A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation

Katra Sadatgani. An eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh, crammed into less than one square mile of land. A community bounded by the certainty of the changing of the seasons, by tradition and custom; a community in which young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them.

It was an ordinary night, in the middle of mango season, when the two girls first went missing. When the next day dawned, and their bodies were found – hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied – only one thing seemed clear: that life in Uttar Pradesh would never be the same again.

Sixteen-year-old Padma had sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli had been an incorrigible romantic. But who they were and what had happened to them were already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind. In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.

A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli’s short lives and shocking deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?