SONIA FALEIRO BRINGING HORROR HOME
Sonia Faleiro’s new book is thorough in its reporting and often harrowing in its effect
The picture first did the rounds on WhatsApp. Two girls were seen hanging from a tree in the remote Uttar Pradesh village of Katra. TV journalists who reached Budaun on May 28, 2014, made apparent they were in an India they did not recognise. They called the district “Ba-dawn”; local villagers only knew it as “Ba-da-yoo”. Outrage spread as quickly as the hashtag, #BudaunRape. Everyone wanted justice for the girls, but no one asked why their bodies were left hanging for the better part of the day.
In her reportage, Sonia Faleiro details, rather insightfully, the response of urban Indians to faraway horror, but The Good Girls is far too invested in its subject—the deaths of two teenagers—to be distracted by borrowed rage. Faleiro calls the girls Padma and Lalli. She tells us that Lalli, 14, would fill her diary with poems, while Padma, 16, secretly dabbed on lipstick. Their desires were as adolescent as their curiosity. But in a village where farms, fairs and funerals had all been declared the domains of men, pleasure was only ever illicit, something one would find in a surreptitious meeting or phone call.
In a world made insular by caste politics and gender discrimination, it was the now-ubiquitous mobile phone that gave Padma and Lalli a smidgen of agency. In the end, the CBI used call records to back up their deduction—the girls were not raped. The incident of Padma and Lalli’s death helps Faleiro join several dots—Bhanwari Devi, Shakti Mills and the 2012 Delhi bus rape—but unlike these cases where the threat of violence loomed outside, “the story of Padma and Lalli revealed something more terrible still—that an Indian woman’s first challenge was surviving her own home”. When Sohan Lal, Lalli’s father, is asked what he would have done if the girls were alive, he says, “We would have killed them.”
Reading The Good Girls can feel hard at times. Faleiro’s description of a botched post-mortem, for instance, is both vivid and harrowing. It is bad enough to know that a sweeper without any medical qualifications had examined Padma and Lalli’s bodies with a kitchen knife, but it becomes all the more distressing to learn that a lack of experience and tools is the norm in much of India, not an exception.
By reminding us how the police, judiciary and CBI function, Faleiro helps us better understand the machinations of power in the country. That said, however, there are a few occasions when the author gives us more detail about India than is, perhaps, necessary. Descriptions like “the palm-fringed western state of Goa” seem more obstructive than essential. This minor complaint, though, mustn’t take away from the obvious achievements of this book. At no point does Faleiro let the want for certainty outrun her empathy. We once thought Budaun is an elsewhere. Faleiro finally brings it home.
By remin dingu show the police, judiciary and CBI function, Sonia Fa leiro helps us better understand the machinations of power in the country