“They are not allowed to be in public with a cell phone,” one of the spectators, a government teacher and farmer, remarks to one of the girls’ relatives. “Who knows who they are talking to?”
“Reputation was skin,” Faleiro writes of the community.
The events of the night the girls died are narrated by a cast of dubious witnesses, secretive family members, and drunken and abusive police officers, all of whom Faleiro interviews and brings to life on the page. One of the lying eyewitnesses, she writes, “fell apart like overripe fruit” before dawn broke over the hanging tree.
When the girls are found, the villagers walk into the crime scene. Female relatives and their friends refuse to have the bodies cut. Someone – the girls’ uncle, it turned out – takes the cellphone out of Padma’s bra before the police can reach it. Lalli’s father later admits to having destroyed it. Hardly anyone wonders why their slippers don’t “lie on the floor” beneath the dangling bodies; instead, they stand side by side, a “precise and delicate placement” against the base of the tree, “upright like stalks of wheat.”
The bodies stay up one day and one night. The crowd rises and falls. Journalists arrive with cameras. Politicians come and go to harvest potential votes. Finally, the bodies are chopped down and subjected to a post-mortem unlike anything previously dealt with in the literature: performed by a former janitor in the ruins of a half-built government building, with a market-bought butcher knife for a scalpel, rinsed off in a bucket of water brought in from an outside tap.
Coming home to the girls’ extended family, the misogyny is so deep that Lalli’s grieving mother is not invited to attend the Hindu funeral ceremony – as is custom she doesn’t even ask. She falls into a semi-catatonic state in the courtyard and only returns to herself a few years later, revived by the rumor that the two girls have reincarnated into a pair of identical twins a few villages away.
“The Good Girls” is a puzzle with a surprise at the end. It’s a compelling, awful story, an all too common story, but Faleiro’s beautiful prose makes it bearable. She concludes: “What I had come to know was this – that while the Delhi bus rape had shown how deadly public places were for women, the story of Padma and Lalli revealed another terrible thing – that an Indian woman’s first challenge survival was her own home. “
This feminist paper takes a straight look at men’s twisted obsession with controlling female sexuality. From Saudi Arabia to Washington, DC, where brutal enforcement is only veiled by wealth and privilege, the story remains the same.