on 26 May, a charismatic new Prime Minister named Narendra Modi was sworn in with an irresistible slogan, ‘achhe din aane waale hain’. Good days are coming soon.
As they waited, the majority of families in Katra went without electricity, gas, running water and toilets. They bought solar panels, they lowered buckets into wells. They gathered dung for cooking fuel. They squatted in the fields, pulling their knees up to their chest as they scrolled through their phones to pass the time.
Some were carpenters and tailors; others worked as political fixers, marriage brokers, cycle puncture repairmen or tonga drivers. They sold vegetables, chickens and country liquor. They broke the law to mine sand from riverbanks. A few well-off families had tractors that they leased out. About a third of the men had a piece of land. It was just a few bighas, never quite an acre, but whatever it was, it was theirs.
Land was security, from which everything flowed – it put dal in the katori, clothes on the back. Land was power. It attracted a good quality of bride who would bring a good dowry. This would increase their security and social standing. Above all, land was identity. It made them cultivators. Without it, the men were reduced to landless labourers. They were destined to go wherever there was work, for whatever they were offered. They could be compared to the Yadav cattle herders in the neighbouring hamlet of whom it was said, they are rooted to nothing and committed to no one.
The men of Katra spent almost all day in the fields. The children studied here since the good school, which taught English, was near the orchard. In the evenings when the edges 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 socialise. Boys teased the limping dogs, and the limping dogs chased rats. Girls huddled. The smell was heat, husks and buffalo droppings.
After night hooded the fields men dragged their charpoys over and hunkered down under blankets, bamboo poles at the ready, same as farmers up and down the district this time of year. They would protect their harvest with their lives if they had to, whether from the gun-slinging bandits who came for motorbikes or the herds of nilgai who sought seeds and stems.
Everything was here. Everything happened here. And so naturally it was here, in the fields, that the rumour started.
1 The girls’ names have been changed in accordance with Indian law which requires that the identity of victims of certain crimes remain private.
Spring, 2014
An Accusation Is Made
Rajiv Kumar had a side job as a government teacher, but his real job was farming. While working his land he had observed Padma and Lalli. They were as alike as two grains of rice, and they spent all day in the fields. Now one girl, he couldn’t tell which, had a phone to her ear. He didn’t like it.
Some villages in Uttar Pradesh forbade unmarried women from using phones.2 A phone was a key to a door that led outside the village via calls and messaging apps. The villagers were afraid of what would happen if women stepped through this door. They might get ideas such as whom to marry.
Records showed that 95 per cent of Indians still married within their caste,3 and anyone who didn’t attracted attention. In 2013 a young woman from Katra village took off with a man from a different caste. Her father was so ashamed he couldn’t show his face, people said. The woman had chosen to marry against his will, to have what was known as a love marriage rather than leaving it to her father to arrange a partner for her. She had violated the honour code and would never see her parents again – for their safety, and certainly hers. A few months after that, it was the turn of a girl from the next-door hamlet of Jati.
The news of the elopements moved like a swarm of whirring insects, landing first here and then there until all the nearby villages were warned: change is coming, be vigilant, be ready to act.
In 2014, for the first time, the National Crime Records Bureau, which publishes the number of cases registered for crimes, published data on honour killings. Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country,4 but everyone knew the true number was hundreds, if not thousands, more. Girls were killed for marrying outside their caste or outside their religion and sometimes having premarital sex was reason enough.
With the killing the family’s honour was reclaimed or, at least, the other villagers were given notice that the family had taken the errant behaviour seriously and done their best to right a wrong. The Constitution had existed for only decades while Hindu religious beliefs dated back thousands of years, said one father who was accused of killing his daughter.5
In Katra, the rule was that boys could own phones, but girls had to get permission to use them.
Even so, Padma and Lalli knew what to do with a phone better than their mothers who could identify neither letters nor numbers. Padma often called her maternal uncles, reciprocating the effort they had put into keeping in touch after their only sister, Padma’s biological mother, had died. Lalli texted her elder brother who worked for a car parts manufacturer far away. The girls used the torch feature to light their way into the pit of the night.
Rajiv Kumar didn’t know this, because he didn’t know them. He didn’t even know their parents beyond the usual ‘sab theek?’ – all well? – but a girl’s life was everyone’s business. He was determined to do his duty. His plot was near some land owned by a close relative of the girls named Babu ‘Nazru’ Ram. With his bowl cut, paan-stained teeth and sloppy smile Nazru was approachable. At twenty-six, he wasn’t that much older than the girls.
‘They shouldn’t be out in public with a mobile phone,’ Rajiv Kumar said, speaking in Braj Bhasha, the language of these parts. ‘Who knows who they’re talking to?’ Although the fields adjoined the village, the walking distance from the Shakya house to the orchard was ten minutes or more. The orchard wasn’t even visible from the house, which was located in a spiderweb of lanes. Rajiv Kumar’s implication was clear. The girls chose that particular time because they were alone, they chose that place because it was secluded. To remove any doubt, he used the word ‘chakkar’ to indicate there was something crooked about all this, something off balance. ‘The girls in your family are romancing someone,’ he said.
Nazru agreed that it didn’t look good.
‘You should let their parents know,’ Rajiv Kumar said.
A few days passed, and Rajiv Kumar again saw the girls talking on the phone. He again sought out Nazru who explained that a complaint could backfire. The girls’ parents might accuse him of slander. Rumours were butterflies, they might say. If word got around, who would marry Padma? Who would have Lalli?
Nazru understood that it was one thing for Rajiv Kumar to talk. It was another for a relative, a first cousin no less, to level an accusation of such grave seriousness. And there was the other matter to consider, which was that he depended on the family. Everyone in the village struggled, but he had an asthmatic father to care for and a brother people called crazy. The Shakyas sometimes hired him to work their land. If things got truly difficult, they could be counted on to come through with cash.
So Nazru said nothing – but mindful of his duty, he started to watch the girls.
His behaviour didn’t go unnoticed.
‘He ogles us,’ Padma said to a friend with disgust.
It
