The Good Girls

The girls' names were Pushpa and Moorti, but they were so inseparable that people in the village called them Pushpa Moorti. Sixteen-year-old Pushpa sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Moorti was an incorrigible romantic. They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started. Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and days later they were found hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was 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 instigate a national conversation about sex, death, honor and violence. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste...