The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro
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through this door. They might get ideas such as whom to marry.
Records showed that 95 per cent of Indians still married within their caste,3 and anyone who didn’t attracted attention. In 2013 a young woman from Katra village took off with a man from a different caste. Her father was so ashamed he couldn’t show his face, people said. The woman had chosen to marry against his will, to have what was known as a love marriage rather than leaving it to her father to arrange a partner for her. She had violated the honour code and would never see her parents again – for their safety, and certainly hers. A few months after that, it was the turn of a girl from the next-door hamlet of Jati.
The news of the elopements moved like a swarm of whirring insects, landing first here and then there until all the nearby villages were warned: change is coming, be vigilant, be ready to act.
In 2014, for the first time, the National Crime Records Bureau, which publishes the number of cases registered for crimes, published data on honour killings. Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country,4 but everyone knew the true number was hundreds, if not thousands, more. Girls were killed for marrying outside their caste or outside their religion and sometimes having premarital sex was reason enough.
With the killing the family’s honour was reclaimed or, at least, the other villagers were given notice that the family had taken the errant behaviour seriously and done their best to right a wrong. The Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years, said one father who was accused of killing his daughter.5
In Katra, the rule was that boys could own phones, but girls had to get permission to use them.
Even so, Padma and Lalli knew what to do with a phone better than their mothers who could identify neither letters nor numbers. Padma often called her maternal uncles, reciprocating the effort they had put into keeping in touch after their only sister, Padma’s biological mother, had died. Lalli texted her elder brother who worked for a car parts manufacturer far away. The girls used the torch feature to light their way into the pit of the night.
Rajiv Kumar didn’t know this, because he didn’t know them. He didn’t even know their parents beyond the usual ‘sab theek?’ – all well? – but a girl’s life was everyone’s business. He was determined to do his duty. His plot was near some land owned by a close relative of the girls named Babu ‘Nazru’ Ram. With his bowl cut, paan-stained teeth and sloppy smile Nazru was approachable. At twenty-six, he wasn’t that much older than the girls.
‘They shouldn’t be out in public with a mobile phone,’ Rajiv Kumar said, speaking in Braj Bhasha, the language of these parts. ‘Who knows who they’re talking to?’ Although the fields adjoined the village, the walking distance from the Shakya house to the orchard was ten minutes or more. The orchard wasn’t even visible from the house, which was located in a spiderweb of lanes. Rajiv Kumar’s implication was clear. The girls chose that particular time because they were alone, they chose that place because it was secluded. To remove any doubt, he used the word ‘chakkar’ to indicate there was something crooked about all this, something off balance. ‘The girls in your family are romancing someone,’ he said.
Nazru agreed that it didn’t look good.
‘You should let their parents know,’ Rajiv Kumar said.
A few days passed, and Rajiv Kumar again saw the girls talking on the phone. He again sought out Nazru who explained that a complaint could backfire. The girls’ parents might accuse him of slander. Rumours were butterflies, they might say. If word got around, who would marry Padma? Who would have Lalli?
Nazru understood that it was one thing for Rajiv Kumar to talk. It was another for a relative, a first cousin no less, to level an accusation of such grave seriousness. And there was the other matter to consider, which was that he depended on the family. Everyone in the village struggled, but he had an asthmatic father to care for and a brother people called crazy. The Shakyas sometimes hired him to work their land. If things got truly difficult, they could be counted on to come through with cash.
So Nazru said nothing – but mindful of his duty, he started to watch the girls.
His behaviour didn’t go unnoticed.
‘He ogles us,’ Padma said to a friend with disgust.
It was while Nazru was keeping watch that he came across the spindly bobblehead boy. Katra village was small and Nazru knew everyone who lived there – but he didn’t know this boy. The boy was grazing his buffaloes so he couldn’t have come from far. It was natural to assume that he was a Yadav from the hamlet next door.
‘What’s your name?’ Nazru shouted.
‘Pappu.’
The young man’s name, in fact, was Darvesh Yadav. He was sharp-nosed with a shock of very black hair. People called him Pappu because he was small, like a boy. Pappu wore an oversized shirt and trousers, a hoop in his ear and rubber slippers on his feet.
Although his face was imprinted with apprehension, Pappu’s life was more secure than most in the hamlet of Jati. His father was a watermelon farmer who had accumulated enough savings to build one of the few brick houses in a settlement of shacks. Pappu’s mother doted on him, her youngest child. Although his parents’ lives revolved around the sandy riverbank home of their crop, they didn’t stop their children from finding work elsewhere during the off season – picking through garbage for recyclables or hefting bricks on construction sites, even as far away as Delhi.
And because of this, Pappu had seen a world outside the one his parents were rooted to: a world in which roads were crammed with cars, and not farm animals, where there were soaring buildings and ambitious men and women doing more than just the one thing in the one way it had always been done – a modern India where the burdens and entrapments that had kept generations of his family collecting cow dung could be swept away and forgotten. And although Pappu didn’t know anyone who had left the village for good, this new world was full of promise. Freedom was close.
But Pappu, although he was nearly twenty, could only write his name. And he was expected to help support his family. They had a deal, father and son – as long as Pappu contributed financially, he could do as he pleased in his free time.
Nazru wasn’t having it.
‘If your animals eat all my grass,’ he shouted, ‘what will my animals eat? Don’t you come here again!’
2 forbade unmarried women from using phones: indiatoday.in/india/north/story/up-panchayat-bans-love-marriages-bars-women-from-using-mobile-phones-109131-2012-07-12
3 married within their caste: thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece
4 Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country: pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1540824; hindustantimes.com/india-news/792-spike-in-honour-killing-cases-up-tops-the-list-govt-in-parliament/story-x0IfcFpfAljYi15yQtP0YP.html
5 accused of killing his daughter: Jim Yardley, ‘In India, Castes, Honour and Killings Intertwine’, New York Times, 10 July 2010, nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10honor.html