At first glance, Sonia Faleiro’s narrative non-fiction story titled The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing is about the chilling deaths of two young girls in Budaun district of Uttar Pradesh in 2014. As one reads further, though, we realize that it is about much more — deep-seated patriarchy, caste dynamics, failing state institutions, and a larger-than-life media. Through the story of the death of the 14 and 16-year-old cousins, named Padma and Lalli Shakya for the sake of the book, Faleiro provides us with an in-depth understanding of crime in rural north India. Her four-year-long investigation with striking attention to detail and over a hundred interviews is telling of her journalistic background.

In essence, the book has two parallel narratives — one, the perplexing mystery of the girls’ death with conflicting eye-witness accounts, evidence tampering, and non-cooperative families; the other, a larger narrative of crime and justice in India and its interaction with socio-political processes.

Underlying and essential to these narratives is the role played by the media in amplifying, constructing, and complicating the factors of the case. While at the macro-level the book is a grave reminder of the perils of being a lower-caste woman in India and the woeful condition of our justice system, it is also a moving account of a family’s grief, albeit complex and layered with societal pressures and questions of ‘honor’ associated with the girls’ actions. 

The Plot 

The case begins straightforwardly – two girls from Katra village of Budaun district disappeared one night after they went to defecate in the fields. The next morning, their bodies were found hanging from a tree. Their family alleged rape and murder by nearby Yadav caste men, namely 19-year-old Pappu Yadav and his brothers because an eyewitness said he saw the girls with him.

Using this crime’s framework, Faleiro’s book dives into the processes of caste, gender, party politics, violence, and even climate change that affect this case and India’s landscape in general. Addressing the most obvious intersections first, she explains how the victims’ families belonged to the Shakya caste while the alleged perpetrators as well as the ruling party of the state, belonged to the Yadav caste —  historically part of the Other Backward Castes but politically powerful in the state, occupying positions of power from the C.M. to the local policemen.

The Politics

It was largely believed that Yadavs as a group favor one another, and the victims’ families saw no use in going to the Yadav-dominated police station in the village. The case gets complicated when the Shakya family refuses to remove the bodies from the tree until justice has been served. The first conscious choice of the family was keeping in mind the power of media narratives in delivering justice, and every act since was influenced by this.

The local police did register an FIR and detain Pappu Yadav, his brothers, and two Yadav-sympathetic police officers. The primary eye-witness Nazru, however, who had previously admitted to seeing the girls being taken by Pappu, changed his story multiple times in front of the police as well as the family. The victims’ families also did not cooperate with the police inquiry.

When media attention and pressure from the local Shakya MLA resulted in the case being transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the mismanagement and faulty investigation methods of the local institutions came to light. Among many gross mistakes, the most shocking of all was the post-mortem of the bodies. It was conducted by a sweeper in the hospital, with no medical qualifications. The first forensic report incorrectly stated that the marks on the girls’ bodies were “suggestive of rape”, despite no proper protocol being followed by the presiding officers, none of whom were pathologists.

Later, revisions of the report stated that there had been no signs of rape or sexual assault on the girls’ bodies. Beyond this, as the police and CBI worked on the case they unearthed other facts — a previously existing relationship between Pappu and Padma, the victims’ family destroying Padma’s cellphone that contained calls between them, and the emergence of another eye-witness that later confessed to being asked to lie by the family. The truth emerged slowly, in real life as well as in the book, letting the audience play the part of a detective in a murder mystery.

 The Fallout

Alongside, however, the socio-political narrative of the case also changed — Faleiro drew the attention of the book towards the more sinister angle of honor killings of ‘wayward’ daughters by families. The fact that the unmarried Padma had sexual relationships with Pappu was reason enough for the family to have killed her had they found out, by the family’s own admittance. Other facts, like the lack of signs of a struggle on the girls’ bodies, and the forensic report stating the cause of death as hanging led the CBI to conclude that the girls had actually committed suicide — in fear of the inevitable honor killing.

Indicative of just how innate the patriarchal conditioning was in the lives of these girls, the book manages to change a ‘whodunit’ mystery into a much more despairing tale of young women strangled to death, literally and figuratively, by the same society that controlled their lives while they were alive.

The Takeaway 

Faleiro's strength lies in managing to weave in larger statistics and data about missing children, rape cases, honor killings, and police brutality into the narrative while staying focused on the case. At plot points such as the arrival of politicians to meet the victims’ families, she deftly segues into a broader discussion about the failure of policies to prevent rape in the country, all backed up by accurate facts.    

It is this ability of the author that makes the book stand out amongst literature around crime non-fiction. By highlighting the high occurrences and low reporting of honor killings across North India, the inadequacy of the police force, the political pressures on the CBI, and even the lack of toilets in most regions of India, Faleiro wanted to drive home perhaps the most important point of her book — this was never a one-off murder mystery, instead, the causes of this crime were systematic, deep-rooted and institutional.

It is in this assertion that Faleiro’s book stands out against any other true crime novel. By Faleiro’s own admission, she got the idea for the book after the Delhi gang-rape incident of 2012. As she followed the Budaun case, she was able to draw parallels that largely reeked of societal flaws that plagued the lives of women across the country. The title, “An Ordinary Killing”, indicates not just the mundanity of the actual crime itself but of the overarching factors that led to it and that continue to persist in India.

“This is a story about women in modern India”, says Faleiro. The fallacious elements of modernity — education, and access to technology — however, only seek to conceal the centuries-old rot of patriarchal authority that continues to manifest itself in every aspect of women's lives, especially in its most raw form in cases like these.

                                                           Works Cited

     Faleiro, Sonia. The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing. 1st ed., Penguin Random House, 2021.