Lal looked down at his phone. It was dead.
In Katra, Jeevan Lal tried dialling a few more times. Then he called Harbans. The reception this far out was so poor, the calls kept dropping, and it was past 10 p.m. when Lalli’s father heard the full story.
As was often the case, practical matters took priority. Sohan Lal needed to get home right away, but to wake early one went to bed early. And almost everyone around him was already asleep. So he called a cousin in Katra, the same man who had helped him buy his new phone.
‘I have to get home,’ he told Yogendra Singh, whose prosperous family owned several vehicles.
‘Is it an emergency?’
Yogendra Singh’s white Mahindra Bolero SUV had been giving him steering trouble. He had a motorcycle, but Sohan Lal and Harbans were with two others, and a motorcycle could hardly accommodate all five of them. Then he remembered a problem with the chain of his bike, which was just as well.
‘I won’t come out at night,’ he said.
There were no street lights in these parts. Some drivers compensated by turning on their high beams, even though it meant blinding oncoming traffic. But it was equally possible, Yogendra knew, that he might be waylaid, robbed and killed. What was an extreme scenario elsewhere was a legitimate concern here. Uttar Pradesh was the murder capital of India.16
Beside Yogendra lay his wife – and at her breast, suckling contentedly, was their newborn daughter swaddled in a piece of sari cloth.
‘I won’t come alone,’ he said firmly.
Sohan Lal hung up.
Then curiosity got the better of Yogendra. Why would his cousin venture out in the dark?
Taking along his father, Neksu Lal, and two brothers, he set off to investigate. The tall sturdy men carried torches to illuminate the inky night into which they now waded. Up and down, the unpaved streets were empty. All the doors were shut. Even the stray dogs that animated the hottest days with their relentless barks heaved with sleep.
There were a number of people milling about the Shakya courtyard. Their girls had gone to the toilet, the newcomers were told. They hadn’t returned.
The Shakyas didn’t say that someone had taken them.
Even with this limited information it was clear that the matter was of the utmost seriousness. Girls didn’t disappear into thin air. But not a single person present suggested walking over to the police chowki that was located not five minutes away. If they were aware that there was a number they could call for help, they didn’t dial it.
16 Uttar Pradesh was the murder capital of India: hindustantimes.com/lucknow/up-is-the-murder-capital-of-india/story-YXx35AZhrSvnXXHehbSNYP.html
Every Eight Minutes
To the Shakyas, the threshold of a police station could feel as insurmountable as a fortress wall. The Indian police were known for their dismissive attitude towards the poor. They were meant to serve and protect, but they were just as likely to kill.17 The roughly shaven, khaki-clad men of the local force had the most terrifying reputation of all. ‘UP police ka koi bharosa nahin,’ it was said. You never know with the UP police.
There was plenty of truth to this notion. Around 2005, children from a slum in Noida started to disappear. The slum dwellers, who worked for the wealthy occupants of the city’s towering apartment blocks, repeatedly went to the police and begged them to intervene. To one distraught mother an officer said, ‘Why do you people have so many children if you can’t look after them?’18 Scrutinising the photograph of her missing twenty-year-old daughter, he declared, ‘She looks so beautiful. She probably eloped.’19
Missing person cases continued to stream in, but by many accounts the police refused to take them seriously.
Then in 2006, officials found seventeen chopped-up bodies, including those of several children, in a sewer behind the home of a wealthy businessman who lived near the slum. The clothes of the missing young woman were also found there. The gruesome details made headlines, and only because of this was the case even investigated in the first place.20 The killers – the businessman and his domestic help – had gone undetected for years, most likely because they had chosen their victims from among the city’s poor.
Since police stations were evaluated on the number of cases they solved, officers had an incentive to open only those with a chance of success. Solving the mystery of a missing child required time, manpower and resources – things that the police were generally short of. Between 2012 and 2014, the police filed FIRs – First Information Reports – in less than 60 per cent of such cases.21 This negligence contributed to an epidemic of missing and exploited children, many of them trafficked within and outside the country.22
In the year that Padma and Lalli went missing, 12,361 people were kidnapped and abducted in Uttar Pradesh,23 accounting for 16 per cent of all such crimes in India. Across the country, one child went missing every eight minutes, said Kailash Satyarthi, who went on to jointly win the Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai.24 And these were just the reported cases.
The economist Abhijit Banerjee, who later also jointly won a Nobel Prize for his approach to alleviating global poverty, explained that ‘parents may be reluctant to report children who ran away as a result of abuse, sexual and otherwise.’ He added that this was likely ‘rampant’.25 In fact, some parents sold their children or deliberately allowed unwanted daughters to stray in busy marketplaces. No one reported them missing, and so, no one looked for them.
Even in a tiny village like Katra where everyone was of the same social class, the Shakya family believed that the police would still take sides. They would choose to favour the person of their caste. And told that the culprit was Yadav, they would most likely wave away the Shakyas, being Yadavs themselves. ‘Raat gayi toh baat gayi,’ they would say, grunting back to sleep. The night has concluded and so has the incident.
‘It was easy to ask why we didn’t immediately go to the chowki,’ Jeevan Lal would later complain. Time was scarce and he preferred not to waste it on a thankless task.
There was, however, another reason that Padma’s father held back.
17 just as likely to kill: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12696470
18 ‘Why do you people have so many children’: nytimes.com/2007/01/07/world/asia/07india.html
19 Ibid.
20 The gruesome details made headlines: ndtv.com/india-news/nithari-rape-and-murder-case-moninder-singh-pandher-surender-koli-sentenced-to-death-1728506
