Good Indian Girls: Stories (14 page)

“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 years 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.

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.