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A few years ago, a photograph went viral on Facebook.
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It was a picture of two girls hanging from a tree.
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It had been taken in the Badau district of Uttar Pradesh and the girls were 16 and 14
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Their slippers lay at the trunk of the tree.
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Later, we would find that the women gathered there had come to protect the bodies of the
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girls with their bodies.
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And one of the patriarchs had decided that the girls would not be brought down from the
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tree until justice was done.
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They turned away the police.
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They turned away local politicians.
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Eventually, the world woke up and paid attention.
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Violence against women in India is commonplace.
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The statistics are overwhelming.
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And yet, this case captured the imagination of the nation.
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Two girls go out in the late evening to defecate in an open field.
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A few hours later, they are hanging from a tree.
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The family alleges that they were gang raped.
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Later, others hint at honor killing.
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There is an angle of caste.
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There is an angle of local politics.
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There is misogyny everywhere.
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The early narratives around this case turn out to be not quite true.
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And in fact, we may never know what happened that day.
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But this much is clear.
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A tragedy took place that night.
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Two girls died and we live in a broken society.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Sonia Fallero, a journalist and writer of narrative nonfiction, whose
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new book, The Good Girls, deals with the tragic incident I just mentioned in Katra Sadatganj
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in the district of Badaan in Uttar Pradesh in 2014.
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Sonia is an old friend and we hung out for many years in the auties till she shifted
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from Mumbai to London about a decade ago.
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She spent a fair bit of time reporting on the farmers' suicides in Vidarbha.
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And once she found her voice, the focus of her journalism was always on marginalized
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While she was in Mumbai, she wrote a superb book called Beautiful Thing, chronicling the
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life of a bar dancer in Mumbai.
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I was privileged enough to be privy to many drafts of that fine book and was blown away
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by her craft and work ethic.
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After she shifted away, she continued making regular trips to India, reporting from here.
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And a few years ago, she released a Kindle single called Thirteen Men, a stunning piece
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of reportage about the gang rape of a 20-year-old in a village in West Bengal, also in 2014.
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Thirteen Men felt like a modern version of Rashomon.
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Her reporting was intensive.
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She spoke to everyone, covered every angle.
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And yet at the end, you weren't quite sure what had really happened.
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We sometimes deal with the complexity of the real world by building simple narratives or
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choosing simple narratives.
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But Sonia's work embraces that complexity and shines a light through its many layers.
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The Good Girls does exactly that.
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Sonia spent years researching and writing this book and there is much in it that is
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not in the public domain and that people don't know about this story.
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When the news of the two girls first hit the media in 2014, it seemed like a clear case
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of gang rape and murder.
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And yet we now know that the early testimonies by the family were made up and motivated.
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Later, it seemed that it might be an honor killing.
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But there's no evidence for that either, although medieval notions of honor do play
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Sonia examines every angle, pulls every strand as far as it will go.
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And by the end, I was left with the sense that everyone is a victim in the story.
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And at the same time, everyone is complicit.
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You'll have to read the book to see what I mean.
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And despite the grim subject matter, it's a heck of a read, with all the characters
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I finished the book in one sitting and so will you.
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I spent a big chunk of the conversation you're about to hear talking about Sonia's writing
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process and her approach to journalism, especially in India.
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Her process is both daunting and inspiring.
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And while I know many, many journalists, I don't know anyone quite like Sonia Valero.
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You'll see what I mean when you hear her talk about her work and when you read her
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Twenty years ago, I could not have done this podcast and you would not be listening to
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Digital technology has changed our lives and it's kind of sad that we take it for granted.
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Well, I want to recommend an online course that delves deep into just this subject.
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This episode of The Seen and the Unseen is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus.
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It looks at subjects ranging from the impact of digital media on attention spans, how
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The Great Courses Plus dot com slash unseen for one month of unlimited free access.
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Sonia, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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You know, it's been a long time coming and you know, I've been meaning to invite you
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on the show for a while now, but you took six years to write the book, so it's not entirely
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Of course, there are many other things we could have spoken about.
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And you know, while researching for, you know, the kind of stuff I should ask you, what I
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do with all my guests is I ask them about their past and their kind of their intellectual
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journeys and how they got to where they got.
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And I did exactly this exercise a couple of days ago when I recorded with another friend
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I've known for as long as you, Deepak Shanoi.
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And I realized with both of you that even though we have hung out so much, we have spent
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so much time at different points in time, that there is still a lot about you that I
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don't really know, which, you know, struck me as so odd.
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So let's kind of fill in the gaps now and tell me a little bit about, you know, when
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you were young, what was your journey like?
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What brought you to journalism to begin with and to writing?
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So I grew up the youngest of three children.
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I think I would describe my childhood as lonely and filled with books.
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I taught myself to read at a very young age and I simply read all the time.
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I read my sister's books and I read my mother's books.
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My father had been a lawyer and I think all he had were law books, so I didn't get to
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But that was my entire childhood.
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I didn't hang out with other children very much that I can remember.
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I didn't try and learn any other skills because I knew that I would be a writer.
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And I tested the waters out quite early on with my mother.
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I wanted to see what she would think about me being a writer.
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Well, my mother was a writer as well.
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She wrote a book, a couple of books actually, to help children learn French, which was one
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of the five languages she was fluent in.
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And she also did translation and other kinds of writing.
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So I didn't expect that my mother would find it odd, but I was still interested in knowing.
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And she said, I think you would be great.
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She also, by the way, said that when I told her that I wanted to be an actress.
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And she also said that when I said I would like to be a doctor.
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So that was just my mom, but having the security from a very young age to know that this decision
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that I had taken was endorsed by the person that I most valued, it was really wonderful
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because it meant that I never had any confusion.
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It also meant that I never bothered to study much because I was going to be a writer.
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But I had that one security and I think it has been the most beneficial thing for me.
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And what kind of books did you read and more so what kind of writer did you see yourself
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becoming because your first book, after all, was not a book of nonfiction or the kind of
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work you've grown to do.
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So how did you evolve as a reader and a writer?
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I don't remember stepping into a bookshop until years, years later.
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And you know, anybody who grew up in India during the 80s would probably have the same
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experience as I did, which is you had access to a very eclectic collection of books and
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they were by English writers mostly.
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And so I started off with Enid Blyton's, then I went to just the weirdest stuff, you know.
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So I Richard Bach, because that was a writer who was by my mother's bedside.
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I have a clear memory and I'm sure this is true of every one of my generation of reading
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Eric Stegall's love story way before I should have been allowed to, Daphne du Maurier.
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It was just a random collection of books.
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I mean, I didn't have somebody saying to me, well, these are the 10 books you must read.
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Although I remember at a very early age, maybe four or five, one of my presents being a bridged
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collection of the classics.
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So, you know, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, I had that.
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And then I had just a hodgepodge.
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And that meant that was actually really good because it meant that I read all kinds of
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writing for all age groups.
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I read all kinds of styles of writing, but I don't recall reading nonfiction.
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And I think one of the reasons is because we don't have a history of narrative nonfiction
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that is a very American thing or creative nonfiction.
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We had our nonfiction growing up with history by the most eminent people like Romula Tupper.
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And I was never going to be Romula Tupper.
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So I was always going to be a novelist.
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And then, as you say, I wrote my first novel.
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It was a book called A Girl.
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I published it in my 20s.
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My gosh, I really can't write fiction.
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And I'm so glad that I realized that after just one book.
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And yes, that's what happened with my fiction career.
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And this is something I've kind of thought about a bit as well, which is, you know, again,
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something I was discussing with Deepak.
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But it's really interesting that our generation growing up in the 80s and the 90s, whatever
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we are exposed to in terms of what we read or whatever is very random and our bit and
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it's just all over the place.
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And then our generation itself kind of becomes a bridge between a world where everything
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is at your fingertips, where you can, in a sense, educate yourself, read anything you
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You don't have to figure out how do I get hold of a book.
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Everything is out there that kind of changes everything.
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And I would imagine that that is not just true in the case of like the books that you
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read or whatever, but it's also true in the case of the values you imbibe about the things
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For example, journalism, that, you know, you look at foreign journalism and you imbibe
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a certain sense of values, you begin to realize the possibilities of narrative nonfiction.
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I did an episode with Saman Subramanian on narrative nonfiction where kind of he spoke
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about that process of discovery as well in the late 90s and the 2000s.
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And so you got into journalism, I'm presuming, because you thought that, you know, I want
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to be a writer and this seems like a natural profession.
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Where did it go from there?
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Where is that point where that sense of the kind of work that you do begins to solidify
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I worked in three newsrooms in my 20s and in one of the newsrooms that I worked in that
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You know, the attitude was that the reporters are the menial laborers who shouldn't be given
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time, who shouldn't be given respect, who don't need to be nurtured.
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And one's ambition should be to become an editor because an editor hangs out with politicians
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and editor gets to name drop that they know, you know, the big politician of that time
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It was Jaitley and the big persona of that time was Nandini Lekhani.
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And the newsroom in which I worked was full of editors name dropping these three gentlemen's
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names and talking about how they came for lunch or, you know, the report, the editors
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were invited to dinner.
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And the sense that I got was that there was no journalism happening.
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There was no aspiration to write about India.
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There was simply an aspiration to social mobility, to economic power.
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And it was not something that I had any interest in.
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And because I had by then worked in three newsrooms, I felt that if this is what it
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means to be a journalist, then it's not a good fit for me.
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And that's actually when I decided that I wouldn't be a journalist.
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And I don't really know at that point what I wanted to be.
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I just knew that I couldn't be this because this couldn't be the tragedy of my life.
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These couldn't be my goals.
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But actually, Amit, when I made the switch was after a conversation with you and another
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one of our friends, the journalist Rahul Patia.
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And I don't know if you remember this conversation at all, but we were hanging out in Bombay
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as we did all the time talking about books.
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We'd read books we wanted to write.
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And at one point in the conversation, I asked the two of you if you were familiar with the
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subject of a farmer's suicides.
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If you remember at that time, the news of the farmer's suicides had saturated the front
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And it was happening very close to where we were in Bombay.
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It was happening in Vidarbha.
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And we, you, me, Rahul, we were people who we were in the news, right?
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We were still journalists and we read the news all the time.
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But I remember that conversation because none of us really had got a handle on the problem.
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And I remember thinking that is remarkable that three people like us who actually do
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care about the state of the country don't clearly know what is happening in Vidarbha.
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And I felt that that was not because of our lack of interest or our lack of attention
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There was something that was going on in terms of how the news was being reported and how
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we were being presented with the news.
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And because I was so curious about what kind of or what I thought was perhaps a systemic
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failure in how we report and present news, I actually asked for special permission from
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the editor with whom I was working at the time to go to Vidarbha and to just do a story
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on the farmer's suicides.
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And actually, my editor, who was awful and ultimately fired, not not at all connected
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to me, but he said, no, you're beat as books, just write about books.
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And that's another reason why journalism is often not a good fit for young writers in
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places like India, because you're constantly being told what you are and what you can do
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as opposed to being encouraged to do whatever you want and the best that you can be.
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But I had no choice and I simply waited it out.
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And as these things happen, he was fired.
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And I went back with my pitch to the editor who took his place.
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And that editor, Sankar Shantopkar, a great editor, he said, yeah, sure.
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And when I went to Vidarbha, that was the first piece of real reporting that I did.
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And I met some farmers and their families and I spent a few days there.
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And I think that was the time when all the pieces came together.
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And I thought, well, this is it.
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This is the place where I'm meant to be.
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I'm meant to be outside, I'm meant to talk to people, I'm meant to understand the effect
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of terrible things, these terrible things on real people and to tell those stories.
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That was that was the turning point for me, that one piece.
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And one of the sort of the pitfalls that falls, say, a journalist like a privileged journalist
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like us who is going from a city and you're going to a village and you're going to cover
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I think the first pitfall that you come across is that you want to find a way to relate to
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these people as real people and not as characters in a story that you're writing.
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You want to give them that kind of respect.
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And that also then means that you have to break that barrier which is there between
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you and you want to, you know, you want to be accepted in their lives so they are comfortable
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They can eventually open out to you.
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They're not always thinking of you as an outsider who's present.
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And this is something you've just done remarkably well in your journalism and the books that
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What was this initial process like when you go out there and it's clearly obvious that
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you are just someone from a completely different world from them?
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How do you win their trust?
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And what are the sort of warnings you're giving yourself at that time like I have to be respectful
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I have to be able to relate to them as people.
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How did you think about it at that time?
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What were your experiences like?
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I can't recall how I approached the initial years in my reporting because of course Beautiful
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Thing was a very distinctive experience.
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So and so was writing The Good Girls.
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But prior to Beautiful Thing, I think, I think I, I was just happy to be there.
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You know, I felt lucky to have the opportunity to travel, to talk to people directly, to
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I don't think there was anything more than that.
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But a sense of, I know this, how this may sound, but it's truly how I felt.
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I felt a sense of gratitude and joy that I had finally found my place in the world.
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You know, my place in the world was not writing fiction.
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My place in the world was not being in a newsroom where somebody would constantly remind me
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that the highest goal was to be friends with some politician.
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My purpose was to, to find out for myself, to find out the answers to the questions I
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had, I could find those answers myself.
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I did not have to be dependent on anybody else.
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And you know, then certainly I, I mean, I was on a salary, but it was not that expensive
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And being in Bombay, which was just so different from being in Delhi, which is where I'd lived,
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I couldn't believe that I could travel anywhere and everywhere without worrying.
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And the combination of those factors, the freedom, I think people, maybe they just got
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that sense that I was glad to be there, that I was not on the clock, that I would wait
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I don't have an ego when it comes to my work.
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I'm easily bruised as in my personal relationships, but not in my work.
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I can wait for you forever.
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And you know, I've had people tell me to get lost, slam the door and then come out and
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call me annoying, which of course I am because I'm always around, but I understand cues.
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I am low maintenance and I'm just happy to be there.
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And I think that, that becomes quite obvious and people respond to that.
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And one of the sort of very insightful things you've said in the past about the way the
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mainstream media covers rural India, like first of all, of course, there's a bare fact
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that almost hardly any news is about rural India.
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You cited a study in the book, which once found that 0.23% of the news in India was
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But the key insight that you'd once expressed about the way the mainstream media covers
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the poor is in the writing, that they focus on the differences between the poor and the
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people who are reading about them.
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And when you went in, you were focusing instead on the similarities, how they are sort of
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so much like us and not the differences.
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So you're not exoticizing them or making them objects in a story, but you're actually making
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us empathize and putting us in their shoes and making the whole process seem very natural.
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So was this something that you went in knowing that this is a problem and this is what I
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have to do about it and this is my approach?
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Or did it gradually evolve over a period of time?
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I think that it just wasn't something that I thought about with a great deal in those
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years prior to Beautiful Thing.
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What it is, is that I find people interesting.
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I find them interesting as they are, and I can hang out with people as they are.
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I don't expect people to be like me, in fact, I secretly find people like me to be considerably
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less interesting because, you know, I mean, I don't think of myself as an interesting
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So I think I just didn't think about it so deeply.
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I went there, I spent time with people, I wrote them as I saw them.
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And because I saw them over and over under different circumstances, interacting with
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different people in different situations, I just got a deeper sense of who they were.
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And that's what you read.
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And how do you, like, you know, we'll come to Beautiful Thing, but one of the sort of
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interesting things in terms of your methodology of reporting and sort of embedding yourself
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as it were, that you mentioned about the book, is that, you know, you would not just show
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up and, you know, pepper questions at them and all of that.
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Instead, I think, you know, the key quote I remember you saying is that you basically
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told Leela, can I hang around?
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And then you just hung around to a point that at one point, Leela, who's the protagonist
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of Beautiful Thing, Leela and her mother actually forgot you were in the room and they locked
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you inside, which could have, you know, taken morbid turns, but it didn't.
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So how did you kind of arrive at that kind of approach?
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And what have you sort of found about that kind of, you know, embedding yourself in that
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And then what happens is that, you know, I used to be fascinated more than a decade ago
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by the reality TV show Big Boss.
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And people would say, hey, but it's so contrived, it's artificial and all of that.
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And the thing is that, yes, it is a contrived situation and the people in it are aware of
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the cameras for a little period of time.
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But after that, they just revert to character, you know, after that, they forget the cameras
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So in your reporting, is there a period of time after which the people you're with forget
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that you're an outsider, forget that you're a journalist, you become a part of their lives
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I don't want to say that they forget.
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And I don't want to say that I become a part of anyone's life, because I don't believe
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I think especially, you know, while reporting The Good Girls, it became very clear to me
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that the people that I was talking to were very much aware of how the media works and
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very much aware of my presence and thought very carefully about what they were saying.
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So I think that things have changed in the last few years.
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I don't want to presume that people trust me.
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I don't believe that is always the case.
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And I feel like that is just a, it's almost impossible to get to that point.
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And I don't think that a journalist needs to aspire to trust.
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I think a journalist needs to aspire to accuracy and honesty.
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And that can be achieved without reaching a place where people confide in you.
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But with regards to becoming, you know, as I felt in Beautiful Thing, a part of the furniture,
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I think I just am never in a hurry to do anything.
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Why should I be in a hurry to publish anything?
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Why not just take your time?
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I don't get the, well, I remember actually once having an editor early on in my publishing
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career who said, if I didn't publish my second book within two years, people would forget
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And I remember for a little while thinking about, oh, I need to publish in two years
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and then thinking, oh, but what does it matter if they forget?
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What do I lose as long as I can keep writing my books?
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And I still feel that it's obviously wonderful to be read, but also if you're not read, that's
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The journey is not here is my book and now my life begins.
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The journey is the reporting and it's all the people you meet and all the experiences
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you have and how sometimes you feel like your brain is literally growing because of the
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amounts of new information you have certain access to.
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And I learned that actually, not just in the last few years, but I actually learned that
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after I published my first book, The Girl, I thought this is my first book, my life is
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And of course it didn't.
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And I thought, oh my God, I've been waiting for this moment with such anticipation and
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The lesson is that it's not what happens when you publish.
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It is everything before.
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And that is the time that you should stretch out as much as possible and read and write
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and report and just hang out.
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And of course, hanging out, by the way, you have to be, there are rules about that.
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I just don't go and plonk myself in somebody's courtyard and just expect them to go about
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That also doesn't happen.
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There are rules about how you behave.
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And like I said, people are rightfully wary and rightfully cautious much more now in much
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more in these past few years than ever, ever before.
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And so, you know, respecting people's boundaries is something that I'm very careful about.
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I don't want to give you the, and I know that you don't think this, but, you know, I don't
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want to give the impression that I just show up at somebody's house and refuse to leave
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I am a professional and I treat the people that I'm interviewing accordingly.
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Let's kind of talk about your writing process now.
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You know, you come from a background of reading literature, reading mostly fiction when you
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Your first book is a novel and then you take that kind of novelistic approach to your nonfiction
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But the interesting thing that you also do in your nonfiction, which I absolutely love
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about your work is, and which is true of this book as well, is that you don't put your own
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opinions in your nonfiction, that you don't bring any preconceptions to it.
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Like I know journalists who will have a narrative set for them beforehand, that this is what
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it is going to be, and then the story they are reporting is whatever will fit the preconception
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that they already have.
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And from your books, it's clear that they're not, and even, you know, both The Good Girls
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and Thirteen Men, which was a short book before this, were both written in really clear prose.
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But at the same time, when you looked at the narrative, what happened wasn't so clear at
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It wasn't a simple narrative.
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It was complicated and messy and you let that be on the page.
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So how did you come to that process of finding your voice as a nonfiction writer?
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So I think I'm really quite fierce about not inserting my opinions in my writing, unless
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I fight it quite hard when editors suggest that I should be in the things that I write.
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I was asked to be in The Good Girls and it was not something that I was going to do.
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So I believe in presenting information in a linear fashion and leaving it to readers
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to come to their own conclusions.
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So that's something that I'm very clear about.
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I mean, you can have very fierce opinions as I do and not force them down people's
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I simply don't enjoy that kind of writing and I don't do it either.
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Once you started writing nonfiction, who are then your models of narrative nonfiction writers
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that you're looking at and saying that this is a model for me, this is the kind of thing
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I'd like to do or where do you get this ethic from, for example?
#
So I think you know this.
#
I did not read any nonfiction until my late twenties and the person who introduced me
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to my first book of narrative nonfiction is again our friend Rahul Bhatia, who's now making
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his second appearance in this conversation.
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Rahul had, if you recall, a library full of the most extraordinary books and they were
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all from like American authors that I had never heard of.
#
And one day Rahul came to me and he said, oh, you're really going to like this book.
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And he presented me with a copy of a book called Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
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And Random Family is a piece of narrative nonfiction that's set in the Bronx and that
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investigates, well, doesn't investigate so much as follow a family through their challenges
#
with the drugs and poverty and their experiences of crime.
#
And I'd never read anything like that because I'd never read narrative nonfiction.
#
But the experience I was left with was that I had learned so much without feeling like
#
I had been taught anything.
#
And the second experience that I was left with was that after I finished the book, which
#
I did in just a rush, I finally came up for air.
#
And I thought that is such a compelling technique.
#
Because I love studying, so I have a very academic mind.
#
I report, but I also love all the facts and figures and the background, the socio-cultural
#
And the challenge is how do you balance the two without making your reader feel like you're
#
forcing medicine down their throat?
#
And this is particularly challenging when two things, one, you are talking about a subject
#
that is constantly being talked about.
#
So readers, in this case, for example, sexual violence, so readers don't necessarily feel
#
that they're going to get anything by reading your book.
#
And the second thing is that they think, yeah, this is going to be too hard, I just can't,
#
You have to make sure that that happens.
#
And everything comes from the correct placement of information.
#
So narrative structure is actually the foundation of my writing.
#
And but the idea that this was a possibility came to me from reading Adrian's book.
#
But after I read Adrian's book, I started reading some other nonfiction.
#
And then I stopped because a lot of narrative nonfiction is the American style of magazine
#
writing that is very formulaic.
#
And when I am writing for one of those magazines, that's how I have to write.
#
But when I'm writing my own book, I don't have to follow those methods.
#
And so I avoid reading those kind of books when I'm writing or when I'm reporting because
#
I simply don't want that voice.
#
Because I think the most important thing that a writer brings is their own voice.
#
So while being influenced by earlier works, I'm also very careful not to immerse myself
#
in any kind of writing because I don't want it to have that strong an effect on me.
#
So when you talk about that kind of formulaic way of approaching a narrative nonfiction
#
that's common in American journalism, can you elaborate a bit on that?
#
What do you mean by that?
#
Well, you know, it starts with I was in the field one morning, you know, the sky was pink,
#
the birds were chirping.
#
And there's a paragraph with all the feels, right, and all your strong emotions.
#
And then you step back.
#
If you look at any magazine article, and by the way, I'm so guilty of this, I am remorseless
#
about talking about it, because of course, I'm as much as a perpetrator.
#
So you know, you have all the feels, and then you step back, right, and then you give facts
#
And then again, you step in and you have all the feels.
#
So it's a dance you do.
#
It is literally a dance that you do.
#
And if you try and not do this dance in your draft, I assure you that your editor will
#
come back and make you do the dance, you know, because that is how a lot of people in American
#
newsrooms have figured out that they can give their readers their medicine by going back
#
And I think it's effective, you know, but it's also the reason that I don't read long
#
form and I just don't read it, because I just know what I'm going to get, you know, and
#
this pursuit of one way of doing things, the American way, the American magazine way of
#
doing things, which we as freelancers must do, if we want to write, often if we want
#
to tell the stories we want to tell for a large audience, it is to some extent killing
#
the form and it certainly kills it for me in terms of my own, you know, the reading
#
that I do for my own pleasure.
#
You know, this is again another question I was saving for later, but since we've come
#
to it, I'll ask it now that, you know, when I used to write op-eds and opinion pieces
#
again, more than a decade ago for the likes of the Wall Street Journal or the Guardian
#
or whatever, I actually hated it because you're writing for a foreign audience, you have to
#
kind of put clauses and explain everything.
#
If you're writing BJP, you have to have BJP comma the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
#
And it just seems like a lot of dumbing down of the content, whereas with an Indian audience,
#
I can make assumptions about that they know the same background information as I do and
#
get to the heart of the matter.
#
Now in your case, what are the sort of expectations that you fight when you do your writing, like
#
a ton of your writing is, you know, journalism for foreign magazines, for example, whether
#
you're doing features or reportage of this kind.
#
And there, there would be A, expectations of style, what you just mentioned, because
#
you're used to that kind of formulaic approach, as you put it.
#
B, there would be expectations from the content itself, because they would have, you know,
#
sometimes possibly exotic notions of what the content will lead to, sometimes, you know,
#
simplistic notions of what the content will lead to, while, you know, so how do you deal
#
Is that a frustration that sometimes get in the way?
#
And C, there would also be a question of language, like, you know, one of the complaints that
#
you've had about our media, and I remember you mentioned this during the Vidarbha time,
#
is that they're not replicating the dialect and the kind of feel of the language that
#
And in your work, you've tried to kind of capture that local flavor and all of that
#
But at the same time, it's a bit of a balancing act, because a significant percentage of your
#
audience, even for books like this, will be westernized audience and, you know, then you
#
have to, you know, is there a balancing act that you then have to do?
#
So how much does this notion of what is the audience play into your writing?
#
So again, I go back to The Girl, you know, my first book, which nobody read.
#
And I just thought, if nobody's going to read anything I write, I can be really disappointed
#
that the career has come to this, or I can see freedom in it.
#
And that's exactly what happened with Beautiful Thing.
#
And you know, Beautiful Thing is full of Hindi.
#
And there are some stylistic decisions that I made with the language that I might not
#
But I was as true as I wanted to be with that book, because I felt that, and I didn't have
#
a western audience in mind, I didn't have an Indian audience in mind, I just wrote the
#
book that I wanted to do.
#
And I think that that was the best thing that I could have done for myself, and I've continued
#
And by the way, if you go to Goodreads, which you shouldn't, but if you do, and you look
#
at the, you know, the reviews for Beautiful Thing, basically, everybody who isn't in India
#
says they didn't understand our book.
#
And why is there so much in Hindi, and why are there no translations?
#
Everybody wants to read a book where there's so many foreign words, but, you know, that
#
And I can't be thinking of people in various parts of the world when I'm writing.
#
You just can't do that to yourself.
#
You know, we have to follow rules all the time in every aspect of our lives.
#
At least when we write, we must allow ourselves to be free.
#
And with The Good Girls, I had the most extraordinary editors, and I don't remember, I don't think
#
there was one occasion where somebody says, can you translate, can you not use this word
#
in Hindi, or can you explain more, or I don't think a Western audience would understand
#
What I wanted to write, I wrote.
#
And you know, that is also luck of the draw, and that is also perhaps where I am in terms
#
Early on, when I would pitch to American magazines, I couldn't find a home because of how I write.
#
And the fact that I don't want to change how I write.
#
But now, more recently, when I've written for magazines like Harper's or the California
#
Sunday magazine, you know, I could, they get me and nobody says, explain.
#
And I think that's also because people have, the thinking has changed.
#
You know, we know that there were Americans in newsrooms, and I'm speaking specifically
#
of the ones that I have had professional relationships with, no longer believe that everything needs
#
to be seen from an American perspective.
#
They recognize that the world is far more interesting because it is different and diverse.
#
So I think I have been lucky, but it's also because of where I am right now.
#
Wow, that's good to hear.
#
My next question is kind of about your writing process.
#
Like when I teach an online writing course, and invariably during the course, somebody
#
or the other will ask me about my approach to multiple drafts.
#
And I will always talk about you there.
#
Because one of the things that blew me away about beautiful thing was that, you know,
#
being privileged enough to be your friend in those times, I got to read all those drafts.
#
And they were all different from each other.
#
It wasn't like you wrote one draft, and then you changed a few paras here and there, and
#
you shortened a few sentences or anything like that.
#
Every single draft was completely different from any other draft.
#
You were starting with, you know, focusing on different characters maybe, or you were
#
just moving the structure around completely.
#
And I would find that impossible to do because once you begin with a certain conception of
#
the book, I would anchor myself to some kind of, you know, base structure of the book or
#
And you were just open to just mutilating yourself again and again and starting from
#
And that ethic just continues to blow me away when I think about it.
#
You know, like one, how do you get that kind of distance and objectivity to look at something
#
you've written and be able to say that, no, this is shit, which is normally something
#
that comes after a bit of distance to be able to see the problems with it and say that,
#
no, you know, I need to do it again.
#
I don't need to tinker.
#
And you just did this repeatedly.
#
And were there learnings about structure which you just mentioned is so important to you
#
during that phase of writing a beautiful thing?
#
So I recognize the kind of subjects that I am interested in may not be easy for people
#
to read about, but I do think that it's important for them to read about these things.
#
And so one of the focuses of my work when I'm writing is to make the language as clear
#
as possible to maintain the momentum and focus on small, small things.
#
You know, the endings of paragraphs, the endings of chapters, every chapter has to end in a
#
way that compels you right away to turn the page and start a new chapter.
#
I want you to keep moving on until you reach the very end.
#
So that's something that I'm very, very committed to, you know, style matters to me.
#
But that never happens in the first three drafts of a book.
#
It just simply doesn't, Amit.
#
And you know, one of the things that also doesn't happen is that knowledge doesn't come
#
in the first three drafts for me.
#
And I'm sure it must be different for other writers.
#
It's simply that it takes years to finally be at that point in the writing of a book
#
or the reporting of a book where I think, oh, I get it.
#
And with The Good Girls, that didn't happen until at the earliest within three years.
#
You know, the first draft of the book was so bad that I really think of my editors and
#
think, how come they didn't just, you know, quietly cancel the contract and just leave
#
The second draft was somehow I put in years more work and somehow managed to produce something
#
And I have a lovely editor here in London called Alexandra Pringle.
#
She's, you know, iconic editor at Bloomsbury.
#
And she called me for a meeting one afternoon in her office and she's just lovely.
#
She's just so polite and she's so kind.
#
And one of the things she said was, you know, I think you've done all the work.
#
I just think that you need to relax and have a little bit of fun with this.
#
And I couldn't believe it because I was like, no, no, you don't understand.
#
I've been doing this for like four, four and a half years.
#
Please publish the book.
#
But I couldn't understand what she meant.
#
And I think what it was, was that she says, you know, you're so, I'm so earnest, which
#
I'm an extremely earnest person, constantly trying even in my work to show you my work,
#
to make sure that you understand that everything has been covered, all vases have been covered.
#
But what Alexandra said to me at that point, when I expected to be published within months
#
was I think you need to, one way to solve this is to just write, rewrite the first chapter.
#
Just go home and give me a new chapter.
#
And I think that was the first time in my life where I was resistant to doing a rewrite
#
because I do them all the time.
#
I consider it part of my job to just keep rewriting things, you know.
#
And I actually sat and thought about it for a month.
#
And I spoke to some people and I just said, I can't do it.
#
I've invested so many years.
#
I can't tinker with it because, you know, a narrative is, is like a house of cards.
#
You know, you move one thing and the house of cards collapses.
#
And but after that month of mulling past, I went back to work in my office, which is,
#
by the way, a table at a Costa coffee shop on the high street close to where we live.
#
So I went back to my table in Costa.
#
And I remember agreeing, I said, okay, I'm going to rewrite the first chapter.
#
And I remember sitting down there and writing, you know, their names were Padma Lalli.
#
And then just realizing, oh, I should just rewrite the whole book that will solve the
#
And that did solve the problem.
#
And I did rewrite the whole book.
#
It's like running, you know, I run and like the first few kilometers is so, so hard.
#
But then then you know what to do and it happens.
#
And so that's what happened even with The Good Girls, that I reached the point where
#
I could rewrite the book repeatedly.
#
Even close to publication, because that's just how I have now I have trained myself,
#
But that sounds absolutely insane.
#
I've got to kind of reassure all my listeners that not only do most writers not have that
#
kind of discipline to write something four or five times or wait four years to find its
#
voice, but all my episodes are also recorded only once we just get one shot at it.
#
No, and you know what I loved about the structure of The Good Girls and I have to tell you that
#
because the subject is so dark, that I was a little scared of reading it because I, you
#
know, I just thought that this will be sort of a tough book to read just because of what
#
But the way you've structured it, the way you've told the story, like the first thing
#
I noticed about it was how it consists of a whole bunch of small, small, small, small
#
Like each chapter is two pages or three pages.
#
It just keeps you reading on there isn't that formulaic dance happening where you have fields
#
in detail or whatever instead everything is like a slow march forward.
#
You have more and more you have things happening all the time details filling in and it just
#
kept me reading till the end.
#
I mean, I just read it in one sitting, not because I had to for work, but because I couldn't
#
And it's almost like what you once said about Beautiful Thing, which you described as quote
#
a terribly tragic story that refused to be tragic, stop quote.
#
And in some senses, this kind of wasn't that dark and grim and at the same time it was
#
darker and grimmer than what you would expect because it's a story about so much other than
#
just sort of a couple of murders.
#
So did your earlier drafts, which by the way, I refused to believe were crap, I'm sure they
#
were extremely readable as well.
#
But did your earlier drafts also have this kind of a structure with short chapters or
#
is this something that you arrived at for this one?
#
The first draft, I think I messed up the momentum completely.
#
So the first draft moved so quickly that you didn't have time to think about anything.
#
You didn't have time to absorb any information.
#
You finished the book and you sat there thinking what the heck just happened and not in a good
#
And I don't remember if the chapters were this short.
#
And in fact, I have to say that I didn't realize the chapters were this short until a few months
#
ago when I received the copy edits and I have the actual pages in my hand.
#
And I thought, oh my gosh, some of the chapters are two pages because for me, it just seemed
#
like all this information, years of information, and I didn't realize that it looked like that.
#
So in the first draft, I got the momentum wrong and I also didn't have information.
#
So I wrote the first draft within the first two years, I did not have information.
#
I thought that I did, I didn't.
#
So the first draft bears very little resemblance to the finished book.
#
In the second draft, you know, I thought that I should write a big book, a book not big
#
in size, but a book of, I don't know what I was thinking.
#
I, early on when my agent tried to sell Beautiful Thing in the UK and the US, a lot of publishers
#
came back and said, but this is just a book about some dancers in Bombay, it's a small
#
book about little people and it's just not like an India book.
#
And I wonder if I absorb that criticism and, which now, by the way, I completely disagree
#
with and felt like I have to write this big India book.
#
So I did so much research that at one point, you know, I'm talking about what Badaiyu was
#
like in the Bronze Age.
#
So you know, I went like all the way in the opposite direction, having spent wasted so
#
much time in archives here in London, digging up the history of Badaiyu and then looking
#
at all the old papers and, you know, understanding what Katra Sadatganj used to be like a hundred
#
And so then that happened.
#
And then I had my conversation with Alexandra and then I got to where we are right now.
#
And then it happened naturally, because I really do believe that there is no way to
#
escape, to circumvent those initial years.
#
You know, you have to go through the struggle to reach a point where everything comes together.
#
And how did you arrive at this specific book and also how do you pick the things that you
#
report on like steadfastly throughout your, you know, since you started writing, you know,
#
serious narrative nonfiction, you've, you know, you've written about women, you've
#
almost in a sense written not just about women, but about invisible women in India who would
#
otherwise be outside the gaze of the mainstream media.
#
And what you did in this case was you picked actually what was a pretty high profile case
#
and yet you thrust aside all the narratives about it that might have existed in the media
#
that this happened or that happened.
#
And then you went in from scratch and you just dove in.
#
Like is there, for example, now this leitmotif in your work that this is a kind of work that
#
These are the subjects that really interest me.
#
And then within that sort of frame of possibilities, how did this particular case and this particular
#
book grab your attention?
#
I'm not interested in bar at all.
#
I'm not interested in bar for people.
#
And I say that because, you know, I write about politics and I write about police and
#
I write about people with pool and people with status, but they don't interest me.
#
And I just, it's the people at the opposite end that interest me.
#
And it's always been that way.
#
And I think it might just come from having been a girl and a woman in India and seeing
#
how people viewed me and seeing how people view girls and women in general, constantly
#
undermining them, constantly underestimating them, constantly shushing them, speaking over
#
them, thinking that their opinions don't matter.
#
And I think I obviously disagree with that opinion.
#
And if you're very strongly about listening to people whose opinions aren't solicited,
#
I just tend to find them more interesting.
#
And it's just the powerlessness.
#
Because you know, if you're powerless in a place like India, I mean, life is just so,
#
I can't, I can't bear it.
#
I have such a visceral, even now, I mean, like I'm literally crying.
#
I have such a visceral reaction to it.
#
I can't believe how we expect to live in a certain way.
#
And we do not think other people should be allowed to live like that.
#
You know, the idea that you can go to Katra and people don't have drinking water, they
#
don't have power, they have to use the fields.
#
How is this acceptable?
#
How are we pretending that Katra, just because it's a village in Uttar Pradesh, means nothing.
#
And in fact, it does mean nothing because, you know, one of the women in the book says
#
She says, do our children mean nothing to the rich, to the powerful?
#
And I'm afraid the answer is yes, they don't.
#
And I simply cannot, I simply cannot understand how this is an acceptable response to the
#
And I think that, you know, my books, they lack opinion.
#
My books don't tell you how I feel because I genuinely don't think that my thoughts,
#
my feelings, my opinions are of any interest and you should not concern you.
#
You should concern yourself with the facts, don't pay attention to the reporter, right?
#
But I will say that behind these things, there is certainly profound feelings because otherwise
#
I can't do it, you know.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and come back and talk more about the book.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
One of the great joys of the last few months for me was discovering how much I enjoy teaching
#
what I've learned over the years.
#
And my online course, The Art of Clear Writing is now open for registration.
#
In this course, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know about
#
the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction and over the nine months that I've taught
#
this course, a lively writing community has formed itself.
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus JST or about 150 dollars and the February classes
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
#
a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
I can help you, IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
#
Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Sonia Follero about her wonderful book, The Good Girls.
#
And after speaking about Sonia for the first half of the show, we finally get down to talking
#
One of the delightful things I noticed about the book was that it has just the right amount
#
For example, at one point you're describing someone staying in Noida and you talk about
#
how the walls of the building shook when trucks rumpled past.
#
At another point you're describing the cops at the station and you write, quote,
#
Attired in night clothes, the five police officers were sprawled on charpoys, legs outstretched,
#
and potbellies heaving, stop quote.
#
And later on you write about how a journalist called Chaturvedi is on his way to the scene
#
of the action and you write, quote,
#
As Chaturvedi sped forward, he saw a man a few feet ahead lying in the middle of the
#
road, his open eyes looking up at the sky.
#
He was very likely drunk, but perhaps he was dead, and Chaturvedi swerved to avoid hitting
#
Which is a delightful light moment and obviously you're having fun.
#
At a different point you talk about how Ganga Singh is telling you, the inspector who's
#
called from a nearby town to the scene, and Ganga Singh is trying to impress upon you
#
how much of a hurry he was in.
#
So he says, quote, I didn't do Colgate, stop quote.
#
And one, how do you, to get these details means you're looking for these details also.
#
You're building this tapestry of observations, you're kind of obviously writing them down
#
somewhere and then you're weaving it in.
#
So what's your process like?
#
Because then you're being observant at multiple levels during the reporting of the story.
#
So how do you kind of approach all of this?
#
I can record for hours on end.
#
I've had recordings that are six hours long, eight hours long, but I don't rely primarily
#
I mean, I rely on them for the accuracy of a quote, but I think that my notes play just
#
as important a role because in my notes, I write about exactly the things that you talk
#
about what somebody's dressed, like what are their facial expressions, what is the environment
#
in which they're working, what are the sounds that you can hear, what are their mannerisms.
#
So I write and record at the same time.
#
And because I'm generally around people for as long as is appropriate and respectful,
#
then I also get time to process my thoughts in that moment.
#
If somebody leaves the room for a bit, then I get to process things and think about what
#
I need to do next, what questions I need to ask, what observations I need to make.
#
I just try and I like detail, I like to read detail, I absorb detail and it's something
#
that is important to my work, but I do also, I do like descriptions that go on and on because
#
I think that they take the reader away from the story and they're very rarely necessary.
#
I mean, I think that I don't think there's anybody who can't be summed up in more than
#
You can tell so much about a person in just a few words.
#
But I do think that so much of it also happens much later in the drafts because, you know,
#
there's the sifting through the information and making sure that you only use as much
#
You don't weigh down your story.
#
You know, some of the kind of early passages that struck me in your book also lay out beautifully,
#
you know, what the role of everyone in this story is and I'll read out a couple of these
#
and one in the first part of your book, you write quote, the men of Katra spent almost
#
The children studied here since a good school which taught English was near the orchard.
#
In the evenings when the edge of the clouds softened and blurred and a cool breeze rippled
#
through the crops, women came back down from the village to draw water and socialize.
#
They stitched the limping dogs and the limping dogs chased rats.
#
The smell was heat, husks and buffalo droppings, stop quote.
#
And later on, you write quote, as the sun climbed Padma and Lalli sat before their respective
#
family herds, lighting dung cakes into a flaring heap.
#
They heated oil and kneaded dough.
#
They returned to the fields with roti sabzi for the family members still toiling.
#
They trudged back home to scrub the dishes with wood ash for soap.
#
Off they went with their goats.
#
Back they came to milk the buffaloes.
#
They swept the courtyard.
#
They washed the clothes.
#
They jerked the heavy galvanized steel handle of the water pump up and down, up and down
#
to fill a bucket of water to wash themselves.
#
They swept the courtyard one more time.
#
Then they did something.
#
Then they did something else.
#
And I just thought this paragraph ends in such a masterful way.
#
Then they did something.
#
Then they did something else.
#
You get a sense of sort of the mind-numbing routine of these two girls who are 16 and
#
And this is an unspoken presence through the book, almost a protagonist, the fact that
#
boys and girls, men and women live such different lives and are assigned such different roles
#
that they might as well be in two separate worlds and in one of those worlds the people
#
You know, tell me a little bit about this and of course we know this.
#
It is there even in the cities.
#
It is not as if the cities are extremely different or progressive or whatever.
#
But just give me a sense of this sort of mahal as it were of Katra Sadatganj where, you
#
know, your story is based.
#
So I went to Katra first in 2015.
#
You know, back then I was not planning to write this kind of book.
#
I, like everybody else, was really consumed by the news of sexual assault in the papers
#
and I wanted to write a book about what was being spoken of as a phenomenon, as an epidemic
#
And I knew that it couldn't just be a book that wasn't anchored in something that had
#
And because the case in Katra was said to be open and shut, I thought that I would go
#
to Katra, do a few interviews of, you know, to say that I had done that and then come
#
back to London and work on the actual book.
#
And what I really noticed the first time I went to Katra was that the men had a lot to
#
I mean, the men were eager to talk.
#
They were warm and inviting and they just went on and on.
#
And I think that is something that is, you know, when we say, oh, it's easy to get people
#
to talk in India, or it's a reporter's paradise, anyone will speak to you.
#
What we actually mean is that it's easy to get men to talk to you, you know.
#
The women don't talk because they have never been encouraged to talk in mixed company or
#
in the company of men and they are used to being told literally to shut up.
#
As I heard, you know, one of the fathers who is mentioned in the book repeatedly say to
#
his wife, and this sense that, you know, the fathers are telling the story.
#
The fathers are the face of this, which is to some extent completely fair enough because
#
But the mothers, I hadn't heard speak except to express, you know, a sort of limited number
#
of sentiments over and over to say, for example, you know, we won't rest until we get justice.
#
If we don't get justice, we'll kill ourselves.
#
But beyond that, we hadn't heard from them.
#
And it just struck me when I went there that this is a village where women don't speak
#
and they're everywhere.
#
You know, they are right there kneading rotis, they're right there sweeping the courtyard,
#
they're right there washing clothes, grazing the buffaloes, shopping, working in the fields.
#
They are everywhere and they are all silent, they're mute.
#
And I found that really striking and really telling.
#
And I don't think that Katra is any better or worse than many places in India, but it
#
certainly meant that it required much more persistence and much more time to really get
#
a sense of what the girls' lives were and what might have become.
#
And that was my first experience of Katra.
#
And the second thing was, of course, you know, you must always be wary when there is just
#
the one spokesperson, when there is just the one person wielding power.
#
And this was certainly the case in the family of the Shakya family that is at the centre
#
of the book, where one person, Sohan Lal, who is the father of the younger girl who
#
I call Lalli, who was 14 years old at the time of her death, Sohan Lal did all the talking
#
and nobody would speak in his presence.
#
And as long as Sohan Lal was around, nobody would talk to me.
#
And that meant that if I didn't find a way to break this, to change this dynamic, then
#
I would only be telling Sohan Lal's story.
#
And that is, that's not what I wanted to do.
#
So those were the challenges before me.
#
Yeah, I was just rereading, you know, Yogantha by Airavati Karve, which talks about how in
#
our epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, you basically have men doing all the doing.
#
The women are just people to whom things are happening, you know, almost like objects.
#
And even in this book, it seems that all the action is driven forward by the men and the
#
women are kind of victims of it, like these two girls, but even beyond that, you know,
#
and even when you think of the Shakyas and the Yadavs, who are sort of the two groups
#
in the middle of this, it's almost like, you know, a century old caste conflict also playing
#
itself out in the microcosm of the story.
#
And even there, in a sense, they are both victims.
#
And you know, the one act of agency that I remember and that struck me from your book
#
was when the bodies of the girls are hanging on the tree, and you describe how the women
#
are then huddling just near it as if to protect those bodies with their bodies, which was
#
a kind of a powerful image.
#
How did you get past this then?
#
Like, did you get the women to speak to you?
#
Did you manage to get time with them?
#
Or did you just have to navigate through these different versions of these different men?
#
So I don't think that I was able to have an honest conversation with either of the children's
#
mothers in the first two, maybe three years.
#
Because every time I showed up at their house in Katra, even if I didn't request to speak
#
to Lalli's father, Sopan Lal, or Padma's father, Jeevan Lal, somebody would go running
#
to the fields to call them.
#
So you know, I would enter a house that was empty of men, because men usually don't stay
#
in the house during the day, except perhaps sometimes to come and nap, they stay in the
#
And it would be a house full of women.
#
But immediately, the men would descend, and the women would go silent.
#
And there's, it's very tricky to navigate yourself out of that situation.
#
How do you say I want to speak in private?
#
Because that's simply not something that is done, it's not considered acceptable.
#
And what changed was that I was just, because I was around for so long, the men couldn't
#
hang out with me anymore.
#
So I would show up at the house, and then somebody would go running to the fields and
#
And then I would wait for so long that the men would be like, yeah, I mean, we have to
#
go work, so you can just sit here.
#
And that's really, that's really what happened.
#
But you know, I'm not saying that it's easy.
#
And I don't want you to get the impression that I was particularly successful.
#
I think that if you spend your life as a woman, in places like Qatar, condemned to always
#
keep your feelings and your thoughts to yourself, I think it becomes a habit.
#
I don't think you trust people with your thoughts, your ideas, your opinions.
#
And perhaps I just got the short version, that's very possible.
#
Give me a sense of the sort of, like I found the politics of this place fascinating, not
#
politics in the sense of UP politics and how that's playing out and who the MPs are and
#
Akhilesh Yadav and all of that, even though they play little side roles in the story.
#
But just the internal politics that the two main protagonist groups in this are the Shakyas
#
and the Yadavs, and they're both sort of OBC groups.
#
But the Yadavs at different times have been politically much more powerful, including
#
at the time of the story when Akhilesh Yadav is sort of the chief minister, while the Shakyas
#
traditionally, until this point, have voted for Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj party.
#
And it's kind of understood, therefore, that whoever is in power as such has a little bit
#
You point to that, you know, the saying in such places, ki raad gayi baad gayi, that,
#
you know, there is no rule of law per se, you just have to kind of deal with it.
#
So give me a sense of what this kind of dynamic is.
#
And at the same time, what we find out about these particular Yadavs is that, you know,
#
they are here in this place because they have also escaped great strife in the past, this
#
You know, they are also victims and they continue to be victims through the story in a different
#
So what was that politics like?
#
How long did it take you to kind of understand all the dynamics of that?
#
And essentially, the more I read the story, the more it became clear to me that what is
#
really happening is shaped by this larger thing.
#
It's not shaped by the actions of, say, one or two impetuous individuals who are doing
#
It's shaped by this larger context, which, of course, includes this caste rivalry and
#
the misogyny we just discussed, but also so much else.
#
So give me a bit about how, you know, layer by layer you, I mean, you unpeeled it layer
#
by layer in the book, but in your process of writing it, tell me what it was like and
#
give my listeners a little sense of the setting of this whole story.
#
So that's the first time that I really got an insight into how important politics and
#
politicians and elections are to the people of this village was when one of Sohan Lal's
#
sons, Virender, who was 19 when I met him, spoke of one of the Shakya politicians as
#
We look after us, but essentially he's our man.
#
And I just thought that was so fascinating.
#
And, you know, he said it with a smile, he said it with a sense of confidence.
#
And I don't think that I've heard, you know, a lot of people in, say, a place like Bombay
#
do that about politicians feel a sense of familiarity and connection and not just familiarity
#
and connection because they share an ideology, but a proximity, like a physical proximity.
#
Because in these villages, first of all, the only way to get anything done if a politician,
#
your local MLA specifically, intervenes on your behalf.
#
So if you want to get a power connection, you want to police to investigate a crime,
#
you want your child to get into a good school, you need a politician to intervene.
#
And therefore these relationships are cultivated by the villagers.
#
You know, the villagers like Sohan Lal and Jeevan Lal, they would truck out to the home
#
of their local politician on the back of a motorcycle or in a tractor and just spend
#
the day there, you know, getting to know the politician's assistants, perhaps even seeing
#
the politician themselves.
#
But these are relationships that people cultivate.
#
And the politicians go out of their way to cultivate these relationships as well.
#
So the MLA for the Dattaganj constituency, which is where Katra village is located, is
#
a man called Sinod Kumar Shakya, who, by the way, has now been expelled from his party
#
But, you know, politicians understand or choose not to invest their time in making big changes.
#
Either they think it's too hard or they just don't want to be bothered.
#
What they focus on is the small fixes, you know, and which is, and a small fix example
#
is, you know, I've had a constituent comes and says, I'm having trouble with my neighbor.
#
He keeps moving the boundary line of his plot.
#
So can you do something about it?
#
Now, it's not really something that you would expect, you know, your local MLA to intervene
#
in, but this is something that Sinod Kumar Shakya would send his closest secretary, his
#
most trusted secretary, all the way to Katra to solve.
#
And Sinod Kumar himself shows up.
#
You would show up regularly in villages like Katra.
#
He hand out his calling card, ask his constituents to call him by his pet name, which is Deepu
#
Bhaya, and say to them, call me anytime.
#
And I cannot imagine living here in London, or even before in Bombay and Delhi, having
#
my MPs or my MLA's mobile number, you know, or just thinking that, oh my God, I've had
#
a fight with my neighbor, I'm going to call my MLA.
#
It's not, it's unthinkable.
#
And yet these relationships are real in many places in rural India.
#
And the narrative at the time of the Katra case was that politicians were just showing
#
up in Katra and they were politicizing the whole situation and how typical.
#
And that is not at all what happened.
#
What we don't understand is that the relationship between politicians and people in villages
#
such as Katra is long, it's deep, it is old, it's profound.
#
And the people of Katra sought out politicians at the first instance.
#
And these were not random politicians.
#
These were people that they considered, you know, members of their family.
#
There was no politicizing.
#
This was simply normal standard behavior.
#
If I'm going to call my MLA to resolve a dispute over my goat, then I'm certainly going to
#
call my MLA to resolve to investigate a terrible and deadly crime.
#
So this is something that I did not know and I understood very quickly, which is that the
#
Shakya family in Katra village has very close bonds with their local politician.
#
And by the way, you know, another angle, another narrative of this story was that there was
#
something sinister about either the Shakya's proximity to the politicians of their caste
#
or the Yadav's proximity to the politicians of their caste.
#
Absolutely nothing sinister about it.
#
This is how things are.
#
I mean, people vote their caste.
#
As we know in Uttar Pradesh, as the saying goes, they don't merely cast their vote.
#
So they vote for people of their caste.
#
And this relationship with politicians gave them a sense of comfort and security and anchors
#
them in a world that is so fraught, that is so uncertain.
#
And understanding it and understanding what that relationship was like, what the give
#
and take was, was certainly one of the most interesting aspects of reporting this book.
#
Yeah, I found it completely fascinating, both the competitive feudalism that exists and
#
the fact that there's no governance at all, which is why you tend to depend on this piecemeal
#
So you're calling your local guy and saying, you know, come fix my goat, somebody has been
#
beating my goat up or whatever the case may be.
#
And there are other sort of deeper social tensions, like just to sort of begin to go
#
along the narrative of the book, the two girls, the book is about, you've named them Padma
#
and Lalli, obviously we are not legally allowed to take names.
#
And they are kids of Suhamlal and Jeevanlal, who are, you know, the patriarchs of this
#
And at one point, one of their uncles, this very shady guy called Nazru, you know, comes
#
back at night when, you know, the two girls have gone to sort of defecate in the open
#
and he comes back and he says, there are thieves in the field.
#
And then they all, the whole, all the men take off to the field.
#
And then he tells him, no, no, that there weren't thieves in the field, but Pappu Yadav,
#
this other protagonist, he has gone off with the two girls and the girls are missing.
#
And this sets him into a full blown panic.
#
And yet the immediate family doesn't reveal to the fellow searchers what exactly has happened
#
just that the girls are missing and there was this very sort of telling paragraph by
#
you, but I love this paragraph and it says so much and I'll ask you to elaborate on it.
#
And you write quote, 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.
#
Quote, and elaborate on this a bit that already it is not just about an alarmed family worried
#
about the welfare of their two girls.
#
It's already become something more than that.
#
Yeah, look, I mean, I always feel the need to say the obvious, which is that these children
#
were beloved to their parents as children are.
#
Their parents adored them.
#
But you know, life in a village like our choice is very different from life where you and
#
I may live because there is no individual agency virtually.
#
And we seem to think that this is something that is specific to girls and women when when
#
while it's true that boys and men have more freedoms, they also are anchored to a vast
#
number of rules that dictate how they are to behave.
#
And for them, those rules determine their place in the village, their status in the
#
village, their happiness, their peace of mind, and ultimately their survival.
#
So what we have is, in a sense, a police state, you know, that is actually what a place like
#
Qatar is, people are policed by all the usual agencies, but they're also policed by each
#
other and they police each other.
#
And everybody, in a way, depends on on the other person for their survival.
#
We think in India that, you know, your actions are monitored or policed by the family and
#
that the family is considering its honor.
#
But actually, it's much bigger than that, because the family isn't just thinking about
#
their honor, they are thinking of their community, in this case, their clan, their village.
#
So there's this enormous sense of responsibility, a burden that everybody is carrying.
#
And even at a terrible and desperate time, a time that no parent can ever imagine, which
#
is the disappearance of a child, I do understand that Jeevan Lal and Sohan Lal would think
#
about what, how this would look, how it would be interpreted, how they would be judged,
#
what treatment would be meted out to them, because we do know this, that people are isolated
#
for much smaller things, you know, and it was possible that under certain circumstances,
#
the other villagers might stop doing business with them, might stop socializing with them,
#
might refuse to cross the threshold of their house for a cup of water or a plate of food.
#
And these are things that they have to take into consideration.
#
It is not that one parent is less loving than the other, or one parent is more obsessed
#
with social status than the other.
#
It is simply that this is the reality of life.
#
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, everybody's a victim.
#
It's not like X or Y are the bad guys, but everybody's kind of a victim, another sort
#
of fascinating minor role, or not such a minor role, but a small role, but an important role
#
in the story is the one intrusion that modernity makes into it, which is that of the mobile
#
And on one hand, it's obviously indicative of the way women are considered, that somebody
#
in the village gets upset when he sees Padma Lalli talking on a mobile phone, because he
#
is like, girls should not have phones, because then it helps them on the route towards greater
#
They will start talking to more people and all of that.
#
And later you discover that one of their fathers bought them the phone, and you're like, fine,
#
what an enlightened person, and that's of course Jeevan Lal buying the phone for Padma.
#
And then you discover towards the end that when he bought the phone, he deliberately
#
bought a phone which has a recording facility where the calls are getting recorded.
#
And that also plays an important part later on in the story.
#
And it's very interesting that we city people don't think of phones in this way, but a phone
#
becomes such a significant thing.
#
First it's like representation of the mobility and empowerment.
#
You don't want to give a woman, and then it becomes a tool of suppression where you're
#
almost like spying on your little girl and all of that.
#
And it kind of plays a big part in the story.
#
How did all of this kind of start emerging?
#
Like at what point did you realize that, you know, the phone plays such an important part
#
I mean, I won't give away how the whole thing ends or whatever, but you know, in a pre-phone
#
era, everything would have played out so differently.
#
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
#
I don't remember the exact moment.
#
I don't even know that at any point during my reporting, I saw a woman in the Shakya
#
But I did learn early on that the mothers didn't use phones unless a phone was handed
#
to them with somebody actually on the line because they don't recognize numbers or letters.
#
And they were extremely unfamiliar with phones.
#
They could just take calls.
#
But I did know that their children enjoyed using phones, were very familiar with them,
#
and they used phones like teenagers anywhere else in India and in fact many other parts
#
of the world use phones.
#
They used phones to have fun.
#
They used phones to communicate with their loved ones.
#
They used phones as just for the pleasure of having something that was special and fancy
#
and expensive that they could say they had access to, that they could flaunt.
#
And it was just for them, I think it was just a way to feel like who they were.
#
They were just kids, they were teenagers.
#
And they were at that age in their lives, but mainly when they really had to break free
#
You know, we've all been through that stage and we all know what it's like when the most
#
important thing in the world is not the company of your mom and dad.
#
It is the company of your peers.
#
It is not your parents with whom you want to share secrets.
#
It's your peers and one way of connecting with your peers is with technology and that's
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, so this has happened that they go looking for these
#
girls and then they go to the cops.
#
Now you've also given at different parts of the book an evocative description of what
#
the police set up in the villages like, which is when, you know, one begins to understand
#
in a deeper way why there is no governance and why they all depend on the piecemeal patronage
#
of politicians because the police system is so messed up.
#
So tell me a little bit about what is, how is the rule of law in this village?
#
What are the policemen like?
#
So, you know, if you just showed up in the village and you saw the chalky had five police
#
officers, you think, well, that's really good.
#
Five police officers for a village that's not particularly big, that has no history
#
of major crimes, that, you know, everybody belongs to the same caste virtually and everyone
#
is of the same socioeconomic background.
#
So, you know, that obviously reduces the potential for strife, which is the whole purpose of
#
You would think, well, that's pretty good.
#
But actually those five police officers had to police more than 40 villages and they had
#
You know, they had no landline.
#
They used their own phones and their own motorcycles and they were not compensated for that.
#
They were only compensated for the use of bicycles.
#
And although it wasn't a reporting chalky, which means that they did not have the power
#
to file an FIR, there were times when, you know, in any one of these villages, a serious
#
crime would happen and they would be the first responders and first responders with virtually
#
no training, first responders with no resources.
#
What can they do really, even if they want to do something, what can they do?
#
And it must be said that, you know, you do this kind of job long enough and you don't
#
actually want to do anything.
#
You don't feel like you have any part to play.
#
And even if you did, you don't want to play it.
#
And I think that's what it was with this group of five men.
#
You know, they were all painted as being enormously antagonistic, that they went out of their
#
way to harass, virtually torture the family of the children.
#
But in my experience, Amit and very much with this book, you know, people are much more
#
likely not to care than to care to the point where they are doing something bad to you,
#
you know, and it's not caring.
#
This liturgy is really what triggered and tends to trigger often problems.
#
So you know, you had a group of cops who are lethargic, were distant, not malevolent, but
#
It was enough that they were just that bad.
#
I think just as there is Hanlon's razor about not attributing to malice what can be explained
#
by stupidity, I can now coin something after you, which is Falero's razor, which is never
#
attribute to ill will what can be explained by apathy.
#
And you know, as you pointed out, the apathy is completely understandable because these
#
cops show up, they're very far from the families, they don't have a place to stay.
#
They don't have a place to wash this.
#
You know, there's absolutely nothing.
#
One of them is sleeping in an abandoned school.
#
One of them is sleeping in the courtyard outside.
#
It's just a complete mess and you know, how do they cope with it?
#
They cope with it by being drunk all the time.
#
And once in a while, when a case for about a missing goat comes up, they do what they
#
have to and they're kind of, you know, this becomes a problem.
#
Now what the interesting thing about this case, and you've given plenty of statistics
#
about crime and women in the book, which I won't quote and which we don't really need
#
to, we know what it's like in India, but you know, there are a few sort of seminal cases
#
which pick up like, you know, Nirbhaya notably for a variety of reasons.
#
And then this also caught public attention, partly because of the image that went viral
#
on Facebook of these two girls hanging.
#
And at one point you write that shortly after this happens, quote, the road to Katra was
#
soon jammed with horse carts, motorbikes and tractors.
#
The farmers brought their wives, their wives toted children and some even carried guns.
#
The visitors gazed up at the girls, larki or tangi, girls hanging, stop quote.
#
And already the circus has begun, but what is a critical factor in the circus continuing?
#
And this almost seems a masterstroke, unwilling or otherwise by Sohamlal is the decision of
#
the family not to allow the bodies to come down.
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, the thinking behind this and why it made so much
#
sense and what was for them and what was driving them towards, you know, this kind of a decision
#
of letting the girls hang there in the sun and not letting the cops nearby or anybody
#
nearby as a, you know, what led to it?
#
Yeah, I think this was the single most important decision that the family took.
#
And it just shows how well they understand this society in which they belong and how
#
poorly everybody misjudged them.
#
You know, from the media to the politicians who showed up, everybody looked, gazed upon
#
them and said, oh, these poor simple folk, we need to help them.
#
But nobody understood the pursuit of justice and what can possibly make it happen better
#
than people who have spent their entire lives seeking justice for one thing or the other?
#
I mean, somebody like me has nothing to tell them that they didn't already know.
#
And it was so, so brave, so strategic.
#
It was so profoundly moving also.
#
And the decision simply came from the sense that their children were dead.
#
They needed to find out what had happened.
#
The police in the chalky couldn't be trusted to solve the disappearance of a goat.
#
Therefore, people have to come in to investigate the case.
#
And the only way to get those people, whoever those people may be, is to protest.
#
And they had learned the language of protest from the protests that followed the 2012 Delhi
#
You know, news of that rape, the impact and the outcome of the protests that reached so
#
many corners of the country where I've reported from.
#
And it also reached Qatar.
#
And the lesson that the Shakya family took from the protest was that it matters raising
#
your voice, putting your foot down, doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter where you
#
It matters because what it does is that it attracts attention and it attracts the media
#
and the politicians care about the media.
#
Politicians and the police don't care about anybody, but they care about the media and
#
they care about public shaming.
#
And that is a very Indian thing.
#
You know, that is a cultural characteristic that we can tolerate a lot, but we don't want
#
We don't like that humiliation.
#
And that is ultimately what the family was going for.
#
They wanted to create a sense of shame among the people who mattered so that they could
#
just find out, the family could just find out what had happened to their children.
#
And you know, I think at one level, people didn't give, the public didn't give the family
#
credit for the thoughtful way in which they approached the investigation.
#
And on the other hand, I think that we also failed them because, you know, you cannot
#
put a family from a village like Katrasavaganch in front of a TV camera and then just leave
#
And then imagine that they're going to be able to tolerate that level of scrutiny.
#
So yeah, I mean, I think there was so much more going on than anybody understood at the
#
And I was able to get a sense of it because I came in so late.
#
And I think that there's a lot of value in being the person who shows up afterwards,
#
And you know, in the moment, a journalist who landed up would just have found what you
#
could call the fog of war, where there is just, you don't really know what is happening.
#
And while they are masterful in sort of this particular sort of decision that we won't
#
let the bodies down till the world takes us seriously and people do something about it,
#
while that works, you know, Sohan Lal also realizes at the same time that if the media
#
come, you have to give them a sensational narrative.
#
And that narrative is really driven by a couple of things.
#
One is, of course, the testimonies and the constantly changing, conflicting testimonies
#
about what happened where, you know, first he tries to train the girl's uncle to sort
#
of talk about how Pappu and his brothers took the girls away.
#
Then he tries to tell them that one of the inspectors was a Yadav and the Pappu's father
#
took the girls away and so on and so forth.
#
Therefore, building that kind of narrative of gang rape, which is, you know, a sensational
#
headline and building that narrative of victim, what did the media plays along?
#
The media plays along in the sense that first, I think it was Reuters who first misreported
#
the Shakyas as Dalits, which of course are not their OBCs like the Yadavs.
#
And you know, one of the police people, Gangwar was also reported as a Yadav, which of course
#
And these convenient narratives build up and then everybody wants to believe this to the
#
point that when you get to the post-mortem stage, there's actually pressure on the untrained
#
people doing the post-mortem to certify that the girls actually were raped.
#
So and even when you are going in, you know, you're going into the story very late, but
#
these narratives are dominant.
#
This is what everybody wants to believe, you know, or even in another case, like Arushi
#
Talwar, where, you know, the cops in that case, of course, kind of did the opposite
#
of what they did here, you know, here they uncovered some of the truth, but there they
#
again build these powerful narratives of honor killing and all that, which then enter the
#
popular imagination and there's nothing you can do.
#
So when you went to sort of report on this case, these narratives were dominant, that
#
if you fought these narratives, that this was a gang rape by the dominant Yadavs, then
#
you could be accused of, you know, siding with the dominant caste here and all of that.
#
And what does one do about the unvarnished truth then?
#
So what was your sense of sort of peeling the layers off and seeing the actual story
#
One day, you know, about it's hard now, you know, to tell one year from the other, but
#
I think maybe two or three years into reporting the story, I was walking in the village with
#
Padma's father, Jeevan Lal, and we were just taking a walk and he stopped at a tall wooden
#
door and he said, this is my animal shelter.
#
This is where on the night my children disappeared, our children disappeared, Nazru came to tell
#
me that khet mein aadmi hai.
#
And I remember that moment so clearly, I remember being absolutely shocked, absolutely being
#
rooted to the spot, feeling the sun beating on my face, because that is not the story
#
that I had read anywhere, and that is not the story that anyone had told me in the first
#
The story that I knew until that time was that Nazru had gone running with the news
#
to the Shakya house, the house where the family lives on a single plot of land, where all
#
18 of them live in three demarcated houses.
#
So now I'm hearing that actually Nazru didn't go to the house, he came to the animal shelter.
#
And you know, this is actually so significant.
#
I mean, this is on one hand, this is where you can say the story starts.
#
Of course, it's not true.
#
Stories like this never start on the night of the event, right?
#
They start years before.
#
But needless to say, this particular story was supposed to have started from the time
#
Nazru comes running from the fields, bangs on the door of the Shakya house and says khet
#
mein aadmi hai, thieves in the field, thieves in the field.
#
So now I'm hearing that actually he went to Jeevan Lal's animal shelter.
#
And this is shocking for so many reasons.
#
First of all, everybody has been telling one story that is incorrect, factually incorrect
#
So why would they do this?
#
And what else is incorrect about what I've been hearing?
#
Secondly, because this fact of knocking on Jeevan Lal's door very specifically, as opposed
#
to the family door, it tells you so much that you might not have known otherwise.
#
It tells you, for example, that Nazru, the cousin, Jeevan Lal's first cousin, knew where
#
he was at a particular time of night, because these men don't spend their day in the animal
#
They go there at specific times.
#
So he knew Jeevan Lal well enough to know that at this specific time, Jeevan Lal will
#
be in his animal shelter.
#
The other thing that we know about this is that Nazru chose to tell Jeevan Lal.
#
He didn't choose to tell the whole family, which would be the natural thing.
#
He singled out one brother, one person, and said, I will give this incredibly significant
#
So by not getting this fact right, I could have missed out on so much.
#
But what this actually teaches you is not that the family members who repeatedly told
#
the story of Nazru knocking on the family house were lying.
#
I don't believe they were lying.
#
I think what happens is that if you know you're going to tell the same story over and over,
#
your mind simply makes your attempts to make everything easy for you and tells you to tell
#
the simplest version of the story, and therefore it becomes much simpler for members of the
#
family to say Nazru came to the house rather than to say Nazru went to the animal shelter.
#
We have three animal shelters.
#
He went to Jeevan Lal's animal shelter.
#
You know, they just made their life easier.
#
But by doing that, it led me to say, what else did they omit unknowingly?
#
What other information am I not getting because people are just trying to give me the shorthand?
#
And from that time on, if I had taken any piece of information for granted, I stopped
#
because it was a really, really good reminder to not assume anything and to always ask people
#
questions directly and very specifically and repeatedly.
#
Really, did he come to your house?
#
Or did he come somewhere else?
#
And then the moment that piece of information came out, then all the other little pieces
#
of information started coming out because also a couple of things happen when you make
#
it clear that facts matter.
#
What happens is that people start telling you the facts.
#
So when I said, look, I didn't know this, I need to know what else happened, then that's
#
when you don't get the shorthand version and also because you're not in a hurry and people
#
understand that you're not in a hurry, then it changes everything.
#
But that was a defining moment for me in the reporting.
#
I mean, why was it significant though that he, I mean, apart from the fact that this
#
was a more, that there was a nuance to that simple story that instead of going directly
#
to the house, he went to Jeevan Lal, why else was it significant?
#
I mean, of course, Jeevan Lal was Padma's father, you know, the older girl's father,
#
you know, at the sort of center of this.
#
Was there any other reason why it was significant or it was just indicative that there are more
#
He wanted to get Jeevan Lal to the fields to see something.
#
And I won't go into details for your listeners, but it was important that Jeevan Lal witnessed
#
what Nazru saw or believed he saw.
#
And he wanted to, Jeevan Lal alone to know, have this information because he was also
#
sensitive to the fact that Jeevan Lal wouldn't thank him if this information reached anybody
#
else, including the members of his own family.
#
So he was, as we find out later, being very sneaky, but at the same time being protective
#
It's actually fascinating in the light of what happens and would make sense from Nazru's
#
Let's also now, you know, we discussed the ramshackle state of the police station and
#
Let's also talk about the post-mortem.
#
And again, you have a para where you describe this quote, when the convoy of vehicles from
#
Katra drew up at the gates of the post-mortem house, it was only around 6.30 p.m., but the
#
place was soaked in darkness.
#
The district magistrate had to be petitioned for a power generator.
#
Then paperwork had to be filed and then the police had to find digital cassettes to record
#
Finally, someone offered the police his wedding video to tape over.
#
It had now been more than 12 hours since the girls' bodies were found.
#
And as you've pointed out, the guy who did the main part of the autopsy, as it were, was
#
an untrained sweeper because there weren't trained people who would kind of do this.
#
There was no equipment in the place.
#
So he had actually gone and bought what was basically a butcher's knife to cut bodies
#
open and the result was that families or victims would get bodies back in a mutilated state,
#
which would of course distress them.
#
But there would also be no useful scientific information from there.
#
And because it had to be determined whether, you know, there was sexual assault or not,
#
you know, they asked this doctor called Pushpa Tripathi, who wasn't a specialist in this,
#
to kind of go and check the bodies out and talk about how this got so dramatically botched
#
up and fed into the media narrative of what had actually happened.
#
So I think anybody who followed the case remembers Lala Ram, who was tasked with carrying out
#
the post-mortem, being described as a sweeper.
#
And I'm sure I'm not the only one who said, yeah, you know what, that's just investigators
#
trying to discredit the post-mortem for their own reasons.
#
So when I went to Badanyu, I met Lala Ram, of course, and I met several other people
#
who were involved in the post-mortem.
#
But because of this description of Lala Ram, you know, him being a sweeper, him wielding
#
a butcher's knife, which was the language of investigators, I actually asked for permission
#
to witness him carrying out a post-mortem.
#
And so just a few days after that, while I was in Badanyu, Lala Ram phoned me and he
#
said, look, a man got pulled under his own tractor and the police are bringing him over
#
and he died and the police are bringing him over.
#
And if you want to watch me, you should hurry up.
#
And so I went to the post-mortem house and I went to it's basically two rooms in a buffalo
#
field by a river with a train zipping past.
#
And when I stepped into those two rooms, it was like stepping into a set of a haunted
#
house, you know, because there were literally cobwebs hanging from the ceilings.
#
There was red wax on the post-mortem table, that is the red ceiling wax that is used to
#
seal post-mortem reports.
#
There were rusty implements that I assume had been used in earlier post-mortems.
#
Everything was dusty and the furniture was literally broken.
#
I couldn't understand where Lala Ram planned to carry out his post-mortem.
#
And then I heard his voice and I stepped out of these rooms and there he was in the back
#
garden, in his vest and trousers, barefoot, because, you know, he didn't want to stain
#
his chappals and he was wearing gloves and he had a knife in his hand and the body of
#
this young man who had just died was laid out on a table.
#
It had been built by the British and it was, has been standing, that metal rusty table
#
has been standing in the back garden of this post-mortem house for I don't know how many
#
And there was Lala Ram with his knife under the tree, the crows cawing.
#
And at his feet there's a bucket where he's essentially, you know, every time he's opening
#
up a cavity in this young man and taking something out, he drops it into the bucket.
#
It was so disturbing and so profoundly sad to see this young man who had been alive just
#
an hour ago, just being chopped up like this, you know, and Lala Ram was doing what he knew
#
He was doing what he had been trained to do and what the hospital paid him to do.
#
You know, this wasn't somebody who was, who had taken an oath to be, you know, to be a
#
doctor and then was violating that oath.
#
This was a man who had grown up in a village close by who had seen an advertisement in
#
the newspaper, soliciting help in the hospital as a cleaner and who one day when he was cleaning
#
the wards was asked if he would like to conduct post-mortems and has been doing so ever since
#
And Lala Ram is not the exception.
#
This is routinely, as anybody will tell you, how post-mortems in many parts of India are
#
carried out with the obvious results.
#
And you know, I saw it firsthand.
#
So Lala Ram was not demonized by investigators, but I think that what they did not do was
#
offer context, which is that Lala Ram did not, was not the exception.
#
An individual like Lala Ram is the rule.
#
And you know, if I had gotten into a car accident and died in, while I was in Badainu, that's
#
where I would have ended up.
#
And that's true of anybody living in that area.
#
It's sort of also an indication of what a pathetic state we are in terms of state capacity
#
in the sense that you have these procedures which you implant from say a more modern context
#
that in a Western world, when this happens, we have to do a post-mortem, therefore we
#
We shall tick that box.
#
But hey, we don't have the capacity to do it.
#
And therefore you do some kind of shoddy jugar like this.
#
And before you know it becomes a rule and there is really no pressure to do any better.
#
Now, now an interesting, and we'll come back to the post-mortem later, but an interesting
#
angle that kind of struck me is that in the popular imagination, we think that all these
#
investigations will be dictated by politics.
#
So you would imagine that Akhilesh Yadav is for the Yadavs, he'll try to protect the guilty.
#
And then if the CBI comes in, they'll act on Modi's orders and he's against the Yadavs.
#
So he'll try to implicate them.
#
But what happens in a sense is the opposite, that the administration actually acts immediately.
#
All five policemen are suspended, two of them are charged with the same crime.
#
All the Yadavs, the Yadav brothers and Pappu and both his brothers are picked up and arrested.
#
And there's immediate action.
#
And then the CBI comes in to growing popular demand.
#
And the CBI actually finds that there isn't much merit to this particular case at all.
#
And I leave it to readers to kind of, you know, go through all the details and the different
#
layers of that, how the testimonies were kind of kept changing again and again and were
#
But what struck me was that at the post-mortem, you have, you know, Pushpa Trivedi who comes
#
across this naked body because by that time Lala Ram has already snipped off the clothes
#
and she finds vaginal blood and there's a crowd outside which is shouting rape, you
#
know, this pressure from the mob.
#
So she says, yeah, it's a sign of rape, even though the hymen is intact.
#
And later the CBI discovers that actually part of the evidence, which is the clothes
#
that had been snipped off, had a menstrual pad.
#
The girl was menstruating, which explained the menstrual blood and that to call it rape
#
And yet Dr. Pushpa Trivedi, who's a lady in her fifties acting purely out of goodwill,
#
made that decision in that moment given what was happening.
#
And it seemed to me so, so dangerous and so almost fortuitous that that sort of that lie
#
gets discovered, you know, or not even a lie that you, what you thought to be a fact is
#
And that gets discovered otherwise had events proceeded, had the CBI not come in, for example,
#
you know, Pappu Yadav and his family could, you know, just be in jail forever, if not
#
murdered there, as has happened with other inmates, as we know.
#
So what was your sense just seeing all of this kind of unfold in the way that it did?
#
I think it just filled me with despair that, you know, the girls never really had a chance
#
that, look, I mean, everybody messed up, everyone let them down and most people were not doing
#
People really are just that ignorant, people really are just that incompetent.
#
They really, they really are like that.
#
And I think it's easy for us to point to politicians and to just speak in vague terms about, you
#
know, like systems and not really understand what it's like to be on the ground in places
#
like this, where everybody is, often people are struggling to do their best, but it's
#
They don't have the resources, they don't have the education, they don't have the time.
#
And there is just no accountability, you know.
#
So Dr. Tripathi, as you point out, didn't come to two conclusions based on scientific
#
But Dr. Tripathi shouldn't have been there.
#
You know, that is not her specialty, if anything, I mean, we must commend her on showing up
#
because she was no one's first choice.
#
She was not employed by that particular hospital, no doctor in the hospital, no female doctor
#
specifically who was asked to come forward did.
#
I mean, you know, why should a dermatologist or a gynecologist or, you know, a general
#
practitioner have to come in and assess two dead bodies?
#
So she did it, but she was not equipped to do it.
#
And just as Lala Ram was not equipped to do his job, and frankly, no one in that room.
#
And you know, they now then had to live with the consequences and they have subsequently
#
spent all the years justifying their actions.
#
Yes, it's kind of very sad.
#
Now, I don't sort of want to give away the end of your book, as you said, you'd want
#
the readers to read it for themselves.
#
It's not even a judgment you come to, it's just that all the facts lead in a particular
#
You know, after reading the book, I kind of tried to see what was there in the popular
#
domain about this case.
#
And there's nothing that, you know, comes remotely close to what you uncovered in your
#
It's almost in that sense, like a piece of investigative journalism that comes to a new
#
But the broader conclusion about who is responsible for these deaths seems to me to be everybody.
#
Like, you know, one of the moments in the book which made me just sit up was when Sohamlal
#
is being questioned, you know, Lalli's father, and he's asked about, you know, that if these
#
girls had lived and if they brought dishonor to you, what would you do?
#
And he said, I would kill them.
#
And then it sort of becomes a matter of happenstance that he didn't have to do it, that it happened
#
in whatever way it happened.
#
And it seems that, you know, even beyond that single event of what happened that night,
#
you know, those girls were doomed anyway.
#
You know, and I know that's a very negative conclusion.
#
And in the times that we live in, I sometimes wonder that, you know, should with all that
#
is happening around us, is there any point to even being hopeful that this is the way
#
And, you know, my question to you is, you've actually gone to these places, spoken to these
#
people, one, how do you keep your emotions out of this while reporting, like there is
#
one Sonia who obviously feels deeply about this, but there's another Sonia who's just
#
taking down facts, who's observing things, who's looking for the smallest things, who's,
#
you know, strategizing what to do next and how to inquire about this.
#
How do you keep your emotions from getting in the way?
#
How do you keep from being judgmental about all of these people?
#
I mean, at an intellectual level, sure, we can talk about them and talk about how they
#
are all victims of circumstance in a sense and, you know, they're but for the grace of
#
God go I, but, you know, but how do you, how do you, what is that process like?
#
Because I can't imagine doing something like this for as long as you did.
#
I just focus on what is real.
#
You know, what is real is that I'm a reporter who has a job to do and I need to do that
#
job in the best possible way and make sure that it gets done.
#
And that is real and that is what I focus on and I don't focus on how it impacts me
#
and I, you do, there is an impact and one carries one's work home, but it's, I can compartmentalize
#
because I don't, I know that I am not the story.
#
I know that and I know that my thoughts, my feelings, the impact on me is nothing.
#
It's just nothing compared to the impact on people who continue to inhabit this story
#
long after I have exited, you know, I can tell the difference.
#
I'll ask you a tangential question, not really about the book, but something that I've been
#
thinking about to the extent that it will almost feel like a cliche to listeners of
#
the show where when I am sort of talking about the constitution or political philosophy or
#
whatever with guests who are speaking about the subjects, I'll ask them that, you know,
#
was our constitution, a liberal constitution imposed upon an illiberal society and therefore
#
And in a sense, you've gone from, you know, the cities where we have, you know, and both
#
of us being fairly privileged, have grown up within these bubbles where we think of
#
India as liberal and secular and all of these things.
#
And then when you come into contact with the real India and you realize that the real India
#
is nothing like this, that it is completely different place, perhaps inhabiting, you know,
#
different centuries at different times in 19th century or even before.
#
And my sense always has been that if we wanted to make India more liberal, it could not have
#
been done through top-down imposition.
#
It had to happen through social change, much like Mahatma Gandhi himself said, it has to
#
happen from the bottom up.
#
And that's a task I think that liberals have, number one, failed in and we have to take
#
responsibility for that.
#
And I don't know if it is going to happen at all or whether society has finally caught
#
So, you know, I know I sound very pessimistic there, but, you know, as someone who has left
#
this bubble and actually seen the real India for what it is, which you describe so incredibly
#
evocatively and powerfully in your book, what's your take on this?
#
I can't afford to be pessimistic because I think that I just can't, I won't.
#
Of course, everything you read in the news, everything you see when you report from frankly
#
most parts of India will fill you with despair, makes you think that, you know, this is it,
#
this is the, this is the end of civilization.
#
But, you know, the truth is also, as you rightly say, Amit, that we live in a liberal bubble
#
and a lot of this idea that things are getting worse has come to us more recently in the
#
last few years, whereas in fact, I suspect that if we lived in a place like Kashmir,
#
if we belonged to an indigenous community, we would have always known that India is very,
#
very, very hard on its people and will snatch even the smallest iota of power from the most
#
So I think that we've experienced a country that, that in a way that is perhaps not how
#
it has ever been and I can only be optimistic, I can only feel that I think there's space
#
I don't, I can't, I mean, I don't want to say things can't get worse because I think
#
we know better than that, but I remain hopeful.
#
You didn't sound very hopeful, but it's been, you know, great talking to you and hopefully
#
the next time we chat about something, it can be about more cheerful subjects.
#
Sonia, thank you so much for not just spending the last couple of hours chatting with me,
#
but for writing this book and all the work that you do.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up The Good Girls by Sonia Fallero.
#
All her other books will also be linked from the show notes.
#
You can follow Sonia on Twitter at Sonia Fallero.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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