Bringing Horror Home

Sonia Faleiro’s new book is thorough in its reporting and often harrowing in its effect

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

THE GOOD GIRLS An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro HAMISH HAMILTON ₹599; 352 pages

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 apparently they were in an India they did not recognize. 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, the pleasure was only ever illicit, something one would find in a surreptitious meeting or phone call.