What is the cost of shame when confronting unyielding social inflexibilities?
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing by Sonia Faleiro is about the case of two teenaged girls from Uttar Pradesh, India that were found dead shortly after they went missing. The author, herself from India, provides us with shocking insights on the course of events that took place. Shocking, because to our western sensitivities, the cast-oriented beliefs and structures of the villagers, the modus operandi of the police and overall, their indifference, the botched postmortem examinations, in a word the circumstances are simply incomprehensible.
The 2014 Uttar Pradesh killing has completely gone by me but after browsing the net I was quickly confronted with pictures of two girls dressed in colorful sarongs hanging from a tree. Needless to say, my initial reaction was sadness, then an all-consuming anger for in the aftermath of the New Delhi bus rape, suspicion pointed to something similar horrendous. However, as I read on and the narrative progresses this becomes increasingly unlikely.
In the end, the exact circumstances of the tragic deaths remain a mystery. Be that as it may, by the author’s careful analysis of situation and event progression, the reader is able to infer a terrible truth unspoken; the tacit truth of a crime perpetrated not by a score of criminals but by a whole nation and its cultural history conspiring against two innocent girls on the cusp of adulthood.
Sonia Faleiro describes the characters objectively but with great subjective insight. Naturally, the girls’ family is in the limelight of her literary scrutiny. We get to know all the necessary information to comprehend how family members, neighbors and village elders relate to each other in rural India.
In addition, the author, known for several other non-fiction books of quality about her native land India, has perfected an amalgam of great true crime prose with clever literary techniques and devices that make the reader think, reflect and ultimately come to his/her own conclusions.
Reading this book, your beliefs and perceptions of progress and human development flip like a pancake at the International Pancake House – if you allow it that is. And you certainly should, for the ability to confront yourself with perceptions and points of views foreign to your own is the precursor not only to change but also to empathy.
This work of non-fiction goes beyond the terrible deaths of the two teenagers; it is also a portrait of village life in rural India with the complexities of the Hindu society in mind written straight from “the horse’s mouth.”
In the West we only now start to understand the cost of freedom without strength.
But what if you don’t have any freedom at all – like these two poor girls from whom an obsolete, encrusted and most of all callously unfair society extracted the ultimate price. Heartrending and infinitely sad. ( )

Qu’écrire après avoir refermé ce livre ? On connaît tous l’Inde, ses saris colorés et ses traditions brillantes, un pays qui fait rêver et qui marque souvent de façon indélébile les touristes qui s’y frottent. On sait aussi que c’est un pays d’extrême : extrême richesse contre extrême pauvreté, tradition fortement ancrées contre occidentalisation accélérée. Je sais bien tout cela, mais ça ne me préparait pas du tout à cette lecture.
Me voilà propulsée en Uttar Pradesh, Etat du Nord de l’Inde, le plus peuplé et l’un des plus pauvres. Un matin de mai 2014, deux filles de 14 et 16 ans sont retrouvées pendues à un manguier. C’est un déchaînement médiatique et aussi une série de malfonctionnement qui résument à elles seules les pires démons de la société indienne.
En reconstituant par le menu les événements qui précédent ce drame et ceux qu’il déclenche, la journaliste engagée qu’est Sonia Faleiro nous montre les facettes les plus sombres du pays. Le système des castes, la place des femmes dans la société, sans oublier un système politique clientéliste et corrompu, un système judiciaire défaillant… C’est une enquête minutieuse, presque trop parfois avec une accumulation de détails dans lesquels le lecteur risque de se perdre, mais qui reste passionnante du début à la fin, avec même un certain suspens qui affleure dans de nombreuses pages.
Beaucoup s’arrêtent au fait que les deux jeunes filles sont mortes en sortant de chez elles parce qu’elles n’avaient pas de toilettes chez elles. Mais cela me paraît (hélas) une situation répandue dans de nombreux pays. C’est peut-être choquant en Inde parce que c’est un pays en plein boom économique, mais c’est la situation de nombreuses femmes et de nombreuses hommes. Par contre, me dire que des femmes n’ont aucun droit, aucune existence par elle-même, ce sont des choses dont on parle sous les talibans, ou dans d’autres pays similaires, mais je crois que je ne m’attendais pas à cela. On a fait tout un plat de l’autorisation enfin donnée aux femmes en Arabie Saoudite de conduire une voiture (mesure qui était nécessaire, ne me faites pas dire le contraire de ce que je souhaite dire!), et certes cela montre une misogynie d’Etat, inscrite dans la loi. En Inde, ce n’est pas écrit dans la loi, mais les conditions de vie de certaines femmes sont au-delà de ce que je pouvais imaginer.
C’est donc un livre qui m’a ouvert les yeux, dont je suis ressortie avec un sentiment d’impuissance, mais aussi de meilleure compréhension du monde dans lequel je vis. Un grand merci, donc, aux éditions Marchialy, que je découvre avec ce livre alors qu’elles publient depuis 2016 des enquêtes approfondies réalisées par des journalistes venus de pays divers et variés. Je crois que je vais commencer à me plonger dans leur catalogue qui semble receler quelques titres bien intéressants.

Merci aux éditions Marchialy de m’avoir permis de lire ce livre, via netgalley.

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )