from education, regardless of ability or talent. However, those who belonged to the ruling castes, just beneath Brahmins, also perpetuated caste discrimination against those they believed were inferior. The merchants, just beneath the ruling castes, perpetuated discrimination, too. Yet, the caste system was also maintained by those among the most disadvantaged, like the Shakyas who belonged to the Other Backward Castes.
People technically outside the Hindu caste system, including Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, but also those others who converted in order to escape caste such as some South Indian Catholics and Pentecostalists, were the greatest victims of caste violence and ostracism. However, their insular communities, too, were plagued by violent misogyny. Faleiro provided a lucid account of this in 13 Men, which was published by the global journalism collective Deca project and is available online. 13 Men tells the story of the brutal gang rape of a Santhal (Adivasi) girl who returned to her village from Delhi to care for her mother and was punished by villagers and Santhal activists for falling in love with a Muslim. Faleiro’s project over the course of her work is to report that lower-caste women, as well as women in insular communities outside the traditional caste system, are shamed and silenced for departures from social norms. And if the oppressors don’t succeed, the expectation of those communities is that you will shame and silence yourself.
It’s not part of Faleiro’s true crime story in this book, but it feels critical for me to state for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the caste system, and also for the safety of Hindu people in the United States, that hate crimes against South Asians are underreported, partially due to socially-enforced shame. Hinduism is a religion of numerous, regional pluralities. Unlike the major Abrahamic religions, there’s no clearly central text within the religion. Still, it is important to understand the epigraph and the Laws of Manu as prime sources of misogyny, discrimination, and honor codes that are implemented in different ways, and thus to appreciate how vital a work of reportage and literature The Good Girls is.
You might think from all I’ve said that this book is a dry text. It’s not. While Faleiro lays out the necessary facts to portray the poverty in Uttar Pradesh, which is the murder capital of India, there’s also a sensory effect in how she generates its atmosphere on every page. Her first book was a novella, and her subsequent journalistic work retains attention to language, image and empathy. For instance, in describing Katra, Faleiro writes, “Boys teased the limping dogs, and the limping dogs chased rats. Girls huddled. The smell was heat, husks and buffalo droppings.” Through her prose’s rhythm and imagery, we clearly register the severity of the rural village hierarchy, even apart from her contextualization. Lower-caste girls are not part of the action; they huddle at the bottom of the hierarchy, below animals, in a physical environment that would be intolerable to most Westerners.
And the book is laced throughout with memorable, concrete observations that exceed the purely descriptive or pictorial into the realm of the subtly symbolic and metaphoric. For instance, the orchard where the girls’ bodies are found is not “even visible from the house, which was located in a spiderweb of lanes.” The image of the site of the girls’ deaths resembles a spiderweb because that’s what it looks like, but the image also embeds the line with a metaphor for lies and entrapment — and points more broadly to the intricacies of getting numerous villagers to tell the truth about what they saw.
Similarly, characterization is vividly concise while still engaging in cultural critique. For instance, of Lalli’s mother, Siya Devi, Faleiro writes:
“The first time Lalli’s mother saw Katra village was also the first time she saw the man she was to marry, whose name she then inked on her hand as a sign that she now belonged to him. She was beautiful, with a straight nose, regal cheekbones and paper-gold skin. Sohan Lal was small and loud. He told her to shut up all the time ‘chup kar, chup kar, tu chap kar!’ But although she was then only a teenager, she was no pushover. When she got angry she turned her back to him. She shouted at others, when really, she was shouting at him. Whatever method she chose, the message was always received.”
Sohan Lal is abusive to his teenage wife. However, displacing her rage at this victimization, she goes on to abuse others who bear no responsibility, in spite of her gender and age and caste background. In this way, the hierarchy is perpetuated.
Although it is narratively more complicated in its turns and events, The Good Girls is of a piece with Faleiro’s stunning nonfiction, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. Like Arundhati Roy, Faleiro is an instinctive truthteller. However, as a journalist, rather than fiction writer or activist, she is nonpartisan and perhaps more fiercely committed to reporting even those facts that might seem inconvenient. She provides a trustworthy and crucial voice in the midst of right-wing autocracy in India, while doing the hard work of illuminating the systemic vulnerabilities of severely oppressed women.
The Good Girls is not only a true crime story, fine journalism about the condition of low-caste women in rural India, and an important feminist work, but also the complicated story of a village as an ecosystem. Minor capitulations lead to bigger ones. Inattentive and dismissive humans fail to tell the plain truth about their society and protect the most vulnerable within it. One can infer from the highly intricate nature of the reportage that even bit players, even people in the humblest circumstances, can make decisions that have bearing on what happens to others. How do we play our infinitesimal parts to combat the biases of an entire culture, particularly one that remains opaque, that punishes and ostracizes people who tell the truth? We struggle with that in America, too. Lies are contagious, but so is truth, as we’ve seen with the #MeToo movement.
Scrupulously telling the truth of what you saw, even if it hurts, even if it’s messy and difficult to communicate, even if there’s a grave likelihood that others will try to shame you and keep you quiet, even if nobody else will come to support you and you stand there by yourself, is one crucial way to open the door to more truth. One implication of The Good Girls is that it’s not enough to enact new laws. Humans need to guard against impulses to shame and silence the vulnerable. Faleiro’s The Good Girls is a vital, courageous, rigorous, nuanced and deeply considered report of true crime with global implications for women.
[Published by Grove Press on February 9, 2021, $26.00 hardcover]