Good Indian Girls: Stories

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

  Her voice was empty of animosity or affection, containing only the unpolished tone of that young woman whose name I had learned the first day I entered their house. What I had heard as trepidation moments before I now imagined as something else. She knew me better than I knew myself.

  I pressed the gun into my pocket and, saying nothing, hurried down the street and toward the ocean, while behind me I sensed her eyes following me from the stoop with the same unvarying attention with which she might follow a plastic bag tossed violently in the air by the wind.

  On the coast road, early rush-hour cars blasted their horns as I ran across the weather-beaten blacktop. The rays of sun sliced across at a sharp angle over the Pacific and my movements soon slowed as I progressed across the sand toward the water. Wading up to my waist, I remembered myself as a child doing exactly this. Crests foamed against my shirt and I experienced the fleeting excitement of a possible life, a different life, with Double Love and Dr. Boyce, living right at the ocean’s edge. Here I could run in the mornings and swim, and in the evenings sit with Double Love while we listened to her father’s madness unfurl through the long and lonely nights.

  When I pulled the gun from my pocket, the sun glinted off the silver barrel. I flung it as far as I could, watching it arc against the sky then become lost, almost instantly, in a rising white swell. It appeared again for a moment, a crisp, black shape amid the waves, and then was gone forever. When I turned to make my passage back toward the beach, I saw that a small crowd had gathered some distance along the edge and were staring at me with suspicion and fear. Someone would no doubt call the police and with that thought I felt myself jolted back into the world—the possible life vanished as quickly as I had conjured it.

  I waded through the water and every step was a struggle. Only now did the cold hit me as I progressed back up the beach and toward the road. This time, I chose to wait for a break in the traffic. Double Love was gone from outside her house. I climbed into my car and dropped my head onto the steering wheel, exhausted and shivering.

  The sun settled below the sharp horizon and I drove several miles south along the coastal highway. The skyline was red and the clouds were streaked across the western sky.

  The night had settled in when I drove back into the city, and soon I found myself pulling up half a block from my apartment. A figure stood under the streetlamp near my building’s door. I recognized the disgraced boy’s father from the way he shifted his weight from one leg to another. All fight had fled me and I could not face the man. I doubted I would ever be able to face him again. I started the engine and the car jerked to an anxious, uncertain life and I drove away.

  At a stop sign, I reached across to the passenger seat and searched the floor until I found the scrap of paper I was looking for. It was Baggie’s address, and with it the dates and times for his evening salons.

  Before I had a chance to ring the bell, I heard Baggie’s voice emerging from an open window. I waited and listened as he recited one poem after another. Something horrid in Urdu, but instead of laughing I was filled with a pathetic gratitude. I wasn’t home, I never would be, but for a moment, I was sure, Baggie would help me pretend. I felt a surge of relief at the prospect of sitting with him, listening to his poetry and imagining myself as another man in another age, the good poet of Africa the Consul once believed I was. Wet and shivering, I pulled my jacket tight around me and climbed the final steps to his door. Right then I recognized a line Baggie spoke and froze. Soon there was another and after that another, and I knew where I had seen those lines before. The world was funnier than I thought, and a host of new questions pestered me as I reached forward and pressed the bell.

  The Discovery

  THE WOMAN’S MOUTH WAS ROUND AND SOFT, A GLAZED doughnut of a mouth smeared in scarlet frosting. I dreamed of her lips clamped to my chest—they were a suction cup, leaving only a ring of red and a vacuum to separate us. I drifted happily on the fantasy until she said something that should have disturbed me. I was only half-listening, and the jolt faded as quickly as it arrived. I never watched the tail-end news. The sportscast was over and all that was left were the human interest stories. The woman’s lips were stuck to my chest, her saliva dripped through the TV screen and found a natural home in the jungle of my nipple hairs. I only heard the words breaking news as an aside to her teeth biting my nipple, only caught the splintered bodies falling from the plane in the reflection on an imagined ruby blood bead as her teeth pierced my skin. Sikh terrorists, she said. My hand found my crotch, and slowly, I unzipped my pants.

  The next morning, the newspaper lying motionless and folded on the kitchen table, a bland, emasculated exclamation point, the unease of the night before returned. There was something in the news I suspected I didn’t want to read about, and, unaccountably, my hands were shaking when I unfolded the paper.

  Instead of looking at the headline, I took the first short sip of coffee. Hot, almost scalding. My tongue retreated. But I had to laugh at the headline when I saw it. 213 DIE IN AIR INDIA CRASH. What an amazing mistake, a fabulous error. We had made up that name as kids. My sister and I playing in the backyard creating countries out of molehills. She had Czechoslovakia, a real country. And I made up India. Dreambirth nation whose dry, California dirt borders were no more certain than a cowpat, a yellow-grass-surrounded-India.

  I scanned quickly through the story, hoping that perhaps there was only the single typo, the sole error. But the word repeated itself, again and again—Air India, India, Indians. With each repetition the newscaster’s voice from the night before found an ugly path into my brain—Sikh terrorists from the North Indian state of Punjab have claimed . . . The word almost gave itself meaning, as though seeing it printed and repeated, the mirror image of a lie flashing endlessly, gave it a core of truth. But what responsibility could these terrorists have claimed? Killing not-Indians from not-India on an Air not-India. This must be a joke, some tremendous and ridiculous trick.

  I walked into the other room, forgetting my coffee, and picked up the heavy tan phone from off the telephone book, and soon found the newspaper’s number.

  The assistant editor’s voice was frantic, on edge about something. I tried explaining my problem, in fact, my basic sense of confusion, in a slow, controlled tone so as not to disturb him further. It was no doubt a clerical error, a simple typo, a computer glitch. However, when I was about to say the word, or more correctly, the non-word, I found I couldn’t get it out of my mouth. My lips were paralyzed, became rock and formed a high dam against the not-word.

  “You say in your paper,” I said, “that terrorists from . . .” I started again. “A plane from . . .” The river of my speech was blocked mid-sentence.

  “Are you talking about the Air India explosion, sir?”

  “Yes . . . I mean, no.” I couldn’t easily explain my dilemma. “There was no explosion, there couldn’t have been. There was no plane. There is no country. There are no people. No word.” Without saying a word, the assistant editor hung up on me.

  I walked back into the kitchen and picked up the newspaper again. From the short drawer to the right of the stove I pulled out a pair of orange handled scissors. I clipped the non-word out of the headline, and out of every occurrence in the story and in the paper. As I searched through the pages, the word multiplied, it fractured and splintered, spreading like a fungus across almost every page. My hand was tired when I finished. On the table the shallow breast of clippings lay awkwardly, as though demanding something from me. I had nothing to give it. Only its negation.

  The next day was Monday, and in the morning I telephoned the gas station I worked at. Without even a word of greeting, Sandeep, the manager, asked angrily where I was. Words vanished momentarily from my mouth.

  “Is it that late?” I asked finally.

  “You should be here an hour ago,” and then he swore at me in Gujarati. Speaking only Hindi and English, I didn’t know what he said.

  “Talk in English,” and I swore in
Hindi.

  “Don’t you . . .”

  I cut him off. “Let me tell you. My aunt, she was in that plane yesterday. She died in that plane.” I lied.

  Only the phone line hummed, vibrating in the expanding maw of space between us. I explained I would be out of town for the funeral, and added, “I’ll be in Delhi, in India.” I emphasized notIndia.

  There was a sound like a vacuum filling with gas. Sandeep’s breath yearned after that notword notIndia, as though it were real. I could hear his Adam’s Apple gulping for a taste of that notcountry, shucking back and forth. He wanted it bad. Was I the only one who saw, who could hear, even over an old phone, this desire for an imaginary land, this hard-on for the unreal centerfold of notIndia? I slammed the phone down. No use.

  My hands were shaking as I pocketed the orange handled scissors and left for the library. When I had created the notcountry, my sister had laughed and immediately took out a piece of paper. With a thick brown marker she wrote the notcountry in bold, shaky letters. We pinned the paper with a knitting needle to the spot where notIndia lay in our garden. It was a small, irregular molehill, surrounded by patches of crisp, yellow grass. It stood in one corner of the backyard, in a spot where the sprinkler never quite reached.

  My sister and I threw stones as atom bombs at each other’s countries, but each morning the countries were revived, had grown back from the ashes of their nuclear annihilation. No nuclear winter cast its long shadow over their phoenix-land plains. Until one night I crept out with a thick, palm-filling flashlight and kicked my sister’s country down to the level of soil over an old grave. There was only India left. NotIndia, I mean.

  The librarian’s blonde hair fell in a sharp braid down the back of her neck. Her green pullover outlined her breasts as full-bodied molehills, and her smile showed a dull row of almost regular teeth.

  “What do you mean?” she questioned, her smile fading, nuclear clouding over. I felt a chill of fear immobilize my mouth into wordless anxiety. “The not country, India?” Her voice was direct and honest, a little loud for a library. Her questioning look gave me a moment’s hope. Perhaps she didn’t know the word. Perhaps she wasn’t in on this massive hoax, this trick or joke or disease.

  Then she said, “We have some books on India. The country India. If that’s what you mean?” I nodded and followed her silently across the floor. When she stood she was much taller than I’d expected, and her legs made long, arcing strides as she walked into the stacks. Behind her I felt small and worried. Distrust and not a little anger was growing in me. How could she know? How dare she know about my notword, my notcountry, my notIndia?

  The stack on world history stood at the far back wall and the fluorescent tube overhead was out. The only illumination was the diffuse finger of light which came through a thin rectangular window set high in the adjacent wall. She pointed out the shelves on Asian history and politics.

  “Here,” she said, “this shelf is mostly India.” I saw the series of familiar names. Nehru, Gandhi, Lajpat Rai.

  “My aunt, you know, is married to an Indian man,” she confided. Why I’m not sure. What did I care about her aunt’s marrying a figment of my imagination. “Perhaps you know him. Vishnu Patel.”

  “No,” I said tersely, “I don’t know any Indians.”

  When her long braid disappeared around the corner of the far stack, I knelt down and began inspecting more closely the shelf of books she had pointed out. The Glory That Was India. India’s Century. A Short History of India. Communism in India. I could hardly believe it. Many of these books were old, decades old. Could this deception be so grand, so all encompassing? I paged through one book quickly, seeing the notword repeated over and over, almost at random, an electron-name whose position I couldn’t predict—I could only know its orbit.

  Carefully, making sure no one could see, I squatted down on the floor and took out the scissors hidden in my jacket. With a surgeon’s precision I began cutting out each entry from the book, each time the notcountry, the notnationality, the notword appeared I made sure it found its way into my pocket. By the time the morning was over, I had four bulging pockets, and had gone through most of the books on the shelf. I couldn’t touch the spines or covers unfortunately. I had to make sure it would be some time before my healing of these history books was discovered. I was still under the impression then that this was some passing madness, a flu on the political geography of the planet. That within a week it would pass, be spent, and that no one would ever mention the notcountry again. NotIndia would revert, as it had always been, to a scrap of paper pinned to a Punjabi family’s molehill in Fresno, California, blowing in the hot, late summer wind.

  At home, I spread the cuttings out across the small kitchen table. There were so many that I had to put some on the sparse counter space by the stove, next to my jar of masala and box of Stovetop Stuffing. I even laid some on the floor. Many had been crumpled in my pocket, and I spent a good hour trying to straighten or flatten some of the most damaged. This further complicated the kitchen, as between the neat, flat lying cuttings were groups weighted down and hidden beneath books, or flattened with plates or salt shakers at either end to keep them straight.

  Soon after, I stopped watching TV or reading the newspaper. There were other notcountries. Even the newspapers acknowledged them. Creating them in one sentence and destroying them in the next. I learned that the notcountry notNorth Yemen was no more. That the notSoviet Union had fractured and splintered back into what it was. That notYugoslavia was, in fact, not. As was notEthiopia. Even my favorite newscaster, the woman whose lips I often imagined caressing my body or licking with soft, fish-like lips the tip of my penis, began sprinkling her speech with more and more notcountries and notwords.

  My friends decided I was joking. “Not India,” they laughed. “Very good, Ranjit. It’s the only way to get away from that bloody country, eh, just disappear it, make it dissolve. Very good.” No one believed me. Many talked about it as though it were real, as though under its umbrella it somehow sheltered all those places we had come from. NotIndia, I learned, was home to Punjab and Gujarat, Patiala and Delhi. Bombay was in notIndia, as was Bengal, and the Sutlej flowed into the Indus within the boundaries of an ancient notIndia. Some even spoke of visiting the notcountry, of returning permanently. I was horrified. “Next year,” said Sunil, “I’m going back for good. I’m leaving these damn goras to their own damn country. There’s nothing here for us. Our home is India.” What could I do but bring him to my apartment. I had to show him.

  “What is all this?” asked Sunil, his jaw dropping in what I thought at first was proper respect for the scale of the problem, of the spreading disease. “Why all these words, all these cutouts?”

  Everywhere, in my whole apartment, on tabletops and countertops, over every inch of floor and wall and ceiling. Words. Notwords, I mean. Even covering the slits of the toaster there was Czechoslovakia and industrial. I ate among the notwords, the notcountries and notverbs, notpeople. I drank my morning coffee staring at their nonexistence, drinking it in with every sip. When I sat on the sofa, I had to clear a space for myself, pushing the nots aside. Sunil didn’t stay long enough for me to clear a space on the sofa for him. I wanted to say to him, not everything is covered. Not the sink, or the bathtub or the nottoilet.

  He was gone before I could tell him, and I was left alone.

  I have since stopped leaving the apartment. Sunil continues to visit and brings with him food. So much of it I can’t eat. I don’t know why he brings notfood. When I asked him to stop, he shook his head. “You must eat,” he demanded with a madman’s self-confidence in his own delusion. I knew he was sick and I questioned if I wanted to allow him entry anymore. Perhaps he would infect me. Perhaps the notwords would become words again. The thought terrified me. NotIndia would become India, the notSoviet Union would reform.

  There is little room left for food anyway, even notfood. There are more notwords than words in the world, and each day I find oth
ers. I am reduced to reading only the junk mail, and what Sunil sometimes leaves, a magazine or a newspaper, but it breaks my heart to open them. It’s spreading, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Soon there will be no room left, soon they will overflow, escape again, back, back . . . Where can I possibly put them all? My apartment is almost full. The bathtub is crowded, as is the nottoilet, and all the closets and all the sinks, and all my notplates and floors. Even under the bed, and all my jacket and trouser pockets. The house is swimming in them. On the rare occasions when I open the door, I shore up the clippings by forming a short storm wall in the hallway. It’s the only way to stop them from spilling out onto the landing and escaping back into the world.

  Recently I found a letter from my sister. I have no idea how long it sat among the clippings by the door. The postmark was from two months ago, and I don’t know how it came here. It was clearly from my sister. Her name was in the top left corner, but even now I’m afraid to touch it. It’s addressed to a notperson. I carefully cut the name out and pasted it to my front door. Through the small hole in the envelope I saw the green of dollar bills. I was sure I’d seen the notname other places. On a driver’s license I found in the kitchen drawer, and on a checkbook. Maybe he once lived here.

  Good Indian Girls

  ON TUESDAY NIGHT, LOVEDEEP RETURNED FOR A SECOND evening TO the de-cluttering class she had, two weeks previous, persuaded herself would bring order to her life and aid in accomplishing a list of modest goals. Gain self-confidence. Find a better job. Fall in love.

  “De-cluttering,” the flyer promised, “empties more than the closet and the desk. It starts you on a road to shedding years of negative habits and self-sabotaging behavior.”

  The class was led by a rake-thin woman with close-cropped, blonde hair who sat Indian-style on a metal desk. The room was usually reserved for karate classes. Glossy posters lined the walls, outlining positions and moves. The early arrivals helped the instructor unfold stacked chairs and carry the heavy metal desk from the utility closet so as not to scuff the floors. Lovedeep was an early arrival, and before the first meeting, as she unfolded one chair after another and set it softly on the wooden boards, the instructor smiled privately at her. When she walked to the front to formally sign in, the instructor leaned in close and whispered, “My heart is Indian.” She had always wanted to go there, but never had. Except in past lives, of course.