How to Get Away With Murder in Small-Town India
He said that Mukesh’s family had bribed the senior officers in the police station, but
that it could not have happened without a vigorous effort by the village chief, Jahiruddin Mewati, to persuade Geeta’s widowed mother, a day laborer from a village 30 miles away, to withdraw murder charges.
I wondered whether he might just be interested in riding in an air-conditioned van — people here were so poor, he might not get another chance —
but as soon as we began to drive, he began to speak, staring not at us but at the road ahead.
Everyone was just watching.”
But when Anjum stepped away, Geeta’s husband — a slight man named Mukesh — stood above Geeta, who was slumped on the side of a rope cot,
and brought the stick down on her head several more times.
