The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro

      24 one child went missing every eight minutes: straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/india-nobel-winner-in-new-campaign-for-abused-and-trafficked-children

      25 ‘a result of abuse’ … this was likely ‘rampant’: Sonia Faleiro, ‘Why Do So Many Indian Children Go Missing?’, New York Times, 20 November 2017, nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/missing-children-india.html

      Jeevan Lal’s Secret

      By 10.15 p.m., a dozen men were searching for Padma and Lalli in the Shakya family plots. Some in the group assumed that the girls were injured and unable to call for help. Around the search party, termites crawled, mosquitoes buzzed and moths fluttered. As the heat drained out, the field rustled with snakes slipping back into their holes. Nazru excused himself – to eat dinner, he said.

      The others waded through the upturned earth of Jeevan Lal’s property. They tramped into the orchard. They arrived at the dagger-leafed eucalyptus grove. They went as far as the tube well that adjoined the Yadav hamlet. They moved quickly and, at the request of Padma’s father, they didn’t call out the girls’ names. They were as quiet as they could be.

      A villager who lived some 400 feet from the Shakya plots had gone into the fields to empty his bladder several times that night, but when questioned about it later he said he didn’t hear or see anything. Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that a group of men armed with torches and tall, heavy sticks were in search of missing children.

      Jeevan Lal didn’t need to spell out what was at stake, but he did anyway: ‘Our daughters are unmarried,’ he said. ‘Why would we ruin their chances of finding a good match?’ The other villagers would have asked why the girls had been allowed out at night with a phone, and without a chaperone. ‘There’s no point crying after the birds have eaten the harvest,’ they would have said.

      But the girls had been taken by Pappu. Nazru had said so – and Jeevan Lal knew this, even if the others didn’t. ‘This is the sort of place where people cause a commotion over a missing goat,’ a village storekeeper later said. ‘If the girls were taken by Pappu, as Nazru said, why didn’t the family make any noise or call out to anyone?’

      They didn’t, because it wasn’t just the girls’ honour that was at stake, it was the family’s too. And the family had to live in the village.

      And so, just like that, in less than an hour since they were gone, Padma was no longer the quick-tempered one. Lalli was no longer the faithful partner in crime. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the status of the people left behind.

      Adrenaline in the Fields, Tears at Home

      It was a quarter past eleven when Lalli’s father arrived in Katra. Every man that Sohan Lal had approached for help that night had turned him down, refusing to drive around in the darkness. His relative Harbans had finally persuaded a friend to bring out his motorcycle.

      The villagers were regrouping around Sohan Lal when they saw a light on the path adjoining the fields. They looked at it with interest, until they realised it was just another motorcycle. There were plenty around here. Most paid it no more heed. They still didn’t know that Pappu had the girls. But the two Shakya brothers, who did know the truth, grew agitated. The motorcycle was leaving Jati, where the Yadavs lived, for a road that led out of the district. If there was even the slightest chance that the girls were on it, now was the time to act. ‘Let’s go!’ they cried.

      Some of the men took off on foot, grunting through the crops. The brothers tried to get a car, but where to start? They quickly settled on a more easily available two-wheeler. But by the time they were back in the fields, fifteen minutes had passed, and the motorcycle was gone. Ram Babu who had led this effort looked helplessly around.

      At 11.30 p.m., Sohan Lal had a run-in with Rajiv Kumar, the man who had seen Padma and Lalli talking on the phone and had complained about it.

      ‘What’s the matter,’ Rajiv Kumar said, glancing curiously over at the gathered men. The men fell silent.

      ‘It’s nothing,’ Sohan Lal replied. He didn’t want any more people getting involved. Understanding that he had been dismissed, Rajiv Kumar went home.

      The men continued searching, and it seemed to some like they were doing a thorough job. But while the plots were tiny, the fields were vast, deep and full of hiding places: groves of trees, ditches, piles of dung cakes. Haystacks, shacks and taro plants two feet high. A search party twice the size, with the benefit of daylight, would still have their task cut out for them. At night, only chance could reveal someone who wished to stay hidden.

      Two small girls, they could be anywhere.

      Later, a farmer said that the search party didn’t venture into some partly constructed houses located in the fields. ‘There could have been any number of men hiding inside, and we wouldn’t have known,’ he said. They missed several plots of land just because they were full of dunghills. They didn’t even make it all the way into the orchard.

      At 12.30 a.m. on 28 May, members of the search party started to make their excuses and peel away. A friend said that he really must keep watch over his harvest. Another pressed his hands against his temple and complained of a headache. The relative, Harbans, fell asleep on a charpoy outside the Shakya house.

      Inside the house, the Shakya women were clustered in heaving groups. They didn’t know for sure, but they knew, nonetheless. With the men gone they relied on friends to call relatives and forewarn them.

      The caller who phoned Lalli’s older brother to pass on the news was so distraught that she couldn’t make herself understood. Virender was hours away in Noida and unable to be of immediate help. He dialled his older sister who lived with her husband in a village closer to home. ‘Something has happened,’ he said. ‘Call and find out what.’

      Phoolan Devi wasn’t in a position to help either. Her husband had a motorbike but there was no question of plunging into the night. ‘It would be good if they are found soon,’ she thought. ‘Our honour will be saved.’

      In Katra, their ten-year-old brother, Parvesh, ran to a neighbour’s house and begged him to try Padma’s phone. The neighbour called twice but the handset was still switched off.

      The girls’ grandmother had convinced herself that since Padma had left the house complaining of a stomach ache, the child was simply having trouble defecating. ‘Sometimes,’ mumbled the old lady, ‘if you delay too long it doesn’t come out.’

      The others knew better.

      ‘We were weeping unstoppably,’ Padma’s stepmother would remember.

      Nazru Changes His Story, Again

      Over in the fields, the men were baffled. The persistent chirp of crickets aside, there were now no signs of life. Where were those two?

      The situation felt so surreal that one member of the search party was convinced he was sleepwalking. Around this time, someone started prodding the Shakyas for details. Where exactly did the girls go? Did anyone see them? Was there anything else they remembered?

      Now, finally – and perhaps only because they weren’t getting anywhere – did Ram Babu tell the truth. The girls hadn’t