© Provided by The GuardianPhotograph: Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Two teenage girls go missing. They are discovered hanging from a mango tree. Sexual activity may or may not have taken place, prior to their deaths. Were they killed or did they kill themselves? There are eyewitnesses who may be the aggressors - their stories don't match up. To add to this, there is a defining visual image. The dead bodies hang from the tree for days, knocking against each other in repetitive, heart-breaking camaraderie, while the grieving women of the village form a circle around the tree trunk, to prevent the girls from being taken down. If they come down, Padma and Lalli (not their real names) will be forgotten. As long as the corpses retain the power to horrify, they are protected from indifference.
"Place is the crossroads of circumstance," Eudora Welty wrote in her 1957 essay "Place in Fiction" - "the proving ground of, what happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" In the The Good Girls, the shifting answers to these questions form a morass of half-truths and lies, freighting the ancient fields of Katra Sadatganj - an "eyeblink of a village" in Uttar Pradesh, north India - with existential threat. This ancestral land, a marker of power and identity for those who work in it, "put dal in the katori, clothes on the back . It made them cultivators. Without it they were landless labourers". Those who inhabit it "believed they would sense if something was amiss, just as one can sense a change in the texture of one's palm. But this was not the case." What follows, in this shocking, mesmerising book by Sonia Faleiro, is an unravelling of shared hubris.
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Faleiro uses the structures of a true crime narrative. The need in the reader to understand these painfully premature deaths and make sense of the world, means that the real objective of The Good Girls - to turn and face the factual horror of inequality - is skilfully masked. "Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments," was the verdict of Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer (1989); "The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art." In this sense, Faleiro is a judicious writer: as with her nonfiction debut Beautiful Thing - a portrait of the table dancers of Bombay - the prose in The Good Girls is full of precise intention. Facts are presented without the electric burn of outrage.
The reader plays detective as the story unfolds, piecing together "evidence" that is remembered from earlier chapters - a phone call, a text, a snatch of overheard conversation, an admission that might later be denied. The author will not hold your hand as you navigate this mystery; instead you are encouraged to solve it yourself.
At the heart of the book, and crucial to interpretation of events, is the question of consent - more specifically, of consensual desire. Padma and Lalli are referred to repeatedly by relatives and politicians as family assets - tangible, walking, breathing manifestations of family honour. There are multiple discussions as to whether they have been raped - at one point the media reports declare this to be incontrovertible, and yet the evidence does not support it beyond reasonable doubt. Vital evidence is tampered with, in the name of saving family honour: phone recordings are deleted, witnesses are told to revise their stories, and the number of potential rapists swells from one to five and back again. The idea that the girls might have had their own romantic lives with boys from the village is crushed in the white noise of gossip and misinformation.
© Photograph: Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times/Getty ImagesThe mango tree in Katra Sadatganj, Uttar Pradesh, where the two victims were found in June 2014.
Faleiro's subjects are numerous and interconnected - from India's corrupt politicians and media to the deleterious effects of caste prejudice and the systemic rot scouring its way through the police force. But her core subject is that of entrapment, and she returns again and again to the lack of agency that the girls have over their own lives, banned as they are from wandering freely around the village and its environs. The author concludes that "an Indian woman's first challenge was surviving her own home".
The girls' nightly journey to squat in the fields after dinner to relieve themselves emerges as the only gap in a system set up to put them under constant surveillance. And it is this gap of possibility, at Welty's "crossroads of circumstance" that Padma and Lalli enter flushed with life, only to die hours later. The Good Girls is a beautifully calibrated book, full of suspense to the final pages, urging us to walk into that night and listen.
. You People by Nikita Lalwani is published by Viking. The Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro is published by Bloomsbury Circus (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.