Good Indian Girls: Stories
Read Good Indian Girls: Stories Online
Authors: Ranbir Singh Sidhu
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author)
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
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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In Memory
Bill Middleton and Monique Wittig
Contents
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.