The Good Girls : An ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro

Summary

Padma Shakya and Lalli Shakya, cousins, living in Badaun, Katra in UP had gone to a fair the previous evening. At night, as was customary, they went for a piss in the nearby fields. The next morning their bodies were found hanging by a mango tree in a nearby orchard.

This isn’t a fictional story. This was a true event that happened on the night of the 27th of May in 2014 in India.

Their families did not allow them to lower the girl’s bodies first in shock and then out of protest because they knew no one would take notice of their children’s death unless a protest was staged. They did not trust the police because they were Yadavs, a caste higher in the caste hierarchy than the Shakyas.

So the bodies continued deteriorating during the harsh summer of UP. Then when finally they were lowered in the late evening, the bodies were dropped while being carried for post mortem. The post mortem was done by a sweeper of a morgue using kitchen tools and a butcher’s knife because there was no qualified doctor to conduct a post-mortem for such a unique case.

The Shakya family’s cousin Nazru, had seen the girls in the fields with a boy Pappu from the Yadav family. Automatically it was concluded that he had raped and killed them despite him repeatedly telling everyone that after Nazru had spotted them, he ran away and did not know where the girls went after that.

My review

After a botched-up investigation by several police teams and a lot of media frenzy and trials, the CBI got involved. They tried to exhume the bodies from the flooded banks of the Ganga to reexamine the evidence, but that wasn’t possible. Finally, through repeated interviewing of every person involved they were able to find the truth.

And the truth was indeed stranger than fiction. And it shocked me more than the haphazard investigation and political madness that was typical of a case in India. It shocked me because so many of us judge and conclude things before going to the depth of a matter. Many of us, me included, when we saw the picture of the hanging girls through social media must have concluded that it’s a case of rape and murder, after all, UP is famous for that. Or maybe it was an honor killing by the family, but no it wasn’t.

So how did the girls die? Read this book, it’s an eye opener.

Sonia Faleiro has masterfully written this incident after in depth research, in-person interviews and while pointing out some basic flaws in several societal, political, judicial and family systems.