Good Indian Girls: Stories Read online

  GOOD INDIAN GIRLS

  GOOD INDIAN GIRLS

  Stories

  Ranbir Singh Sidhu

  SOFT SKULL PRESS

  An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  BERKELEY

  Copyright © Ranbir Singh Sidhu 2013

  First published in India in 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers India

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sidhu, Ranbir Singh.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Good Indian Girls : Stories / Ranbir Singh Sidhu.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  “Distributed by Publishers Group West”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-1-59376-569-9

  I. Title.

  PR6069.I275A6 2013

  823’.914—dc23

  2013017908

  Cover design by Rebecca Lown

  SOFT SKULL PRESS

  An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In Memory

  Bill Middleton and Monique Wittig

  Contents

  The Good Poet of Africa

  The Discovery

  Good Indian Girls

  Sanskrit

  Hero of the Nation

  Solzhenitsyn in Vermont

  Neanderthal Tongues

  The Consul’s Wife

  Bodies Motion Sound

  The Order of Things

  Border Song

  Children’s Games

  The Good Poet of Africa

  A FRESH COAT OF WHITE PAINT FAILED TO OBSCURE THE old cracks on the office walls where the ambassador sat behind his desk in all his fleshy bulk, his rough, ungainly hands wiping the sweat from his face with whatever was closest: a corner of his jacket, the report on our prospects for the oil deal, the photograph of his only daughter. Behind him, the map of India nailed to the wall still owned to a vestigial East Pakistan, and next to this, portraits of Gandhi, Indira, Nehru and Rao hung like long-forgotten family members.

  I yawned. He told me I was promoted, eating as he talked, that my transfer was imminent, laid a samosa back on his plate, and grimaced. The effort made his stomach pulse lightly up and down. I thought of him naked, riding his stick-like wife, eating all the while.

  They were sending me to San Francisco, to the consulate there, though why, he didn’t know, and saying that he laughed, a real crack-up of a laugh. Flecks of samosa shot across the desk, landing on reports and visa applications and even on the photograph of his wife. He recovered and wiped the photograph with a jacket sleeve. “You have important friends,” he told me. “Very high.” The fan ached above us, groaning from its constant, but useless, effort and a flutter of his fingers indicated the end of the meeting. He turned and picked up a stranger’s passport and pressed it against his forehead, complaining that his constitution was unfit to handle many more years of this African climate.

  That evening, in my room, with my shirt sticking hungrily to my back, I could think of no friends who might vaguely be considered high. My mind occupied itself with the memory of the ambassador’s mass, the heat, and how, at this time of night, trucks passing in the street outside hummed with restless activity, as though the late hours had brought out in their engines a spirit of relentless and undirected motion.

  A young Sikh greeted me in the terminal at SFO. Handsome, tall, with a clean, neat beard, bright eyes, a precisely arranged orange turban, he slapped me with comradely affection, a jolly, thick-fingered Punjabi slap. My new assistant, Bhagwant. Call him Baggie, he said, hauling two heavy suitcases, one in each hand. “See. I’m really Baggie now.” The Consul was dying to meet me, he assured, but that would be later. He laughed, almost squealing, then abruptly stopped and apologized. It was an honor, he explained, to be asked to meet me at the airport. I concluded he must be an idiot and scrutinized the terminal, hoping someone else was hunting for me. But there was only Baggie who staggered beside me with an irrepressible grin and the gait of a drunk gibbon.

  The next day, insisting I get to know the city, Baggie pushed me onto a visitor’s bus and left me stranded, crushed against the window by the elbows of a white-suited tourist. The man asked my name and I answered by silently raising the corner of my lip in a putative snarl. He turned quickly away.

  This new home offered an unlikely intimacy. The irregular street plan, how hills first concealed a vista and then presented narrow, elongated views of streets and the bay beyond, the sense of motion and life, not undirected as it felt in Nairobi, but appearing purposeful—all contributed to a feeling that I could find a place here. When the bus arrived at the top of a hill, it afforded a view of the ocean. I realized I had not lived so close to a coastline since childhood. I twisted my neck as the bus turned a corner, attempting to catch one last glimpse of the blade edge of water.

  Stepping off the bus, full of nostalgia for the ocean of my childhood, I confronted a wan noon heat and fell instantly against a young black woman who, had I not actually touched her, I would have said wasn’t there. She held out a sheaf of purple flyers and, though it appeared she should be distributing them, simply stood there, consumed by the rising currents of hot exhaust from the bus. One hand was stretched forward in a gesture of apathy while her eyes remained sunk in boredom. I snatched a flyer and hurried on.

  Come hear the Unities of East and West, the purple sheet announced, of North and South. How we are all One World under the Benign Gaze of Atatatata. The sheet listed a series of dates and times. I folded it into quarters and slipped it into my pocket. If she had said anything I would have discarded the paper immediately, but her silence and the sheet’s curious message erased all thoughts of childhood and determined me to learn more about this Atatatata. All afternoon I remained under the spell of the studied apathy of her gaze.

  The Consul was not as eager to see me as Baggie had earlier asserted, and several weeks passed before I received a summons. In the meantime I became increasingly accustomed to the spaciousness of my office and to the day’s routine.

  On one wall hung a portrait of Gandhi and on another, one of Singh. I was tempted to turn both around, but didn’t, more out of torpor than fear of consequences. In the mornings, Baggie invariably asked what there was to do, though he almost certainly knew the answer far better than I. No doubt an inherent defect in his character kept him cowed. I despised him considerably more when he became personal, asking what I had done the previous evening.

  My response was always curt, offered with a sneer, something like this: “Why don’t you make some tea, you know, real tea, chai, and cut your hair or something.” Nothing offended him, as if within him rested an indefatigable reservoir of simplicity and good nature, and it gave me rare pleasure to push up against the dams of that basin with what already felt like a hatred that grew out of some long ago and unresolved conflict.

  My days filled themselves. The position was some species of cultural attaché, though no one confided my exact title, and I appeared charged with meeting any of
the public who wanted to know more about India or Indian culture. A ludicrous post, as I knew little about India and cared less for it. Men and women of all ages were announced by Baggie and sat themselves down. Often I had no idea how to respond to their questions and so resorted to invention or vague generalizations. “India is a large country and jam-packed with diversity!” The sort of thing people think they want to hear. One young woman dressed in red leather and expensive-looking torn jeans asked about the rave scene. I didn’t know what a rave was and gave her a lengthy explanation of the many ascetics who dance in the streets, naked most of them, begging for a single bowl of rice. “One day every year all India becomes like this. Everyone naked and dancing, begging for rice.” She looked excited when she walked out, and I pictured her stepping off the plane into a Delhi summer, her eyes intent on searching out a naked and frenzied India.

  If they stayed long, especially women, I offered tea and sweets and tried to keep them talking while I sat there, imagining them in the nude, my pants inflating and collapsing with the slow passage of the day.

  It was Baggie who drove me across the bridge one afternoon to help me buy a car. My choice was something large and flashy, an ancient DeSoto, with an engine which, when I turned the ignition, shook with a threatening and vibrant rattle. Baggie didn’t understand my preference. There were many newer models, he said, much more reliable. “You’re not on an African salary anymore,” he declared in a tone that was curiously protective and, for the first time, my attitude toward him began to soften.

  All warm feelings vanished when he suggested I join him that night at his apartment. Every Thursday he hosted informal poetry readings. It was a group of his friends. They read old and new Urdu ghazals—always Urdu. Baggie claimed it was the real language of poetry.

  I told him I hated poetry—worst was Urdu poetry. I had never seen him look so shocked.

  That evening I found a note slipped under the windshield wiper of my new car. On it, Baggie had written his address and the dates and times of his salons. I laughed at his tenacity and felt oddly gratified at having an assistant like Baggie. That didn’t stop me from crushing the paper into a ball and throwing it onto the floor of the passenger seat.

  The night I visited the address listed on the purple flyer with its promise of benign divinity, a man answered the door, tall, muscular, and welcomed me with a handshake so hard I felt the sting in the bones of my palm for minutes after. His name was Dr. Geronimo Boyce III. The tone of his voice was regular and precise and seemed, oddly, to originate not from his mouth but in the empty space between us, as if disembodied.

  The young woman I’d met my first afternoon in San Francisco sat on a frayed couch, wearing bright yellow headphones, and chose not to acknowledge me when I walked in. Her expression seemed almost identical to that earlier glimpse I had caught.

  On the walls, those not crowded with bookcases, hung African masks and artifacts. Similar ones overpopulated the tourist stalls in Nairobi. Here, the wooden faces stared down with menacing, uncertain expressions, incongruous within this studious and musty room.

  “This is Aime Love.” Dr. Boyce gestured vaguely in the direction of his daughter. When he spoke he did not look at me but rested his eyes on a spot in the air, as though addressing a fourth, spectral individual. “Get it? Aime Love. Aime is Français for love, and with her last name being Love, she is really Double Love or Love Squared.” Double Love pulled the headphones from her ears and, in a voice long ago drained of all enthusiasm, asked her father to shut up.

  “But, Love,” Dr. Boyce offered, “he doesn’t know your special nature or how you came into this world filling it with joy.” Dr. Boyce turned to me and I could see from his blank eyes that he believed every word he said. “My friend, when Aime was born she was so full of the wonder and joy of life that we thought it a crime to call her anything else. Love wasn’t enough to encompass her shining character, so we decided on Aime Love. Doesn’t it suit her?” I nodded, unsure what else to do, and looked back at Double Love. Her eyes smoldered.

  No one else arrived that evening, and throughout the night Dr. Boyce walked continuously, making the precise figure of an eight around the two couches where Double Love and I sat facing one another. The old carpet revealed the frayed path of hundreds of such figure eights, perhaps thousands. His eyes unfailingly searched out that other, fourth person, only rarely coming to rest on me. Double Love had brought me a mug of coffee from the kitchen. She drank from one herself.

  “I,” Dr. Boyce announced, “am the Seventh Avatar of Atatatata. Your people have avatars also, but they are false. Atatatata has given them to you not to deceive you, but to prepare you for the knowledge of the real avatars, the Avatars of Atatatata.” Atatatata emerged from the love cauldron of Venus, Dr. Boyce explained, where he had spent eternity balancing a rock on his nose and thimbles on his eyelash hairs. He came down to Africa where he consummated his marriage to the Earth with all types of animals, and from these different unions were produced different races—Neanderthals, Pygmies, Tibetans, Andorrans, the Welsh, Liberians, Sikhs. He droned on and soon my eyes fell back on Double Love, whose face had not moved and whose eyes registered an emotion lost between rage and lethargy.

  The Seventh Avatar, without changing the rhythm of his speech, stepped into the kitchen to refill my cup. His voice continued, but the moment he was out of sight, Double Love started forward on her sofa. “When he quits, don’t leave. There’s a side door. Follow the stairs up. My room is at the top.” She fell back instantly and soon her father returned carrying the coffee. Her expression remained unchanged, as if, during the moments the Seventh Avatar was out of the room, nothing had happened.

  The attic ceiling of Double Love’s room sloped at an acute angle. I ducked and stood stooped with Double Love’s back to me, her face visible in the mirror of a low bureau where she sat examining herself. The room was scattered with clothes and tapes, and a single mattress rested on the floor. Minutes passed before she twisted around in her chair to acknowledge me after arriving at some moment of satisfaction with her own appearance. She swore at her father. “How can you sit there? All those hours.” I was waiting to ask her the same question. “Me?” she said and laughed. She shook her head. “Me.”

  In minutes, I was on top of her, and what surprised me was how stagnant and unresponsive her body remained. Her apparent hatred of her father had led me to believe the opposite would be true, but she was little more than a dead thing underneath me.

  When it was over she found a cigarette and lit it and told me to put my pants on. “You’ve got to leave,” she said, exhaling smoke into the tight, airless room, not bothering to offer me a drag. I descended the stairs without fuss and outside in the cold nighttime street I thought about her body and how she had lain there, motionless, on the threadbare carpet. I had done little more than mount her.

  The following morning I shouted at Baggie. That thing on his head he called a turban was a disgrace, if he didn’t know how to wrap one properly, what was he doing being a Sikh. He stared back at me, disturbed, so I told him to get out and not come back until he looked decent.

  The early hours passed with the usual mixture of mild fantasies and, later, when Baggie returned with his turban straighter than a turban could possibly be, I found myself in a better mood. The Consul wanted to see me. “He is eager,” Baggie said. Three weeks since my arrival and finally the Consul was displaying his eagerness. I laughed but Baggie didn’t understand.

  The Consul’s office stood at the top of a wide flight of stairs, along a narrow corridor with doors on all sides and behind double wooden doors. This section of the consulate was alien territory as I’d kept my wandering circumscribed, having no desire to know more than I needed to fill my days. Noises emerged from behind the doors—pitched and delicate music, deep, exasperated groans, a fist striking wood, and even the sound of a chisel on stone. At the Consul’s door, I could smell the pakoras, freshly made, that awaited me inside.

&nbs
p; He was a thin man, unusual in the service, unheard of at his level. There was one unbreakable rule and he had broken it: the higher the diplomatic office achieved, the wider one grows, constantly ballooning and rising. He wore a plain Indian shirt, which only accented his boniness. The office was large but spare and, when he motioned for me to step forward and sit, he did so disinterestedly, not looking at me but beyond, down the hall and through the open door. Several miniatures in the old Mughal style hung on the walls, while in one corner a sitar took up residence.

  “I trust you have settled in.” His voice was sharp and strong, not at all what I had expected from his appearance.

  I nodded.

  “Yes, yes, and you have been here . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Three weeks.”

  “Yes, yes.” His eyes signaled the pakoras. I took one and dipped it into the chutney and ate it slowly. He didn’t eat.

  “How do you find it?” He twisted his head away from me and closed his eyes as though in contemplation of something distant and great.

  “Find what?”

  “The city, the job. All this.” He motioned with his hands to the room.

  “The usual.”

  There was silence for some seconds.

  “You know I asked for you.”

  “Asked for me?”

  “Yes, yes. To come here from Africa. You are the poet, yes?”

  “The what?”

  “You are the poet. The good poet of Africa.”

  I suppressed a laugh. Obviously someone had grossly misinformed him. I was not a poet. I never had been one. I hated poetry. He appeared disturbed but told me that clearly I was lying. “You poets are recluses and no doubt don’t like to be known, but this is going too far. Too far.”

  An untidy stack of papers sat on his desk. He now picked several of these up and I saw that they were fax transmissions. “These are yours, yes?”