The Deaths of Teenage Cousins in a Village in India Have Global Ramifications
“One should not be out in public with a mobile phone,” one of the watchers, a government teacher and farmer, sees among the girls’ relatives. “Who knows who they are talking to?”
“The reputation was skin,” writes the Falero community.
The girls are killed in the night’s events by suspected witnesses, secret family members, and drunken and abusive police officers, all of whom interview Faleiro and bring him to life on the page. One of the lying eyewitnesses, he writes, “was coming like an extreme fruit” before it broke on the hanging tree.
When the girls are found, the villagers reach the crime scene. Female relatives and their friends refused to cut the bodies. Someone – the girls’ uncle, it turns out – takes out the cellphone from Padma’s bra before the police can find it. Lalli’s father later admits to destroying it. Hardly anyone wonders why their slippers are not “scattered on the ground” beneath the dangling corpses; Instead they are a “precise and delicate spot” against the base of the tree, “directly as a trunk of wheat”.
The bodies remain for a day and night. The crowd grows and roads. Journalists arrived with cameras. Politicians come and go, harvesting potential votes. Finally the bodies are cut and subjected to postmortem unlike any cover in literature: in the ruins of a semi-constructed government building operated by a former watchman, with a butcher knife purchased from the market for a scalpel , A bucket of water rinsed in a layer moved inside from an external spigot.
Coming back home with an extended family of girls, the misunderstanding is so deep that Lalli’s grieving mother is not invited to attend the Hindu burial ceremony – per custom, she doesn’t even ask. She goes into a semi-majestic state in the courtyard, returning to herself only a few years later, revived by a rumor that the two girls have been reborn in a set of identical twins in some villages.
“The Good Girls” is a puzzle with a surprise at the end. It is a frightening, terrifying tale, a very common one, but Faleiro’s grand prose makes it fascinating. She says, “What I came to learn was that – when the Delhi bus was raped, it was revealed how deadly the public spaces were for women, the story of Padma and Lalli is still something more terrible – one The first challenge of the Indian woman was her own home. “
This feminist document directly looks at men’s twisted obsession with controlling female sexuality. From Saudi Arabia to Washington, DC, where brutal enforcement is only associated with money and privilege, the story is the same.
