“They shouldn’t be in public with a cell phone,” observes one of the observers, a teacher and government farmer, to one of the girls’ relatives. “Who knows who they are talking to?”
“Reputation was skin,” writes Faleiro about the community.
The events of the night the girls died are reported by a cast of dubious witnesses, secret relatives and drunk and abusive police officers, all of whom Faleiro interviews and brings to life on the page. One of the lying eyewitnesses, she writes, “was falling apart like an overripe fruit” before dawn on the hanging tree.
When the girls are found, residents invade the crime scene. Female relatives and their friends refuse to allow the bodies to be cut. Someone – the girls’ uncle, it seems – removes the phone from Padma’s bra before the police can pick it up. Lalli’s father later admits that he destroyed it. Almost no one wonders why their slippers are not “scattered on the floor” under the hanging bodies; instead, they are side by side, a “precise and delicate placement” against the base of the tree, “upright like stems of wheat.”
The bodies stay awake day and night. The crowd increases and decreases. Journalists arrive with cameras. Politicians come and go, harvesting potential votes. Finally, the bodies are cut and subjected to an autopsy unlike any other ever covered by literature: conducted by a former janitor in the ruins of a semi-built government building, with a butcher knife bought on the market as a scalpel, rinsed in a bucket of water pulled from an outdoor tap.
Back home with the girls’ extended family, the misogyny is so profound that Lalli’s bereaved mother is not invited to the Hindu burial ceremony – as is customary, she doesn’t even ask. She enters a semi-catatonic state in the courtyard, only coming to herself a few years later, revived by a rumor that the two girls were reincarnated in a set of identical twins in some villages.
“The Good Girls” is a puzzle with a surprise at the end. It is a fascinating, terrible, very common story, but Faleiro’s beautiful prose makes it bearable. She concludes: “What I learned was this – that although the Delhi bus rape showed how deadly public places were for women, Padma and Lalli’s story revealed something even more terrible – than the first challenge of a Indian woman was to survive her own home. ”
This feminist document directly examines men’s distorted obsession with controlling female sexuality. From Saudi Arabia to Washington, DC, where brutal application is veiled only by wealth and privilege, the story remains the same.