Good Indian Girls: Stories (2 page)

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.

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?”

The paper was thin and glossy and the writing, in Urdu, was poorly transmitted, some illegible. The office had received streams of such poems. Other embassies in the city also received them. All carried my name and all originated in Nairobi. I paged through them without interest. There was my name, scrawled in someone else’s hand. All looked like dreary love poems, desire, loss, the usual sentimental ambit. I could care less.

“We got phone calls from all the consulates and embassies
in the city asking who this phantom Indian poet was who lived in Nairobi.”

I dropped the pages onto the desk and shook my head. Someone was playing a trick, I said. The Consul was not convinced. Everyone here was an artist of one sort or another. The Consul himself, though not an artist, was a critic of the early Mughal style in painting. He waved his hand at the miniatures on the walls. “Don’t hide yourself. We know it was you. You must write more like this.” He pressed his finger down onto the stack of faxes. “That is why I gave you an assistant. Think of those days in Nairobi as an apprenticeship. Now you at last have the ease to spread your wings. Your assistant can do your work, yes?”

I started to laugh. “Is this why I was transferred?”

“Of course!”

I could think of nothing else to say. The whole situation was ridiculous. “I’m not a poet,” I said finally, my voice flat.

“Do not lie to us.”

I stood and found that I was shaking. The tone of the Consul’s insistence made me angry, and I clenched a fist as I walked out, saying only that I had an appointment.

The corridor met me with silence. Behind every door were hidden mouths no doubt sunk in scorn and laughter. Perhaps the joke had not originated in Nairobi but here. Perhaps someone here wanted to make a fool of me. I clattered noisily down the wooden stairs.

A teenager waited for me in my office. He was no more than sixteen, a high school student, and writing a paper on the history of languages for an honors history class. Could I tell him something of the Indian languages? I clapped my hands. Of course! For half an hour I fed him nonsense. All Indian
languages, I explained, were derived from Hebrew. “That’s where Hindi comes from. Notice how Hebrew and Hindi sound alike.” I was gratified to see him scribbling. Hebrew was a Dravidian language and therefore all Indian languages were also Dravidian. “King David’s original name,” I said, “was Dravid. Thus, Dravidian.” All except Punjabi and Jain, which were invented by rajas for the sole use of eunuchs. “All modern Punjabis and Jains are the descendants of eunuchs.” He wrote furiously.

With the so-called honors student gone, I exploded into spasms of laughter and Baggie popped his head around the door to ask what was so funny. I told him and he looked at me crossly, like an angry mother, and slammed the door on his way out. My thoughts returned to the current problem: who was it who might have worked alongside me in Nairobi, who might be here, scribbling those dreadful lines? I thought of those love poems sent across continents in seconds, the very handwriting of the writer, anonymous and electronic, a pulse on phone lines, a transmission from one satellite to another, drowning the sky—the whole spectrum of electromagnetic bands—in the hieroglyphs of miserable and repetitive passions.

The next morning found me having drunk a half bottle of bourbon, cotton-headed from a hangover, and curiously exhilarated on sighting Baggie with his downcast eyes. My assistant was still angry over the trick I played on the kid, and I told him I got drunk to celebrate, that’s how good a joke it was. In the afternoon, Double Love was announced. “A Miss Love,” Baggie’s voice crackled over the intercom. Across her eyes I recognized that same torpid lusterlessness I had seen at her father’s house. She wore a tight black skirt that stopped above her knees and a white tanktop and held a
leather jacket slung over one shoulder. Before Baggie could close the door, she had thrown the jacket violently onto the desk and kicked off her shoes.

“It’s so boring out there. He makes me stand there handing out that shit. God, I hate him.”

Her anger invigorated me and I was flattered she had come to see me. Our sex was hurried and anxious, performed standing up, her body pinned to the wall under the portrait of Singh. She was quick and unenthusiastic and, when she left, I noticed how her odor clung to me. I settled back into my chair behind the desk and replayed the feel of her body as it pressed against my skin and hands. When she had come, I was sure the hint of an expression had glimmered on her face. That memory stayed with me for days.

She returned the following week, and soon she was visiting every few days, sometimes three times a week. Always at the office, never where I lived, though I told her where that was. She preferred the cool afternoons, and we made love with increasing regularity. With each visit I detected a larger crack in the façade of her apathy. I wanted to break the mask completely. With her gone, I thought about her constantly. My body ached after the increasing violence of her movements and the diversions that normally propelled me through the days—my fantasies and tricks—lost their appeal.

I confessed this to her one afternoon. We were sitting together against the wall in the office, our bodies glistening from the sweat of our exertion, drinking tea Baggie had carried in on a tray. I no longer cared what he thought, yet I discovered there was something irreducible about Baggie’s good nature. His anger never persisted long and soon he had grown used to Double Love’s presence and prepared tea for
her with extra sugar and not so much milk, the only way she said it did not totally disgust her.

I was in my underwear and she in a shirt whose flaps hardly covered the triangle of her crotch. Baggie now grinned on repeating his claim that I was corrupted within and without. Only rarely did his face cloud with worry on looking at me, but such times I ignored, and instead I experienced a growing fondness for Baggie and his ways. In a certain fashion he had become a regular aspect of my afternoons with Double Love.

I told Double Love I wanted her to come live with me. She immediately turned away and said it was impossible.

She hated her father and hated living there. Every moment was one of boredom and tedium. It was the straightforward solution, I argued. We would live together, in the same small room, and I would work and she would do exactly as she pleased, whenever she pleased. She shook her head and said she couldn’t explain. I pressed her for a reason. I took her face in my hands and turned it toward me and demanded to know why. After a minute, she confessed that if she left her father, he would kill her. She was sure of it. He had done it before. He had killed her mother. When her mother tried to leave, he shot her. “He made it into an accident. He spent a year inside for manslaughter. That’s when he discovered who he was.” She laughed scornfully. “The Seventh Avatar!”