The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro

Manju was twelve and skinny, with the radiant smile and point-blank manner of all the Shakya women. She lived with her family in Noida, a heavily polluted industrial city some hours away from Katra village, in an overcrowded tenement with shared bathrooms. The walls of the building shook when trucks rumbled past.

      When Lalli’s father, Sohan Lal, phoned to invite her for the school holidays she was thrilled. It was mango season. And she’d get to see her first cousin, whom she fondly called ‘meri wali didi’ – my sister. Her uncle said he’d be away with his wife and youngest son on a pilgrimage. ‘Lalli will be alone.’

      It was understood that Manju, although she was younger than Lalli, would look out for the older girl.

      Before leaving, Sohan Lal went to buy a new phone from Keshav Communications, which was located in the bazaar, down the road from the cycle puncture repairman and opposite a snack shop that served Coca-Cola out of an icebox. Waiting at the door, sweat beading on his face, was Yogendra Singh, Sohan Lal’s cousin. He was a plain-speaking young man with a rough beard, dressed – like all the village men – in a collared shirt and sturdy trousers made from a pale fabric, which better endured the heat.

      All day long customers streamed into Keshav’s. They browsed his affordable range of Made in China phones, some of which had features that weren’t readily available even in name-brand handsets. Then, because they didn’t have Internet access, they asked Keshav to download the latest Bollywood songs by sideloading them from his desktop computer to their phones via USB. Most didn’t have power either, so they also paid a few rupees to charge their phones.

      As they waited, customers enjoyed the cool breeze from the whirring fan, gazing at the neatly ordered shelves stacked with boxes of cellophane-wrapped products. Keshav was a modern entrepreneur and the village boys admired him.

      This afternoon there weren’t very many clients vying for his attention – but even if there had been, Keshav would have served the newcomers first. Sohan Lal’s cousin was Keshav’s landlord’s son – and according to the social hierarchies of the village, this made him the equivalent of Keshav’s boss’s son.

      Sohan Lal wanted a handset with a long battery life. He was going on a pilgrimage, he said. It was time to get his youngest boy’s hair tonsured and to pay respect to the mother goddess.

      Keshav brought out a handful of phones from under the glass counter. Sohan Lal browsed them carefully, but it was his cousin who did most of the talking, asking about this feature and that. They settled on a shiny black phone with a gold and black keypad. Then Sohan Lal asked to buy a SIM card. But when told to provide proof of identity, which was the law, he said he wasn’t carrying any. His cousin looked on enquiringly.

      Twenty-year-old Keshav made a quick set of calculations in his head. It was only here in Katra that he could afford to run his own business. He paid 500 rupees a month in rent, a good deal. He was in debt to his uncle who had helped set him up and he owed it to his widowed mother to keep things going.

      It didn’t matter, Keshav assured the men. He pulled out a copy of another customer’s identity card and entered the details in Sohan Lal’s bill of sale. Then, because Sohan Lal couldn’t write, he forged a signature on his behalf. What was more likely, he thought, the police appearing at his doorstep or his landlord’s son getting angry with him for refusing to do as he was told?

      Keshav knew the villagers had identity cards which they used to purchase subsidised food grains and to vote, but he also knew that these precious items were kept securely at home. He often did such favours and had never yet been caught. He had no reason to believe this time would be any different.

      Sohan Lal didn’t take his new phone on pilgrimage. Instead, he gave it to his niece Padma. Although it’s unlikely she knew it at the time, the device had a feature that made it especially popular with nosy parents. It could record calls. The conversations were then saved on the phone.

      Cousin Manju Observes Something Strange

      Some years ago, the Shakya family stopped getting along. The men blamed the women, accusing them of submitting to small-hearted squabbles. The house, which stretched across a quarter acre of land, was now split into three parts demarcated by low mud walls.

      Thereafter, each of the families cooked meals in their own kitchens, drew water from their own handpumps and housed their black-bellied buffaloes and white-skinned goats in separate shelters. If they had used toilets, they would have built three. But they squatted in the fields, as most everyone else did, because paying for something that could be had for free was wasteful.

      They were still a joint family, the Shakyas insisted. The courtyard was for everyone to bask in, all eighteen of them, and the dogs too. A parent of one child was the parent of all the others. Padma called Siya Devi ‘badi-ma’, elder mother, and to Siya Devi her niece Padma was ‘hamari bachchi’, our girl. Sohan Lal, the oldest of the brothers at forty-seven, was the head of the household. His two younger brothers, who were in their thirties, deferred to him on important decisions. Being men, they spent their days outside the confines of the house. The women mostly stayed in. They cooked for the men, ate after the men and sat lower than them. If the men settled on the charpoy, the wives made do on the floor.

      But a little space and some autonomy improved the quality of one’s life, the Shakyas said, and so did some education. The Shakya parents were illiterate, but they sent their boys and girls to the school near the orchard. The girls were typically pulled out after the eighth class, when school was no longer free nor compulsory. Then they were married off. For their safety, the Shakyas said, for social acceptability. When she could read and write, a woman exuded sheen; she attracted a better quality of husband.

      Every morning at harvest time, Jeevan Lal and his wife Sunita Devi went to their mint plot. They left Padma in the care of her grandmother with whom they shared a dark little room partitioned into two by a bed sheet hooked to some nails. The elderly woman was whispers and bones in a widow’s white sari. Although she shared a close bond with her granddaughter, and was, in fact, largely responsible for her well-being, it was inevitable that Padma would drift off to see her cousin in the room next door.

      Lalli had two elder siblings, Phoolan Devi and Virender, but they no longer lived at home. In the absence of her parents – Sohan Lal and Siya Devi, who had taken their youngest child Avnesh on pilgrimage with them – the teenaged girl looked out for herself, her brother Parvesh, their animals and home.

      At the other end of the courtyard the third Shakya man, round-bellied Ram Babu, and his ringing-voiced wife, Guddo, shepherded several of their young towards their taro patch. They wouldn’t return until it was time for the evening prayers, which they performed before a shrine indoors.

      The children left behind were unsupervised. The day cracked open. In, out, in, out, they went.

      When Manju’s father learned of this much later, he was outraged. ‘Ghar pe koi nahin tha,’ he said. There was no one at home. ‘They were children!’

      Then there was the awkward matter, which was that the older girls didn’t want little Manju around. ‘We’re going to cut mint,’ Lalli would call out as the teenagers rushed off. ‘What will you come for?’

      Padma, the older one, ignored her. Later, Manju would explain, ‘She never asked about me. When I tried to make conversation she would reply, “what does it matter to you?” ’

      When the girls returned, they were even less inclined to talk. They routinely performed hard physical labour, so it couldn’t be fatigue. And while they acted like she was invisible, they kept up a steady stream of conversation between themselves. ‘No big deal,’ Manju grumbled.

      She observed that Padma’s father didn’t much care for this behaviour either. When he came in from the fields and saw the teenagers sitting side by side, he acted annoyed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered, ‘keep wasting time.’

      But if anything, all the girls did was work.

      As