The Good Girls. Sonia Faleiro

       Prologue

      Good Days Are Coming Soon

      People called them Padma Lalli like they were one person.

      ‘Padma Lalli?’

      ‘Padma Lalli!’

      ‘Have you seen Padma Lalli?’

      At sixteen Padma was the older cousin by two years. She was small, only five feet, but even so she was bigger than Lalli by three inches. Padma had oval eyes, smooth skin and collarbones that popped. She had long black hair that she knew to pat down with water and tightly plait or else there would be words.

Lalli’s kameez hung from her frame like washing on the line. Round-shouldered and baby-faced, she was the quiet romantic who read poems out loud.1 Padma had dropped out of school, but Lalli told her father she wanted to study and get a job. And while it would please him to share the memory of this conversation, they had both known it would never happen. The school Lalli attended had a roof, but not enough rooms – many classes were conducted outside, in the dirt, and there were seven teachers for 400 pupils. But even if the school had been different, a girl’s destiny lay in the hands of her husband.

      School broke up one blazing afternoon in May, and all the children congregated in Ramnath’s orchard to shout, run and climb trees. Lalli hurried to Padma’s side. As the others pelted down green mangoes, the teenagers stood aloof. They were together always, apart from everyone.

      Some 3,000 people lived in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in the Budaun district of western Uttar Pradesh, crammed into less than one square mile of land. On harvest mornings, when it was time to cut the rabi crops, the entire village congregated in the fields. Women hitched their saris and men rolled up their trouser bottoms. By 8 a.m. the ground was tapestried with branches of tobacco, and freshly picked garlic bulbs filled the air with a biting fragrance.

      Even small children pitched in. They shooed the crows that swooped through the fields like great black fishing nets, they chased away the long-limbed rhesus monkeys that prowled lunch bundles for roti sabzi.

      That summer, temperatures climbed to 42 degrees Celsius. Amid whirlpools of dust, cobras slithered out of their holes, but the barefoot boys and girls paid no heed. The harvest was the one precious opportunity their families had to make money.

      Economic growth had improved

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