The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing

By Sonia Faleiro

**Longlisted for the ALCS Gold Non-Fiction Dagger**
**Longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2022**

'Haunting … lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned' Sunday Times
'A compelling whodunnit ... Devastating' Financial Times
'Transfixing' New York Times
'A powerful, unflinching account of misogyny, female shame and the notion of honour' Observer
___________________

A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation

Katra Sadatganj. A tiny village in western Uttar Pradesh. A community bounded by tradition and custom; where young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them.

It was an ordinary night when two girls, Padma and Lalli, went missing. The next day, their bodies were found – hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied.

In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.

The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shocking deaths, daring to ask: what is the human cost of shame?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781408876749

Sonia Faleiro

Sonia Faleiro is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, which was named a book of the year by the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Economist and Time Out and a novella, The Girl. She is a co-founder of Deca, a cooperative of award-winning writers that created narrative journalism about the world. Her writing and photographs appear in the New York Times, Financial Times, Granta, 1843, Harper's and MIT Technology Review. She lives in London.

Reviews for The Good Girls

[eliz12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kudos to Sonia Faleiro for her outstanding research into and dedication to telling this painful story. It's clear that she is both a very good reporter and writer. Many of her descriptions of events, the land and the people are haunting; I've never been to India, but she managed to make me see things so clearly - and that's a brilliant skill.Unfortunately, this book is overwhelmed with so many characters that it weighs down the story. The author was clearly aware of the plethora of names, and she wisely often mentions the relevant connection before citing each one. There are also a few pages at the front that list everyone and his/her role in the story. Still, the reader can't help but feel overwhelmed, which works against the grief that should always stand at the heart of the events.I felt well educated after reading the book because it has so many facts. But telling the story of the two girls, without all those extras that scream "See how terrible this is!" would have been enough to express the tragedy of life for girls and women in India.

[porte01 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a devastating book. All the more so, because the horrifying facts it lays out are all true, meticulously researched and painstakingly delivered, end to end, to build a picture you absolutely won’t want to acknowledge, because it’s just so awful, but you can’t simply look away - because if you do, then aren’t we also somehow also partly accountable?There is no other way to describe it than, in the authors words “a systemic social failure.”Starting and ending with:“An Indian woman’s first challenge is surviving her own home.”As we learn in the pages of this book, there is no other culture, not even war-torn Syria, that has as deeply entrenched a history of violence, rape and subrogation of women as India. In this nation of 1.4 billion people, fully half of its citizens don’t count for much at all. They exist to bring a good dowry, bear children, toil to serve their husbands, and most importantly, honour (or at least, not dishonour) the family name (by socially unacceptable actions including owning or talking on a cell phone, or “wandering” too far from home). (Yes, this is a current day book).For breaking the honour code is a fate punishable by death - and this is largely death at the hand of your own family. This book tells the story, the true story, of two teenagers, (named, for the sake of this narrative, Padma and Lalli). They are respectively sixteen and fourteen years old - good girls, who leave school in the eighth grade, as befits their gender, to dedicate their lives to working hard, every day to prepare their families food, feed their goats, harvest in the fields, get through another day and sink exhaustedly onto their thin mats to sleep each night. Waiting to be married off, as Parma shortly will be, to a mate chosen by her father, for whom she will carry on, playing the same role but now under the rule of her husband and new family. Until the day Padma and Lalli are both found, one blazingly hot day in May 2014, hanging from a tree, and the lives of this small community are forever turned upside down. For those of us on the outside reading this book and looking in, there is no easy way to understand a culture so deeply buried in impenetrable convictions about human worthiness tied to one’s caste, one’s religion (Hindu vs Muslim) and one’s gender - with the vast majority of the population struggling under generations of crushing poverty, and non-existent infrastructure (no running water, toilets, gas or electricity) . And even for advocates of social or government-orchestrated change - fairness and justice are nonexistent in this world consisting of wealthy, corrupt and criminal politicians and their posses of inept thugs manning the police forces.This book is a challenging read, and I’ll find it hard to put some of its images behind me. But its story needs to be told, and this author, an investigative journalist, does a beautiful job helping us understand the context around this tragedy and what it teaches us about shame, about mortality, and about power. Trigger warnings: strong abuse narratives including horrific historically accurate description of the 2002 Gujarat riots.A big thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an advance review copy of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Padma and Lalli, inseparable cousins and friends, were only 16 and 14 when they were killed. As their small village in Uttar Pradesh was rather underdeveloped in hygienic and housing terms, the girls needed to go to the nearby fields to relieve themselves. One night in 2014, they went missing and were found hanging in the orchard a couple of hours later. Rumours spread fast about what might have happened and who could be responsible for their deaths, however, even though national media became interested in the case, investigations took their time and the police only reluctantly tried to solve the case. Girls from lower classes have never been high priority and their death seemed to cause more nuisance than alarm.“This negligence contributed to an epidemic of missing and exploited children, many of them trafficked within and outside the country.”Sonia Faleiro’s book is a true crime account of how the girls’ lives might have looked like in their last hours, the immediate reaction of the families and villagers and also a lot of facts which help to understand the circumstances in which this crime could take place. The subheading “An Ordinary Killing” already gives away a lot: the murder of girls and women had become to ordinary in India that people didn’t bat an eyelid anymore. However, the events of 2012, when a student was violated in a bus, made worldwide headlines and stirred protests which finally made people aware of the hostile and misogynist climate they were living in. “Although Delhi was notoriously unsafe, stories about sexual assault didn’t often make the news.”There are a lot of factors which enabled the murder of Padma and Lalli, their status as girls, their belonging to an inferior class, the remoteness and backwardness of their village – many standards and rights we in the western world take for granted simply do not apply there. But it is not only the crime itself which is abhorrent, also the situation of the police – understaffed, ill-equipped, prone to bribery – and even more of the medical examiner – without any training, just doing the job because nobody else would do it with the logical result of a post-mortem which is simply absurd – are just incredible. What I found most interesting was actually not the girls’ story and the dynamics in the village afterwards but the background information. Sonia Faleiro convincingly integrates them into the narrative which thus becomes informative while being appealing to read. I’d rather call it a journalistic piece of work than fiction and it is surely a noteworthy contribution to the global discussion on women’s rights.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Good Girls is a powerful, heartrending and compelling work of investigative journalism from award winning author Sonia Faleiro.On May 27th 2014, cousins and best friends 16 year old Padma* and 14 year old Lalli* went into the fields to relieve themselves before bedtime, as was their habit, and never returned. In the early hours of the morning their body’s were found hanging in the mango tree orchard belonging to their families in the tiny Indian village of Katra Sadatgani. And there they would remain for days as their family demanded justice.* The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.Drawing on official documents, news reports, and personal interviews, Faleiro attempts to piece together the events that led up to the girl’s deaths, and the extraordinary events that followed. Faleiro does her best to establish a timeline and unravel the often contradictory information that is a hallmark of this investigation. This is a complex case that involves a large number of people, and is forced to take into account issues of family structure, tradition, poverty, caste, religion, and political corruption to explain both its origin and its development.The Good Girls is not the easiest of reads, from a position of western privilege it’s confronting to learn about the circumstances in which Padma and Lalli lived. This not only includes their immediate environs in a village with no running water, sanitation, or electricity, but also a society that considers them as little more than chattel. Crimes against women, and girls, are ubiquitous in India, both in public and at home. Despite attempts to lawfully curb the violence (largely as a consequence of the ‘Delhi Bus Rape’ in 2012) when caste, tradition and religion insist that women are little more than the property of men, the law is often ignored, abetted by corrupt politicians and a venal police force who lack the skills, resources or motivation to investigate complaints. To be honest I have little faith in the official findings in this case, given the falsehoods, contradictions, and grievous errors that dogged every step of the investigation. I don’t think any conclusion can be reached with confidence, but I appreciate Faleiro’s attempt to shed light on what happened to Padma and Lalli.The Good Girls is a well written, disturbing yet fascinating narrative that provides insight not only into an individual tragedy, but also into a culture and a country. Incidentally I strongly suggest you don’t Google the case, or if you do be careful which articles you view as many are accompanied by a photo of the two girls hanging from the mango tree.

[kulmona · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Thank you, Edelweiss, for my e-ARC.I requested this book because it is set in India, my country of birth. I can relate to the culture...somewhat.Based on the 2014 Katra case, the true story of the disappearance and death of two young girls, the first few pages consist of maps and a list of characters(so MANY characters that it often became difficult to keep track of them). Also, the excessive statistics made for dry reading.  However, I did enjoy the vivid descriptions of the characters and setting.Although the case itself was disturbing, compelling and a story that needed to be told, its shock value was reduced by the inordinate amount of information.