Trigger warnings: Violence against women; rape and sexual assault; gore; murder.
This book had an interesting way of showing all of the parts of this story. I appreciate that Sonia Faleiro took the time to give us a look into the lives of Padma and Lalli. This moved away from just being a textbook that can desensitize the reader. It was a great mix of facts, while also bringing in the personal facts and personalities of the people in the case. The format of the book was not my favourite as it involved a lot of perspective changes and it wasn't always clear whose perspective it was.

Trigger warnings: Violence against women; rape and sexual assault; gore; murder.

“Padma* (16) and Lalli* (14) were hanging from a mango tree. The tree had a broad base, with a trunk that branched off a few inches short of three feet. Padma was higher up above the ground. One knot secured her dark green dupatta to the tree. A second knot, looped tightly around her neck, kept her aloft. Lalli was nearly two feet lower, secured in near identical fashion. Their eyes were closed. Their hands sloped inwards. Their toes pointed to the earth.”

Sonia Faleiro, a formidable investigative journalist and author of ‘Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars’, examines the death of two low caste teenage girls.

In ‘The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing’, Faleiro discusses the coming of age, the failures of care and the violence of caste, honour and shame in contemporary India.

Examining the circumstances and responses to the deaths of Padma and Lalli at the village of Katra Sadatganj in the Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh, Faleiro discusses how the investigation into their deaths imploded not only everything that their small community took to be true but also instituted a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.

In investigating the deaths of Padma and Lalli, Faleiro poses the important question: What is the human cost of shame?

Two years previously, one cold December night, a twenty-three-year-old physiotherapist intern and her male friend were returning home after watching the movie ‘The Life of Pi’ in an upscale Delhi mall. It was around 9.30pm., but the streets were brightly lit and crowded. The roads thundered with fast-moving traffic. After they had boarded what seemed to be a passenger bus, the men inside took hold of the young woman. Six of them gang-raped and tortured her. Then they threw the couple off the vehicle. They tried to run them over. When the victim was brought into the hospital, she was alive, but her intestines were spilling out of her body. The victim died eleven days later in a hospital bed in Singapore. Indians responded with the largest demonstration against sexual assault the country had ever witnessed.

What the Delhi bus rape did for Indian women is that it broke the silence. There was plenty of violence against women before this young woman was abducted, tortured, raped and eventually died, but because of the particular circumstances of her life and death her story became everybody’s story for better and worse. It broke the silence and after that as though to compensate for the fact sexual violence had never been talked about before, sexual violence was spoken of all the time. It was a subject that one couldn’t get away from and one of the things that happened was that the media started covering sexual assault. It was in the papers all the time so people felt that the only thing in India that was happening to women was sexual assault.

It was a problem being highlighted, otherwise it felt like there were no other problems in India. What Faleiro was trying to understand was that if people know this as such a major issue, not just because of the Delhi bus rape, but because of women’s daily experiences and the statistics, why did they not seem to be able to put an end to it.? Who are these men committing all these crimes and why can they not be stopped? Where in this system is the failure taking place? This was the kind of book that Faleiro wanted to write.

Thinking about it and wondering how she would frame the narrative, she was in London in the summer of 2014, scrolling through Twitter, when she came across a heart-stopping picture of two children hanging from a tree.

Somebody had put that picture out there thinking that it was okay and the justification for publishing that picture was that you know that Indians need to wake up and, perhaps, if they see this picture of children in a tree they will finally be shocked into responding.

The alleged story behind the picture was that the two children, Padma and Lalli, whose names have been changed in accordance with Indian law and were sixteen and fourteen at the time of their death were abducted, raped and hanged by upper caste men in a show of power and strength. The picture was what set Faleiro off down the road of writing ‘The Good Girls’.

One of the reasons this book is so impressive is that Faleiro doesn’t cast judgements. She conducted more than a hundred interviews. She tried to uncover so many sides of the story, from the family to the police to politicians to the ‘post-mortem house sweeper’ who conducted the autopsy.

‘The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing’ is shocking and mezmerizing because it goes way beyond the facts and figures of hangings, murders,rapes and sexual violence against women, to reveal a whole set of wider issues, the psychological, the emotional, the legal, the political, the social dimensions of what is at stake. Faleiro’s excellent narrative-reportage unfolds like a true crime thriller. Her reconstruction moves far beyond the Katra events, dovetailing countless gruesome crimes, disclosing shocking data, divulging pervasive incompetence, and exposing widespread corruption.

Reading The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro is a harrowing experience. It is a tremendous feat of literary and investigative journalism.

The Good Girls investigates the real story behind the shocking discovery of two deceased teenage girls hanging from a mango tree in their village in Uttar Pradesh, India in 2014. Their story is told through the experiences and reports of their family members, neighbours, the government authorities, investigators and even power-hungry politicians.

The Shakya cousins’ story is not singular nor uncommon, however their story is widespread because their families refused to let their bodies be taken down from the mango tree where they were discovered until higher powers in India got involved. The families’ defiance shook their village and the rest of India, then the world as images of their dutiful daughters in their sinister state were shared on social media forcing vast media coverage.

Claims of gang-rape similar to the abhorrent Delhi bus rape case of 2012 and murder circulated. Witness statements were fabricated only to be withdrawn then fabricated again. Confusion, class wars and inappropriate handling of the case by unqualified and corrupted individuals created chaos in solving the case.

Sonia Faleiro covers all of the facts of the case as well as the lives of Padma and Lalli, the victims. She provides a detailed account of India’s political, economic and social landscape in relation to rural India and past, widely-known crimes against women specifically of the sexual nature. Her writing forces the reader to face the facts while simultaneously holding onto the hope of resolve only to be slammed with India’s warped justice system.

This non-fiction reads like a whodunit and pulls the reader in. This book is devastating and deeply distressing. But I am obligated to state that this is one story out of millions. It is unbearable to imagine the millions of girls who have heinous things done to them every day.

This book reminded me of why I read. I read to understand the stories that feel so alien to my own lived experience and yet they happen in my own homeland.

Women in our world, (developed or otherwise) must first survive that which should support them only to face a world that denies them basic human rights hindering their ability to dream. Or hope.

What kind of a life would you have without hope?

One of the best 2021 releases I’ve read.

The Good Girls is available in Canada on February 23rd, 2021. Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin Random House Canada and Sonia Faleiro for this advance review copy.