Good Indian Girls: Stories

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

  That was when a strange thing happened. Someone struck me hard on the arm and hurried quickly on. It was a young woman who turned for a moment and held me with a look of contempt. Her dark hair fell nearly to the middle of her back and she could easily have been Indian or Puerto Rican or Greek. Meeting her eyes caused an electrifying sensation to spirit through my body and she turned immediately away and without thinking I followed after her, hurrying to catch up. We passed a gaudy row of Indian restaurants with their strings of lights and made a right onto Second Avenue. Her shabby jeans, her red revealing top, thrilled through every step I took and I followed close behind, barely a step or two, so near I could smell her hair. She turned again and only after she stopped did I realize where she had led me: my old street. We stood together at the foot of my one-time home, that tiny studio where I once dreamt of stacking books like an enclosing wall. I was inches away as she slipped the key into the lock and twisted it, pushed the door in and on entering, held it wide for me, like a tamer holding open a lion’s massive jaws, and immediately I knew I was home.

  Five flights up and me a step behind her every moment, tasting the sharp odor of her sweat as it pressed through the air toward me. The stairwell graffiti had changed little over the years and we wound up through the stiff artery of creaking steps as if toward a fractured heart. The old door to my apartment hung in the gloom at the end of the hall where all lights had long since been broken, and once there, standing at this familiar portal, I pressed my body against her back and waited, my own heart thumping and my lips touching the nape of her neck, until the door swung open and we were, in moments, swallowed by even deeper darkness. A black blanket covered the single window, the floors were crowded with refuse, and the bed was simply a mattress with a metal headboard and footboard and no sheets. Broken, leaning against a wall, stood the lamp I had found on the corner the morning I first moved in. Once inside, she moved quickly, gathering up objects and only after several minutes did she approach me and motioned with her eyes to my clothes. I stripped off in a state of excitement and then she looked at the bed and I lay down on it. We didn’t say a word.

  Reaching across my body, she pulled one of my wrists fiercely up and tied it with a leather strip to the bedpost. The moment she touched me, I knew, with a certainty beyond words, that we were the same person, and it wasn’t me she was tying, but that I was doing this to myself. Her breast pressed against my face as she tied the leather off and pulled it taut until the band cut almost into the bone. In minutes, I was spread-eagled on the bed, wrists and ankles already humming in soft pain. She climbed onto me and forced an old rag into my mouth and tied it into place with something like a belt. The rag smelled vile and it was all I could do not to choke on it, but moments later, my situation became more dire. I was blindfolded and masked and could hardly breathe except through tiny holes for my nose. Struggling, I threw my head back and to the side, and immediately felt her mouth press against the side of my shrouded head and for the first time I heard her voice: a gentle, consoling whisper of a breath, and instantly, all fight left me. Soon, she was moving again, pulling the bonds tighter at my feet and arms. I lay there, unresponsive, allowing the pain to slice deeper into my flesh, for were we not the same person, the same body, one and the same agony? She will leave me alone to die, I thought, for that was what I would have done to myself, here, caught in a mad web, naked and in pain, adrift on ever rising waves as if my body floated farther and farther out, and I was already a corpse waiting for the rot of my flesh to be discovered. Instead I felt her move close to me with some object, a knife perhaps, and she jabbed it, creating a hole at my ear, making sure to nip the side of my head, and then there was her miraculous breath pulsing against me in soft, startled whispers.

  She was singing an old lullaby, “Rock-a-bye-baby.” Her voice rang out with an otherworldly confidence, as if she had landed here, on this planet, in this age, to do exactly this, to sing this song to me in my time of distress and terror. Above me, the sky opened and my body, which now floated on the epidermis of the oceans, was nothing more than so much flotsam and jetsam in a whole universe of castaways. There were other songs, so many, some I knew, others new to me. “Tom Dooley” and “Mr. Bojangles” and “I Shall be Released” and the hours passed and became days, and the days passed and became years, and on that bed, all flesh fell away, the blood dried up, and I was transformed into something harder and substantive, an alloy, a severe and glinting metal.

  When I woke she was gone and the restraints released and I lay there naked on that bed in a state of enchantment. It was some time before I could stand, shaking, nauseous, hungry, and I ran into a corner and vomited violently. Straightening again and searching for my clothes in a slow circle around the room, I experienced a sense of defeat, but over what, by whom, what battles had I ever fought? Eventually I discovered my watch resting on the dresser. According to it, no more than an hour had passed. I was sure it was wrong. I was certain beyond doubt it had been years.

  VII

  “Do you want a drink?” Christie said. She didn’t look at me when I walked into the kitchen. Instead, her back to me, she was pouring herself a glass of white wine. I had been sitting in the study, watching the garden darken and the colors shift, the green taking on the burden of night while the eastern sky inked over, greedily inhaling a whole palette of colors before losing itself to black. When I heard her, the key in the lock, the pad of steps along the hall, I felt a momentary desire to tell her everything, the whole sorry story from my confusion when I asked her to marry me to all the events of today. The impulse was sudden, and I squashed it as suddenly, but walking down the stairs to meet her in the kitchen, the thought continued to float at the far edge of my consciousness.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, stepping in behind her and reaching around for the scotch. I thrust the glass at the ice dispenser and watched five cubes splash into the drink while Christie turned and looked at me. I raised the glass to my lips.

  “What happened to your face? You look awful.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Some kid on a skateboard decided not to look where he was going.”

  “Let me see.”

  “No, don’t.”

  “Fine,” she said, irritated. “Have it your way.” She turned and began her nightly search of the refrigerator to see if there was anything to eat.

  “There’s never a goddamn thing, is there?”

  “The fall was nothing, okay,” I said. “A guy in a shop patched me up. It’s not important. What’s important is that I want to talk to you tonight. I want to try and explain.”

  She folded her arms, dropped her chin until she was staring at her feet and stood like that, silently tapping one foot. She said, “Okay, we talk.”

  We were soon settled side by side on the living-room sofa, each with a drink, staring at the sliding glass doors leading to a hardwood deck we almost never used, and a garden which was alien territory for the both of us. The television was Christie’s old one, as was the glass coffee table where I had earlier placed a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Her copy, a hardbound Modern Library edition with a worn blue cover whose pages were warped by water. She’d told me, on one of our early dates, that she had dropped it in the bathtub one night when reading. I’d felt a tremendous warmth for her, for someone who’d lie in a tub and actually read that book.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to me these past few months,” I said.

  “Months?”

  “What? You want an exact date? An anniversary?”

  “No. Go on.”

  “When I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself. I’m not the man you married, I don’t know why.”

  “And . . . so what’s the news here? You think I’m surprised? I don’t know who you are either. I have no fucking clue!”

  “Please, Christie, let me try and explain.”

  “No . . . you wait. If this is going where I think it’s going, I don’t want stories. I don’t want to he
ar how much you love me, how fucking sorry you are, how it’ll all be different. It’s too late.”

  Perhaps that’s what I would have tried had I come straight to meet her from my encounter with John, but the events of the afternoon had changed everything. I was already beginning to question whether it really happened—the coincidence seemed too striking: my old apartment, a sadistic siren . . . But what then is reality, I asked myself, if not the coagulation of past circumstance and a person’s present. It is the inexplicable that claims the heart, that shapes us every day, for better or worse. Don’t we lay these traps for ourselves every minute? Simply by living, by acting in the world, we erect a history that must, sooner or later, overpower and strangle us. These were the thoughts I had as I sat alone waiting for Christie, and this was why, if there can be any reason, I chose my curious love song.

  “I had an idea,” I said. “I thought I’d try to read to you like I used to. I wanted to try and make things better, back to the way they used to be.”

  She looked down at the copy of Crime and Punishment.

  “That?”

  “What’s wrong with it? It’s one of your favorites.”

  “It is, but . . .”

  “Please,” I said.

  Christie brought her bare feet onto the sofa and leaned her back against the armrest. She was looking directly at me. She pulled her legs to her chest and balanced the half-empty glass on one knee.

  The chapter I’d picked was from Part Two, set after the murder, when Raskolnikov is delirious from a fever and is certain everyone suspects him. He wanders through the city, passing drunks and whores and, stopping at the Palais de Cristal, meets Zametov, the head clerk at the police station. It was this same Zametov who earlier watched Raskolnikov faint when the murder was discussed, and Raskolnikov knew the head clerk believed him to be the killer.

  I had never really understood what Christie meant when she spoke about suffering that night we became engaged, but it was her words then that prompted me now, which pushed me forward to read aloud the section I chose. The mental leap she made then, the one from necessity to companionship, was what I wanted her to think about. If she could see that, if she could see us continuing together, like Sonia with Raskolnikov, then I suspected I still had one last chance to avert the disaster of my parents’ marriage.

  But once I started reading, I forgot about everything, where I was, what I was really trying to do, and I identified completely with the voice of Raskolnikov. I found myself fully inside his being. I could see myself walking along the same streets he walked, and when he entered a loud throng, I heard the noises, the people, the singing. My legs shuddered when he stepped over a drunk. And once Zametov appeared, my whole face transformed. It was as though I was possessed. I took on every grimace, every sharp look, every whispered word as though I was the killer himself.

  I was exhausted when I finished, shut the book, replaced it on the table and fell back against the cushions and closed my eyes. Every feature of my face must have spoken directly of that Raskolnikov she so admired, every nuance of deception and knowledge, every falsehood stacked upon falsehood. Even at the end, when Raskolnikov’s face was trembling, hysterical and twisted, mine was equally so, a vision of a man pulled out of hell, and it was this man, the one who suffers, that I was sure Christie would see and sympathize with. She’d understand, she’d know, we too could be that unhappy, suffering couple, Raskolnikov and Sonia, just as we had once promised each other in that single brief moment of our love.

  Days seemed to pass before I had the courage to open my eyes again. I was startled by a sound from the garden, a branch cracking in the night. When finally I looked across, Christie was gone. Only one glass remained. Mine. Even the side of the sofa where she had curled herself into a ball appeared as if it had never been touched. She was like a cat sometimes. A ghostly silence had fallen over the house. The sound of wood cracking in the distance returned and I walked to the glass doors and stood, staring out at the garden, the patch of light on the hardwood deck, shivering for reasons I didn’t understand.

  The sound of cracking branches drew closer. It was as if the trees were being shaken and crushed by something approaching. I interrogated the darkness and after a minute I could make out a great black shape. The trees trembled against the starlight, and soon, the stars began to disappear, one by one, as the great shape menaced toward me. The lights of houses blinked out and the glow of the distant city, always there, now appeared at the edges of my vision as the creature seemed to grow wider and taller with every shuddering step.

  Finally, emerging from the dense, shattered woodland at the far end of the garden, there appeared a colossus of a man, so huge he hid the sky behind him. He was heading directly for me. The ground trembled as he approached. He had come to destroy me, he had come to rid the world of me, he was my annihilator. His breath shook the glass from a hundred feet away. The ringing boom of his heart slapped against the soles of my feet. I got down on my knees, waiting for the blow from his massive fist. Whole minutes passed with me expecting it at every moment, hearing his steps grow closer until the house was shaking free from its foundations and the sound of his feet thundered in my ears. I heard him mount the deck and the wood cracked underfoot and I thought, this is my last moment.

  Nothing happened. After a minute I gathered my courage and looked up.

  There he was, a great dim shadow visible faintly through the glass. His trunk-like legs were illuminated by light from the living room. The deck was wrecked, crushed below his massive weight, and he towered far above me and the house. I strained my neck and stared up until I could peer into his enormous face, and that was when I saw, for the first of many times, my dear, tragic companion, that blasted frown, those great eyes anguished and sad, and only moments later did it become clear to me that he was weeping.

  Neanderthal Tongues

  I CAN TRACE IT BACK THAT FAR. IT WAS ISMAIL’S DEATH THAT revealed the grammar of the landscape, that allowed me to understand the meaning of the flat desert plain as it fell into the disorder of the badlands.

  In Ethiopia, inland from the slim ribbon of beach along the Red Sea, the land rises to a high levee of mountains that hoard what little rain comes down. A desert plain flattens the continent before it splits and falls into the Great Rift. It is here—a realm of gullies and valleys, of infinite variation, yet linked by a communal disarray—that the world is pulling apart.

  I am dead, and below me water shuffles into darkness. Contrary to superstition in which the dead become universal—no up, no down, just a bland everything—there is a below me, as there is an above me, and a me. Land is nowhere to be seen—only the wreckage of the plane, fragments of burnt and twisted wing, seat cushions, their springs popping out, the aftermath of what could have been a victory parade: torn barf bags like confetti, magazines, newspapers, boarding passes, passports. And sometimes the dead on the parade route, or at least pieces of them, their limbs, their eyes. I am better at knowing the bones, the small fragments of zygomatic arch, the lumbar vertebrae shattered.

  Ismail joined me in Ethiopia that summer. It was the first and only expedition I ever led, a coveted prize after two years teaching at Michigan, and before that, as a graduate student in physical anthropology when I worked on surveys in Pakistan and Kenya.

  We were a small team. I was denied NSF funding. A new professor, and though my thesis was published, it was far from groundbreaking and I was thought unproven. Only those students who won travel grants on their own merits were able to accompany me. There were five of us, and a cook. Three were graduate students from Michigan: Bill, Ellen and Steve.

  Ismail was the sole Ethiopian among us. He would start as one of my graduate students the following term, and we met him in Addis Ababa. We had planned a preliminary mapping of an area in the north, along the eastern rim of the Great Rift, a bare reconnaissance of the badlands whose thick fingers extended to the far horizon. A team of petroleum geologists who traveled through the area two ye
ars earlier had collected fossil mammal remains that suggested the region had exposed layers almost two million years old.

  That first night in the desert found us all marveling at the stars, our blanket, at the stillness of a universe that had retracted from us only to show its distant splendor. The cook’s heavy breath as he turned the goat on its spit, the fire bursting open the night—I remember the smells, the sounds. We argued about Binford and Isaac, about the significance of recent excavations. When the fire sputtered, we thought the stars might blind us.

  The following day Ismail saw a thin string of smoke in the distance, rising like an exclamation point, but the cook had laughed at the city boy. Those were just hunters, he said. Ismail said nothing. Only later did he tell me of the rumors of the widening war, of trouble in the north. We would never have been given our permit had there been the possibility of trouble, I explained, there was nothing to worry about. Ismail’s eyes continued to reflect the horizon, though he never spoke of it again.

  My father, Hukum, had told me about his village in India. I had never been to India. I was born one cold winter in New York, and in those first few weeks, my mother told me, the pipes had rattled in the apartment building until finally they burst. Water flooded the first floor and became ice, and the firemen used blowtorches to melt their way into our building. My father said that in India they gave names to the dark spaces between the stars. It was the darkness that was novel, scarce, that seemed brilliant against so much light. Sometimes I would find my father late at night in the living room, the lights all off, only the clock glowing on the VCR. He would say that it was such a relief, this darkness, this not being able to see. Only years later did I learn what it was he was hoping not to see.