Good Indian Girls: Stories

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

  My body spreads every day, the currents and the horizon of cold waves pushing me in different directions. One hour, one part of me is warmed by the red breaking of dawn, while another still misses the recent evening. Soon night and day will be eternal, dawn and sunset constants from which I will never be free. Sharks tear at pieces of me, at the water snake of my intestine, the sweet of my testicle, and in the distance there are screams—faraway terrors, growing closer. One eyeball sinks to the ocean floor and is caught up in warm currents rising from an underwater volcano.

  Immediately after the explosion, when my body was blown into—how many, I don’t know, maybe a hundred thousand, maybe a million—fragments, I had the illusion that I was everywhere at once. That every part of me—every smallest fragment, from the length of my femur to the stray spots of blood suddenly red, diluting—was connected. Not in the physical sense, the way a body is naturally connected, but through our senses. It is hard to find a correct pronoun for the experience—we, us, I, it? In those seconds I saw everything that every part of me saw, experienced everything from all the diverse views that a splintered body possesses. I was at one with all the elements of my body for the first time. For a few seconds, I understood them and understood their sudden and enlarging fear—my own fear—as within moments our consciousness began to deflate.

  It lasted only seconds, as though we were living in the aftermath of a camera flash, slowly fading, the light dimming, and I soon lost touch with the lines of my veins, the fragments of appendix, the small bones of the hand, the drowning balls of spit and urine.

  The expedition was almost over. We had found no evidence of hominid remains, but many of the fossils we did recover suggested that in future seasons, with a larger team and more intensive surveys, this area could prove fruitful. Ismail and I were walking. The high sun hid our shadows under our feet. When we came to the last gully, his face was weary and sweat glinted off his skin like jewels. I’ll take this side, I said, you that. He nodded. He had been distracted all morning, said he had heard a gunshot in the night. But on the two-way radio back into town, there was no news of any trouble. There were the regular skirmishes farther north of us, but nothing where we were.

  We’ll be finished in three days, I said, and then you fly with us to the States. He smiled at this, and I let the weight of my body pull me down into a gully, showering the air with fine white dust. Up on the ridgeline, he was watching me. I saw his silhouette, hesitant. In a week, I shouted up, Michigan!

  Super Bowl and McDonald’s! Ismail shouted back. His body slid down into the next gully over.

  An hour later, I was halfway along the cleavage of this ancient wound, finding nothing visible, when I heard his scream and the shouts of strange voices. Then Ismail again, his throat scrabbling for air.

  When my parents moved to New York, my father already spoke English well, though haltingly. My mother’s English was poor, and she was excited at the possibility of improving it. She wanted both of them to take ESL classes at City College, but my father refused to listen to the idea. He said that they (meaning him, according to my mother) spoke English more than well enough to get by. He said they would both take classes in Esperanto, which—my father claimed—was the language of the future; in a decade, everyone would be speaking it. It was language, he told my mother, that had ripped India apart, thrown it into the pool of communal violence. How can a country persist—a world even—where people cannot speak to each other? This was his argument.

  This was when my mother was pregnant with me and in her fury she almost took his head off with her fist. It was the pregnancy, the sudden mood swings, the new country. She slammed her fist into his face, knocking him down onto the carpet, bloodying his nose.

  See! he shouted from where he lay on the floor, Until we all speak one language, we will always fight.

  All argument fled my mother with that single blow. She was not a violent person and was shocked at herself. It was not the weight of my father’s belief but of her own violence that persuaded her to go along with him and learn Esperanto before she mastered English. When I was still small, I remember her voice, sometimes late at night, singing me songs and nursery rhymes in a language I barely remember, a language I have never since heard anyone else speak.

  Still, she remained firm on one point. She made sure I was never forced to speak that language. They taught me English and Hindi instead, and I was allowed only those few words of Esperanto picked up by chance from the two of them. It was a strange household, all of us speaking different languages. My father clung to Esperanto, my mother to Hindi, and I managed a patois of these two and English. It was the furthest from my father’s dream of a common language I can imagine.

  One night, I remember, they were arguing—both shouting in Esperanto. My five-year-old self could see them clearly, the small shelf of books behind my father, the black-and-white TV flickering, the smell of milk on the stove in the kitchen. What they were saying to each other was beyond me, but it was the last night my mother ever spoke Esperanto in the house. At one point, my father was on the verge of striking her. I could see his hand formed into a fist. At that moment, my mother let out a scream—the only time I ever heard her scream, a scream in no language I knew. It wasn’t a Hindi scream or an English scream—I have heard those—and I am certain it wasn’t an Esperanto scream, because no one would resort to so foreign a language at such a moment. It was something else entirely, and it stopped my father’s fist midair. Stunned, he stood motionless for a moment—then his body slumped, relaxed, and he put his arms around her, talking softly in Hindi.

  Three men surrounded Ismail, all shouting, all with rifles. In my panic I had scrambled up and over the thigh of rock that separated our two small valleys, dirt catching under my nails, my breath suddenly hard. The gunmen wore jeans, old, beaten athletic shoes, dirty T-shirts. Thick ammo belts hung across their chests, as though they were old-time bandits. One brought down the butt of his rifle like a bat, smashing it against Ismail’s head and the young man fell to the ground, screaming, a pool of blood already forming on the dry desert surface.

  Who the fuck are you? I shouted down, and three faces turned to acknowledge me, mouths rigid and tense. The action of a rifle click echoed across the landscape and suddenly, looking down there, at guns now pointed up at me, I wanted nothing more than to scramble back down into the hot gully I had emerged from, to abandon Ismail to his murderers without a thought. I didn’t see the one who aimed at me, instead I heard the gunshot and my body flew back, tumbling into the white of the gully, dust in my mouth, the taste of blood. I screamed.

  My body curled into a ball, trembling, and my mother’s scream that night many years before filled my ears. I remember it now as above me clouds have cut the stars away from me, and a storm rumbles in this direction, already tossing parts of me around, viciously. My mother’s long-ago scream had seemed incomprehensible, as though something ancient were shouting through her. But when I heard Ismail’s—and heard my own echoing through my skull—something in me understood the origin of that scream. I lay at the bottom of the gully, shaking, terrified, certain already that Ismail would be killed. Why—? I didn’t know and didn’t care. My mouth was full of blood and above me the blueness of the sky, my only companion, appeared like a glove strangling me.

  At the camp, Steve, one of my graduate students who had been briefly in medical school, dressed the wound. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the skin, had simply grazed my shoulder. Bill meticulously tore down and packed up the camp. I saw Ellen standing in the distance. She was searching the horizon, in the direction where the Jeep had raced, carrying Ismail. She shouted over to me, her arm pointing at the faraway sky. The line of her finger led to a cloud of black specks of vultures swirling and dipping like mosquitoes over a stagnant pool.

  When Bill finished packing the two Land Rovers, we followed the distant shadow of the vultures. The cook was also gone, with all his belongings. Ellen said that when she ran back to the camp on he
aring the gunshots, the cook and the other vehicle were missing. We were all silent. My shoulder was burning, and I asked myself why I hadn’t tried harder to stop them. They had guns, and they were willing to use them, but . . . What if I had been a different person, able to subdue the kidnappers with the sound of my voice? What if all it took were the right level of voice, the right determination? Instead I had lain at the bottom of that hole, shaking with fear, and comforted by the taste of my own blood, as though that were proof I had tried.

  More than once I have come across the heads of my fellow passengers. Most often they were unrecognizable, only fragments—it was only many years of studying anatomy and osteology that allowed me to see them as human heads at all. But some I did recognize. There was the stewardess who spilled coffee on my lap when we hit a pocket of turbulence. There was the large man who grabbed the last copy of Scientific American just as I was reaching for it. There was the blown-apart face of the child who sat behind me, constantly kicking at the back of my seat. It floated past me, or maybe I floated past it—it is so hard to tell now who is moving, who is stationary.

  When finally we found Ismail’s body, it was covered by a black scab of vultures picking at what little meat was left. Ellen jumped out of the Land Rover, a small revolver in her hand, firing into the air. Even when the birds had scattered, she tried to shoot at them, as though the vultures were somehow at fault. When the gun was empty, I saw the tears on her face. None of us had cried up to then. We did not want to admit what had happened, but Ismail’s face had been slashed open with a knife and his chest made pulp by countless bullet holes.

  Ismail’s scream still haunts me. It left me unable to return to Ethiopia. Nor could I continue my research there, or on anything that was connected to that summer. The picture of Ismail’s body lying in the hot sun returned to me constantly, the white of the sand become red.

  My days passed then in serious contemplation of Ismail’s scream. Above me now the blueness of the midday sky is the same sky in Ethiopia under which I had huddled in a ball, terrified, while somewhere I hear parts of me, far off, mumbling. My cowardice and fear left me feeling little more than an animal, something that can no longer think but only grunts and scratches through the day. Was this what Ismail felt when they appeared, guns pointing? Or when they pulled him away, his feet dragging on the old desert? Or when finally they took out knives and slashed open his face and emptied their rifles into his chest? The two of us had had language stripped from our mouths and were left with only antediluvian tongues. As though we were dogs, beaten, our barks become low whimpers.

  A year after Ismail’s death, I received a package containing a Neanderthal hyoid that had been recently excavated in Spain. The hyoid is a small U-shaped bone that sits behind the jaw, above the larynx and thyroid, and attaches to the tongue. It remains the only articulation we anthropologists have to the beginnings of language. The one shipped to me—small, delicate, resting among layers of rough blue toilet paper and a cocoon of bubble wrap—was the first and only Neanderthal hyoid ever excavated. The excavators themselves were not interested in it, except to note it in their publication, so I had asked if I could be allowed to study it in further detail. Up to that point my career had been spent tracing the evolutionary paths of early hominids. Examining a Neanderthal hyoid presented something of a challenge.

  I was searching for something new in any case. After Ethiopia, I found myself growing numb to my previous research, and was reminded of my father, who had searched for a universal language and, later, for all languages. Perhaps a part of me began to understand the reasons for his choices, which up to then had struck me as strange and disturbing, in the years before his death.

  The muscle attachments were easy to trace on the rough surface of the bone, and in a cold winter in Michigan, the office heat ever failing, I sat huddled in sweater and overcoat, cramped over the desk, a bright table lamp illuminating the bone’s shadowed detail. Following the slight rises and depressions and examining the bone under multiple magnifications allowed me to compare it with human hyoids, and also with chimp and gorilla hyoids. Every point was measured, every angle and distance. A series of statistical analyses of the surface area covered by the various attachments for ligaments and muscles helped me to understand its relationship to the jaw and palate. Ever so slowly, I was beginning to gain a deeper knowledge of the bone, of how it might be related to those first human grunts and mumblings, and I sensed finally I might be unearthing the lowest deposits of language, the first words themselves.

  I have come to a decision. I will find the other parts of me. Time has disappeared in this ocean, and ever since those first seconds when my body was all and then diminished, one piece after another has been losing contact, as though the many fragments of myself are disappearing from the radar screen of my consciousness. Each time a fragment vanishes—that sudden moment of loss, as though a limb were cut off—every part shudders. If it does not stop soon, I will lose touch with every part of us, with everything.

  A systematic search requires mapping the vectors of the explosion to learn how widely scattered the original wreckage was. I need information on current strengths, on wind speeds, on local storms and weather patterns. I need to know what parts of me are likely to have sunk to the bottom, and what parts are likely still to be floating, bobbing toward some distant shore.

  None of this is easy. I even tried to employ the aid of dolphins. With their sonar they might easily locate my many scattered selves. But when I get close enough to shout at one, the dolphin approaches, nudges me quizzically, and quickly moves on, having lost all interest. Sea birds are no better. They pick at the scraps of flesh that dot this ocean now, as though it were all a single vast carcass, but remain equally estranged when I call out to them. They take flight, their wings flapping nervously. All this time, I am drifting farther and farther apart. Soon I will be scattered across the globe. Soon my pleadings will be heard by birds in the Amazon and fish choking in the Thames, by fishermen off the Red Sea coast, by the stone faces on Easter Island. Somebody must hear, somebody must understand.

  My colleagues laughed when I first explained my ideas. They thought I was joking. It must have seemed funny at first, strange at least to someone who has not studied the evidence. But the data was unimpeachable and I felt a rising confidence that I could substantially back up my claims with scientific evidence.

  It was around this time that Ellen walked in to see me. She was finishing her PhD, and the frown of concern on her face told me she was both determined and concerned. The work I was doing was crazy, she insisted, it was useless, ever since Ethiopia I had lost it.

  How can you possibly hope—she was almost shouting, her hand stabbing the air—to reconstruct a language from a stupid hyoid? If nothing else, what kind of sample size is one hyoid? She looked again as she had that day when she jumped out of the Jeep, her face contorted in loss and anger, the small gun in her fist, firing into the air.

  I let her go on. She was worried about her reputation. If it got out—and no doubt it already had—that her advisor was a crackpot, her chances of landing a post would crumble beneath her. I sympathized, but I knew then—as I know even more strongly now—that I was right, my work would be vindicated. If only I could have a chance to present the evidence.

  My goal was simply to reassure Ellen, to downplay my claims, to tell her that what she had been hearing were exaggerations, that it wasn’t a language I was trying to reconstruct but rather the level of cognitive and linguistic potential. This wasn’t true. I had reconstructed the language, but hoped to wait until the opportunity arose to present the evidence to my colleagues in a proper environment. Ellen left, still worried I could tell, although she smiled as she walked out. But she was right. It was Ismail who started it all.

  The language I reconstructed was one of grunts and squawks, of deep aspirated vocalizations, of long growls. All this arose from my study of the hyoid, from how the muscles and ligaments had been attached, how th
e tongue had to have moved. In my office, alone, I practiced those sounds, painfully distorting my mouth into shapes that would form such strange and distant voices. In them I detected that ancient sound I heard in Ismail’s scream: the sound of an atavistic fear, the fear of everything. Alone, at night, making sure no one loitered in nearby corridors, I would let out that scream, as though I too had become a Neanderthal facing something so terrible it defied comprehension. I did not know exactly what it was, but I knew the sound, the scream that gave birth to everything.

  This ocean feels endless. The first time I walked out across the badlands in Ethiopia, I believed I had found the meaning of desolation. But I would return to those badlands in a fast second. If only I had been scattered by the vultures, become a fossil myself. Here, amid all this water, I find no part of me that makes sense anymore. Floating past me, my lower jaw, some teeth still intact, jabbered incomprehensibly. The current finally pushed it away, its squawks fading among the growling waves. Now a fear grips me, that when I find the other parts of what is no longer me, none will be comprehensible.

  The last I heard of my father was a letter from a neighbor of his in the cramped tenement where he had lived during those final years of his life. It was a brief note telling of my father’s death. He had had some last words for me, but the neighbor hadn’t understood the language.

  I had known he was dying of cancer. I visited him once in those years, when he told me what he had never been able to tell my mother. It had been some years since I had seen him. After my mother left him, he hid from us, refusing ever to give us a current address. All we knew of him were the monthly checks sent dutifully. Finally, we received a letter from a friend of his, saying he had asked me to come and see him. My mother was not mentioned.