A double tragedy in India and the search for elusive answers

The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing

They were as alike as

“two grains of rice” — 16year-old Padma and 14year-old Lalli. In their village in India, the cousins were spoken of as one person: Have you seen Padma Lalli? They were inseparable, tending their goats and the fire, feeding their families, working until sundown.

The girls went missing the night of May 27, 2014. Their bodies were discovered the next morning in the orchard, hanging from the same mango tree. When a breeze shook the branches, their bodies jostled each other; it was, Sonia Faleiro writes in “The Good Girls,” as if they were sharing one last secret: “Suno, listen, I have something to tell you.”

Journalists from Delhi, 60 miles away, came to hear of the story. Tragic, no doubt, one reporter from a popular Hindi news show recalled, tragic but tragically ordinary; his viewers liked lighter fare. But then he learned of a strange new detail.

The girls’ parents were refusing to let the bodies come down. They were calling for the district magistrate, the chief minister, even the prime minister, to witness the bodies, to solve the crime. Who killed their girls?

It became known, inaccurately as it would turn out, as the “Badaun rape case,” after the district in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most politically significant and poorest states, where people survived on grass in lean times. Photographs of the dangling bodies were seen around the world, the girls’ mothers and grandmother crouching beneath them, veiling their faces, refusing to be moved. Children and men stood, forming a ring around them.

When Faleiro began visiting the village in 2015, it was to research a planned book about rape in India. But the case cracked open to reveal a honeycomb of histories, resentments, secrets, competing interpretations. The nature of the crime kept shifting. Was it murder or suicide? The families of the girls laid the blame on a local boy and his kin, of a more powerful caste. This was a story of caste violence, it was decided.

No; the police began suspecting the fathers. This was, in fact, a story of honor killings — of a world in which “reputation was skin” and “the taboo against premarital sex was greater than the stigma of rape.” Or was it a news story, about the proliferation of soap opera narratives and the Indian media’s taste for them? Or a story of jagged modernization, of a country in which cellphones were cheap and ubiquitous but toilets scarce? (The girls had gone out in the night to use the fields.)

“You get as much story as you can take,” writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc has said. And, perhaps, you can tell as much story as skill and structure allow. Faleiro has a talent for ramifying plots and slippery characters — for a narrative that resists easy formulation. Her books include “Beautiful Thing,” a portrait of Mumbai’s dance bars, and “13 Men,” a study of another shocking crime that, on second look, might certainly be a crime but of a very different sort.

“The Good Girls” is transfixing; it has the pacing and mood of a whodunit, but no clear reveal; Faleiro does not indict the cruelty or malice of any individual, or any particular system. She indicts something even more common, and in its own way far more pernicious: a culture of indifference that allowed for the neglect of the girls in life and in death. In some of the book’s most harrowing scenes, she details the bungled post-mortem, conducted by a man without any formal training, the former custodian of the facility, who used a kitchen knife on the bodies. Assisting him was a doctor so rattled by the proceedings that when she noticed blood between Lalli’s legs, she announced that the girls had been raped. She did not think to check their clothes; she did not notice the sanitary napkin in Lalli’s underwear.

What happened in the orchard that night? According to the most recent official explanation, Padma, having been seen with a boy, knew that her fate was fixed — and Lalli’s by association. They left their shoes neatly lined up at the base of the mango tree and climbed up together.

What happened that night? What could have happened? When the police interviewed Lalli’s distraught father and asked him what he would have done to protect the family’s honor if the girls had been found alive, he replied simply: “We would have killed them.”

Michelle Burford has a fuzzy purple ski hat, and when she puts it on, she can channel voices.

It’s a magic she has manifested many times, most recently in helping actress Cicely Tyson write her memoir, “Just as I Am” (HarperCollins). The New York Times Book Review praised the “firm, warm, proud, reflective voice on the page” as Burford’s creation.

Normally we would call such a person a ghostwriter, but Burford can’t stand the term.

“Historically, to be a ghostwriter was to be seen as sort of a literary hack,” she said during a video interview from her Manhattan apartment. A better way to imagine Burford is as a therapist, a cajoler, a confidant.

Burford has been a collaborator or “story architect” — her preferred titles — on 10 books over the past eight years, and half have become New York Times bestsellers. She has become particularly well known for the memoirs of celebrated Black women — Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, musicians Toni Braxton and Alicia Keys, and Tyson. But Burford also collaborated with Michelle Knight, one of the women held captive in a Cleveland home for over a decade, and Clint Harp, a carpenter from Waco, Texas, and star of the HGTV reality show “Fixer Upper.”

“I’m not trying to just replicate what they say. I’m trying to get to a point where I can generate content in their voice,” Burford said. She spends dozens of hours soaking up not just the stories but also the way they are being told, the idiosyncrasies of speech, the catchphrases, the 15,000 to 20,000 words she estimates make up everybody’s private vocabulary.

“These are your words,” she said. “So if I can listen to your words and see the way that you typically put them together, really study them, then I can go from simply regurgitating what you said to imagining what you would say, if in fact you were to say the things that I’d like you to say beautifully in a book.”

Harp, the carpenter whose book, “Handcrafted,” came out in 2018, said Burford understood aspects of his life because she was seeing them from another angle.

“Without that contrast, you are just going to get one story that you’re expecting to hear,” he said. “You’re expecting macho, wood, sweat, blood, whatever. But my story is one of sawdust and tears, happiness, emotion, struggle, and Michelle is the one who helped me pull that out.”

ACROSS

1 Honshu high pt. 7 King of Maine 14 Alpine Olympics

event

20 Playground denial 21 Former SAG president

Gilbert

22 Like many garages 23 Discipline involving

slow movement

24 “... the beauty of the

soul”

26 Equivalent wd.

27 22.5 deg. 29 Spam-spreading

program

30 Games gp. that added a “P” to its initials in 2019

31 Frank behind a bookcase

32 Colosseum warrior 35 Sommer of cinema 37 Literally, the sci. of

women

38 Origami bird 41 Manhattan, e.g.:

Abbr.

42 Progress

45 Airport not far from

the Common 46 Native ceremonial

pipe

49 Emphatic type 53 Forever, with “an” 55 “... a fruit in season

at all times” 58 Leopardlike cats 59 Touch

60 German coal valley 61 Author Rand

62 Suffix with salt 63 “Yes!”

64 Med. office titles 65 WWI Belgian battle

site

67 Very big

70 “... an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired”

74 Inner: Pref.

75 Sky blue

77 Audio units: Abbr. 78 Word with cut or pin 79 Dripping __

81 TD scorers

82 High style

84 Dish put away with a

spoon 85 Two-year periods 89 “... an act of endless

forgiveness” 92 Bleachers critiques 93 First U.S. space station

94 Court conference the

jury doesn’t hear 96 Bay State sch. 97 Source of emergency

light

100 Tats

101 Used for a tryst

102 AOL, e.g.

105 Makes stuff up

106 Elite tactical units

110 Congeal

112 Pitch-raising guitar

device

114 Payroll service co.

115 Agnus __

116 Response to overhearing?

119 “... eternal, infinite ...

equal and pure”

123 Hostile advance

125 Bad way to be led

126 Oakley skill

127 Model railroad scale 128 Ideal partner

129 Swears to

130 Password partner

DOWN

1 Yoga needs 2 Cafeteria convenience

3 Sinn __

4 Auntie’s hubby

5 “... a flower, you got

to let it grow”

6 Rock memoir 7 Texting format, briefly

8 Perforated orb holding leaves

9 “Cats” poet 10 Spotted horse 11 Post-WWII pres. 12 Genesis twin 13 Whale-watching woe 14 Wouldn’t go back on 15 Elec. units

16 Greek “i”

17 Cake topping 18 Childcare employee 19 Place to putt

25 Top medal

28 Orders from on high 32 Way more cool 33 “By Jove!”

34 Bonnie Blue’s dad 36 Place to have a meal 38 Queen of the Nile,

familiarly

39 Campus mil. unit 40 Screenwriter James 43 Horn of Africa country: Abbr.

44 Pirate’s cry 47 “Burnt” pigment 48 Oregon’s highest

point

50 Absorb in class

51 “... __ to come” 52 Kid’s assertion 54 Road to the Forum 56 Goof or gaffe 57 Tamblyn of “West

Side Story” (1961) 59 Iowa State city 63 Monastery VIP 64 Sign of a slow leak 66 Honey and Sugar 67 80-pound concert

instruments 68 Turkic native

69 Like winds in storms 71 Gambler’s calculation

72 Raoul Dufy, stylistically

73 Silly goose 76 Continental travel

pass 80 “... the truth more first than sun, more last than star” 83 Limelight

84 Salon cuts

85 Warned one’s master, perhaps

86 Line above the equator: Abbr.

87 “Sing it, Sam” speaker

88 DA’s aide 90 “Xanadu” rock gp. 91 Suffix with Catholic 92 Jargon

95 Very small role 98 Starring role

99 Ad astra per __:

Kansas motto 102 Phased-out Apple

messaging tool

103 Wade noisily

104 Florence’s __ Vecchio 107 Pixar title robot

108 Wood shapers

109 Half-serious sequence?

111 Spanish bull

113 Final notice

116 Sightseeing trip

117 Christmas trio

118 Fingered

120 Operated

121 Back at sea

122 Hall of Famer Young

et al.

124 Issa of “Insecure”