The Good Girls

December 14, 2020
In this powerful account, Faleiro (Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars) tells the tragic story of two cousins, 16-year-old Padma Shakya and 14-year-old Lalli Shakya, who grew up in a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Padma and Lalli, who tended the family’s goats, disappeared one night in 2014. They were found the next morning hanging from a mango tree. Was it rape and murder, or suicide? Months of bungling police, corrupt politicians, lying witnesses, and missing evidence resulted in the arrests of Padma’s boyfriend, his two brothers, and two police officers in a case of a gang rape gone wrong. When officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI, took over the botched case, they concluded it was suicide, not murder, and the girls took their own lives out of shame after being caught in a field with a boy.
In incisive prose, Faleiro, who offers no opinion on what actually happened, examines India’s family honor system and the grueling lives of lower caste women. True crime buffs will be fascinated. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

February 1, 2021
International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as "the rape capital of the world," spurring award-winning journalist Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to "find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India." She finds her narrative focus in another gory story that emerged in May 2014 from Katra, a remote village six hours from Delhi. "People called them Padma Lalli like they were one person," writes Faleiro as she introduces cousins Padma, 16, and Lalli, 14. Their horrific double assault--they were raped and murdered--set social media afire with graphic images of their hanging bodies. Investigations continued for months, but procedures were repeatedly "botched"" (a word so often repeated about criminal investigations, it's familiar even to non-English speakers) so that months passed before answers were finally revealed. Faleiro's meticulous reconstruction (""[n]o scenes or dialogue in this book were invented," she assures) moves far beyond the Katra events, dovetailing countless gruesome crimes, disclosing shocking data, divulging pervasive incompetence, and exposing widespread corruption. These contextual extras, while unarguably urgent, prove excessive, eventually overwhelming the girls' tragedy.

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February 1, 2021

Faleiro (Beautiful Thing) tells the story of the infamous deaths of two girls in Katra, Uttar Pradesh, India, in 2014. The teenage girls vanished one night and were found hanging from a tree the next morning. The case gained international media and social media attention, especially after the medical examiner reported evidence of rape. Part true-crime tale, part social commentary, Faleiro's account guides readers through the evidence and potential explanations for the girls' deaths as investigators uncover new evidence. In the first part of the book, Faleiro introduces the key players while reflecting on the effects of poverty on the rural community in Katra and the political climate in India. Later, Faleiro uses the ongoing investigation to reflect on the status of women in India, particularly surrounding issues of rape, caste, and the community's rigid code of honor. She explains the history of Uttar Pradesh, including occasional independent movements, in order to provide more context about the region and its close ties to Nepal, while also shedding insight into how others in India view the province. VERDICT An interesting look into women's lives in India. Recommended for readers interested in women's issues.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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January 1, 2021
A modern-day Rashomon that offers multiple views of the widely publicized deaths of two young women in rural India. In the summer of 2014, two teenagers, whom Faleiro calls Padma and Lalli, left their homes in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh, walking to a nearby orchard. Not long after, they were found hanging from a tree. An autopsy was inconclusive, but it seemed likely that the girls had been raped. Consequently, the village was swept up in a vortex of contending views on religion, caste, gender roles, women's rights, and other thorny issues, all cogently explored by the author. The principal suspects were members of a low caste. "Their lives had been dismantled," writes Faleiro, a sympathetic yet unrelenting investigator. "And not one politician, they said, not even one of their own, had come to see them, never mind offer them assistance of any sort....This is what it meant to be poor." Other issues were at play, including the fact that the girls had dared use their cellphones in public--an act that proved, according to a society where women are untrustworthy, that they were seeking dangerous liaisons. As Faleiro carefully documents, the disappearance of the girls was not extraordinary: "In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh, accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India." In a recent case, a wealthy businessman had murdered at least 17 people, some of them children, whose disappearances the police had not paid attention to precisely because they were poor. Padma's and Lalli's graves suffered a final indignity during a devastating flood, and while their case seems to resist definitive resolution, it shows that, "for the poor, who have always suffered the most, India hasn't changed all that much." A gripping story that brings home the point that India may be "the worst place in the world to be a woman."

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