Good Indian Girls: Stories

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

  “Not you too.”

  “No, just . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Kastenbaum thinks we speak Sanskrit.”

  “We don’t?”

  “No one does, darling.”

  “Not even when we were little?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m flying.”

  “Tie my legs.”

  “Which ones are your legs?” She falls forward onto his chest. “Did you eat both the burgers?”

  She licks his neck, up, across, to his ear.

  “Tie me till it hurts,” he says.

  She raises herself on her elbows and looks at him hard.

  “Pig,” she says.

  His cell phone rings.

  “Hey Jack,” Anu says. “Long time no speakee.”

  “Annie,” Jack says. “I need Harry.”

  “He’s all tied up.”

  “Darling,” Hari says. “Hold it to my face.”

  She shakes her head. “Fuck you.”

  “Jack,” he shouts. “Ignore her. She’s talking to me.”

  She shuts the phone and drops it on the floor.

  “Cunt,” he says.

  “Prick,” she says.

  “Fuck me,” he says.

  “No,” she says.

  The phone rings again.

  “Hold it this time.”

  She sticks her tongue out and holds the phone to his ear.

  “Harry, that you?”

  “I’m right here, Jack.”

  “I’m having a crisis, Harry. You’re the only man I can talk to about these things. The two of us share a natural affinity for order and a well-regulated life. We are blood brothers, we are kin of a higher order. I look upon you as my spiritual body double. I’ll hire you to impersonate me in heaven one day.”

  Anu bites his nipple and he stops himself from letting out a cry.

  “Do you mind if I call you Dick?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay, Dick. Don’t you like the sound of that?”

  “Sure. What’s on your mind?”

  “Could it be that I am not who I am?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Those movies, you must have seen them when you were a kid. Body snatchers, aliens with the power of mind control, top secret government experiments. Maybe I am an alien in my own body, maybe I am someone else entirely. I might be sitting right now in a room in Arlington, Virginia, and here is my body, walking around an office in midtown.”

  “That’s the movies. In the movies, no one is who he is.”

  Anu is running her tongue along his throat, his chin, a foot playing over his crotch.

  “That’s an interesting idea, Dick. I’m impressed. But what about the one where Heston plays Van Gogh? Is he Heston? Is he the painter? Who is he, if he’s not one or the other?”

  “Jack?”

  “Yes, Dick?”

  “What are we talking about?”

  “I’ll tell you a story, Dick. I once put a loaded pistol up my first wife’s cunt. It was my grandfather’s gun. He carried it in the Great War. Then it was my father’s. He carried in the Second World War. Then it was mine. I pushed it up my wife’s cunt one night and I told her I was going to kill her if she refused to give me a divorce.”

  “What happened?”

  “She said no. I pulled the trigger. I’m not kidding. The gun was loaded and I pulled the trigger. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Dick. I’ve never told anyone, not even my lawyer.”

  “Did she die, Jack? Did you kill her?”

  Jack says nothing.

  “Jack?”

  Anu releases one of Hari’s wrists and brings his hand to the phone. She raises herself, first on all fours, straddling his body like a cat, the sari falling from her figure and across his chest, then is free of him.

  “That’s the beautiful thing,” Jack says finally. “In all those years, that gun never once misfired. That was the one time it did. I tell you, Dick, I had the best sex of my life that night, the very best. It remains unequalled.”

  Hari shoots her a look of alarm and she puts a finger to her lips and tiptoes out.

  In the kitchen, all the way at the back of the cupboard over the microwave, she finds her stash of Dunhills. Not even Hari knows about them. She pulls out a pack and matches and takes them outside, to the concrete porch, and sits down in the cool night air. She can hear Hari calling after her.

  She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. It has been six months since she last smoked. The tobacco tastes stale, glorious. Despite the high, it goes straight to her head.

  Across the street, she sees Mrs. Kastenbaum at her kitchen window, face framed by bright yellow ruffled curtains. Her face is deformed and ugly and frightening. Her eyes are enormous insect eyes, staring through the window glass. It takes Anu a moment to realize Mrs. Kastenbaum is holding a pair of binoculars to her face. The old woman lowers them and raises an arm and waves.

  The Bolinas razorback kicks in. It is sudden, like the drug has been puttering her along in second gear for miles and with one punch of the pedal shoots her up to fifth.

  Everything transforms.

  She looks up at the few stars, the sky is burning, it is on fire, stars are falling from the heavens. She is melting into the concrete. Everything is molten, the street, the houses, the whole city is a river of flames. She can see Mrs. Kastenbaum. The two large insect eyes are at her face again, hovering in the kitchen.

  Anu wants to say something. She wants to tell Mrs. Kastenbaum something desperately important. She tries. She opens her mouth. She forms the words. Nothing comes out. The words are stuck in her throat. They are not even words, they are sounds, the sounds people made before they could say anything.

  She stubs the cigarette out, lights another. Inhales. The world is fire, she thinks, and tries to make a sound and fails. When she looks up, Mrs. Kastenbaum is gone.

  Hero of the Nation

  THE FIRST TIME I MET PAPA WAS WHEN HE CAME TO LIVE with us in the spring, when things were growing. In an uncharacteristic mood of celebration, Mom planted a row of colorful flowers in the front yard along both sides of the driveway. Daisies and buttercups and even a rose bush. A week later, I was the one who found Papa peeing on the flowers. His ancient penis was gripped between his fingers, his lower lip curled over his upper. He looked like a garden gnome, except that he was out-sized and he had, strangely, a working dick.

  “The bastard,” Mom said, shooing him back into the house. “I’ll never do another thing for him.”

  I clipped two roses for Papa and left them on his pillow. I was on his side, I decided.

  Papa was Dad’s father, a man in his seventies who had spent his life in the military in India. I asked Dad how many wars he’d fought in and Dad said, “Don’t be an idiot. Girls don’t need to know about things like that.”

  I’d heard stories, mostly in whispers, of my soldier grandfather, far away in India. The few photographs of him hanging in the house showed him stern and handsome in his turban and his neat beard and proper military moustache, decked out in his crisp uniform. I dreamt of his adventures on the front lines of wars I knew nothing about, and in my mind all his battles took place on the slopes of high snow-covered mountains. He would struggle for hours through the mist, carrying an enormous pack, only to suddenly confront the enemy directly in the zero-visibility of a blizzard. He always won these hand-to-hand fights, and he always slit the throat of his enemy with his bayonet so that blood splattered gregarious and red across the white snow.

  It was a shock to meet him finally, bent, his eyes filmy with age, his figure straining against collapse.

  “The old fool has come here to die,” Dad mused when he arrived. It was Papa’s first time in the US. Dad invited him every year and every year Papa refused. Dad said Papa was stubborn, that he never liked the idea of his children moving away. Now he came because there was nowhere else for him to go. The old man had lost his strength, while his mind, Dad said, was
going. He’d also lost the power of speech. When he tried to talk, he moved his jaw up and down and a painful rattle emerged. Dad refused to tell me what happened. I searched Papa’s old neck for a gunshot wound but found only a thin, inconclusive scar. At night I’d lie awake thinking of him, this one-time hero of his nation, reduced to wordless sorrow and a life little better than that of an animal chained and dying in its pen.

  My brother Johnny said they cut your tongue out when you left the army, that way you couldn’t reveal state secrets. I knew that’s not what happened, for there was Papa’s tongue, a curled sentry greeting all when he opened and shut his great mouth. Johnny had another name, an Indian name, but no one used it. I hated mine, Ruby, short for Rupinder. Every week I secretly changed it. One week it was Gloriana, the next it was Xerxes. I’d exhausted the standards: Ashley, Heather, Mary, Juliet. I was worried one day I’d run out and have to become a boy to find a name that suited me.

  A month after Papa arrived I learned why he couldn’t speak. He was a lifelong smoker, contracted throat cancer, and the operation that saved his life cost him the power of speech. I learned this by listening in on a phone conversation Dad was having with his sister in Phoenix.

  “Papa used to smoke,” I said to Dad that evening.

  Mom looked at me across the dinner table. “Don’t talk like that in front of your father.”

  Papa was sitting to one side of the dinner table, in his own special chair, a big baby chair, a bib printed with pastel-colored unicorns around his neck and a small table at his elbow.

  “What did I say?”

  “You know exactly what you said,” Mom said.

  I did know. Sikhs don’t smoke. It’s one of the rules. Like Sikhs don’t cut their hair and Sikhs don’t drink. Smoking one cigarette is almost as bad as killing someone.

  “Who told you he smoked?” Dad said.

  “No one. I thought that was why he couldn’t speak.”

  Papa grinned at me each time I spoke.

  “He was in the army,” Dad said. “Things happen in the army.”

  I nodded, “Oh,” and went on eating.

  Johnny jabbed me in the ribs. “Shit for brains,” he whispered.

  Suddenly Mom made a face.

  “Oh god,” she said.

  A thin stream of urine was dripping from along the edge of Papa’s chair and he grinned broadly at all of us now.

  “He’s your father,” Mom said to Dad. “You clean it up.”

  The next day, Mom bought twelve boxes of Depend undergarments. I watched as she stacked one after the other in the cupboard under the stairs. I could tell she was angry. She punched each one into the wall, like she was shoring it up against a flood.

  “Can I try one on?” I said.

  She ignored me and punched the last box into place, slapped her hands together, and turned and bumped straight into me as she was walking out.

  “You,” she said.

  “Can I try one on?” I said again.

  “They’re not for you.” She slammed the cupboard door.

  “How many people did Papa kill?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Papa? How many did he kill?”

  Mom considered me with distaste. “You and your questions. Is that all they teach you at that school?”

  She turned away and walked into the kitchen. It was time for Papa’s lunch.

  That school was a special needs school. I had started there two years ago. I talked too much, asked too many questions, couldn’t concentrate; the doctors said one thing, gave me pills; Mom said I needed discipline; Dad looked around for the right kind of school. We were all girls. Half the universe was erased the moment we walked through the gates. It didn’t bother me, I liked the school well enough, except we learned little and were left mostly to ourselves, to taunt and tease and make up stories as we liked, and during recess we would wander in circles through the courtyard and pretend we all had futures which the bright ones amongst us knew we didn’t.

  When Mom was gone, I climbed into the cupboard, switched the light on, a dim, bare bulb, and closed the door behind me. I opened the first box, pulled out one of the adult diapers and held it to the light. It looked exactly like a baby’s disposable diaper, only larger, as though it was made for a mutant, the kind they used to make bad movies about in the fifties. Two blue buttons were sewn to the front to hook it up with. I pressed it to my face. It smelled of plastic and cardboard and glue.

  I pulled my jeans off and my panties down and slipped into the diaper and buttoned it up. I felt anxious and excited as I stood there, hunched over because of the low ceiling. The plastic felt warm against my skin. I dug in my jeans, produced a pack of cigarettes, Kools, and a book of matches. I tapped one out against my wrist, placed it in my mouth, and lit it. I stood there for a minute smoking, thinking something should happen, something magical and strange. I should instantly be transported into another dimension where the rules of the universe were reversed, where black was white, where up was down, where the world I knew had never so much as been imagined.

  Because there I was, standing in the closet, smoking, wearing an adult diaper.

  But nothing happened. I stubbed the cigarette out, pulled the diaper off, and replaced it in the box.

  Johnny was in the backyard, playing on the swing. Papa sat in the shade in a deck chair, his pink turban lopsided on his head. I could tell he was watching Johnny from the way his head moved back and forth with the motion of the swing.

  I found Mom in the kitchen. She was chopping chicken with a cleaver.

  “Can I put the diaper on Papa now?” I said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “It’s for training.”

  “Training?”

  “I’m planning to be a nurse.”

  Mom looked at me with concern. She always did when I voiced any ambition.

  She shook her head. “I want your father to do it.”

  I was leaving when Mom said, “What’s that smell?”

  “What smell?”

  “Come here.”

  She pushed her nose into my hair. My heart began to explode in my chest.

  “New shampoo?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Peppermint. Like gum.”

  Dad appeared late at dinner that night, one arm around Papa, whom he helped down the stairs. When Papa was settled in his special chair, Dad poured himself a large whisky, no ice, and drank it in a single toss. He poured himself a second before joining us at the table.

  No one spoke out loud. Only Johnny and me whispered almost silently to each other.

  “Fuckwad,” Johnny said.

  “Butt plug,” I said.

  My name that night was Cassiopeia.

  Later, I heard Dad on the phone.

  “I hate him,” he said.

  I was listening in on the extension downstairs as he talked to his sister. “If I could . . .”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I would.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t have the guts.”

  “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s our father.”

  “I know.”

  “I hate him as much as you do,” she said. “More.”

  “Yes?”

  “I couldn’t. Not ever.”

  “I know.”

  “You won’t do anything?”

  “I’m a coward,” Dad said.

  I stopped listening when he said that. I hate cowards. I returned the phone loudly into the cradle and walked up the stairs to my room and banged my door shut.

  Soon after, I heard footsteps outside my door. I knew it was Dad, I recognized the way he walked. I could sense him standing there, holding a hand up as if to knock. He stood there for about a minute before I heard the steps move away.

  From that day on, when Dad called his sister, he used a cell phone.

  I cut school at lunch and returned home to an empty house. I thought I’d watch the afternoon movie. I shouted up and down
the stairs. “Mom, Papa.” No one. Maybe Mom had taken Papa out. I walked upstairs, excited by the freedom. I could hardly remember a time when I had the house entirely to myself. I stripped down to my underwear, slipped the pack of Kools into the elastic of my panties, lit a smoke, and began dancing along the hall.

  First into Johnny’s room, then Mom and Dad’s, finally into the spare bedroom, where Papa slept.

  I waltzed into Papa’s bathroom. “My name is Andromeda,” I sang.

  He was lying on his back on the floor, pants around his ankles, arms waving weakly. His turban was knocked off his head and the room smelled foul, of old man urine and feces.

  “Papa?” I said. “What happened?”

  His eyes widened at my nudity and he threw a hand forward, attempting and failing, with an unsteady gesture, to block his view.

  “It’s okay, Papa,” I said. “It’s only me.”

  I felt oddly brave standing there, like a soldier marching into battle. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. Crouching on the tiles and over his knees, I reached forward across his body and took hold of his turban. My plan was to replace it on his head, but the moment I lifted it, I pulled back. I watched his mouth tense and his eyes open wide with longing as he followed the passage of the cigarette, and then, for a second, his skin brushed mine. It felt dry and cold and cracked. A rattle emerged and I sensed him convulse.

  I raised the pink turban, settled back on my haunches, and instead of replacing it on his head, fitted it onto mine.

  It was large for me and slipped down over one ear and partially covered my right eye. I tapped a second cigarette out against my wrist, lit it and took several puffs, then leaned forward and slipped the cigarette between his lips. This was what he wanted, what he had wanted all along. His face transformed. The sternness disappeared, replaced by a giddy look of surprise, and there he was, a child again.

  He lay there, trembling with his eyes closed, the cigarette in his mouth, and I watched as his hand found his penis and grabbed hold of it roughly. It only took him a second to come. A tiny stream of goopy white liquid spread from the tip of his penis down its length. His hand once again drifted to his side and his body flagged. Within a minute, he was asleep.