Good Indian Girls: Stories (9 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“At Grand Central Station, underground. People are dying,
they will die. They will choke on their bathroom floors. I know it.”

“It was a bomb scare.”

Mrs. Kastenbaum blinks, looks at Anu closely, as if her eyes have been closed this whole time, as if suddenly, after many decades of being blind, she has been miraculously given sight again.

“It’s a sari,” Anu says.

“You stapled it.”

“I know . . . I just—”

“I’ve never seen anything so . . . so . . .”

“Yes?”

“You dress like this every night?”

“Well, not . . .”

“You must be deeply rooted people.”

“It’s just . . .”

“I thought of you two as a modern couple, you know, drugs, parties, electrical devices, that sort of thing. Who knows? Adultery?”

“Yes.”

“It is so rare, people who take the past seriously, people who respect their parents, their mothers. No one respects their mother anymore.”

“Yes.”

“Will you say something for me?”

“I don’t understand.”

“In your language.”

“In English?”

“English?”

“I’m speaking it now.”

“No. In Sanskrit.”

“Sanskrit?”

“I’ve always wanted someone to say something to me in Sanskrit. I’ve never had the courage to ask.”

“No one speaks it.”

“No one?”

“It’s for the gods.”

“Oh—”

Mrs. Kastenbaum turns to leave and stops. “People are dying,” she says.

Hari’s cell starts to ring the moment Anu enters the bedroom.

“Quick,” he says. “See if it’s Jack.”

“It’s Jack.”

“Hold it to my face.”

She answers the phone. “Here he is, Jack,” she says.

“Jack?”

“I’ll make this quick,” Jack says. “This is about Hawthorne.”

“Go ahead.”

Anu hovers over him, lit by candles on all sides, her hair falling down about his eyes. He is watching her the whole time he talks to Jack, her eyes, mouth, lips. Who is she? How did they marry? How did they meet? The past is oblivion.

“Stick him like a pig,” Jack says. “Stick him and stick him hard. Up the ass. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“You’ll get one chance with Hawthorne, maybe not even that. He has his mouth wrapped around Keppenmeyer’s dick. He’s sucking hard. You need to be aware of this. I want you to stick him in the ass and make the shit scream. I want to see shit flying out of his mouth. Is your dick big enough for that?”

“My dick’s big enough.”

There is a long silence.

“Jack?”

“I am in the abyss, Harry. I am staring into the abyss. I am falling. It’s a very long way down.”

“You’ll be fine, Jack. We all will.”

“I like your attitude. It’s a great reassurance. I don’t know if it’s enough. There are things you don’t know.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Remember. Hawthorne takes it in the ass. I’ll call you later.”

Anu shuts the phone and drops it on the bed.

She says, “One of these days, you’re going to have to tell me what you do for that man.”

She is watching, she is looking at his face, at the shadows, the play of light created by the candles.

“My feet,” he says. “Tie my feet.”

“Wait. I want to say something, I want . . .”

She loses the thread. For a moment she saw something, something vital and deep in his eyes, about herself, about him, about the two of them together. In a flash it is gone.

“I’m losing my mind,” she says.

“Not you too.”

“No, just . . .”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Kastenbaum thinks we speak Sanskrit.”

“We don’t?”

“No one does, darling.”

“Not even when we were little?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m flying.”

“Tie my legs.”

“Which ones are your legs?” She falls forward onto his chest. “Did you eat both the burgers?”

She licks his neck, up, across, to his ear.

“Tie me till it hurts,” he says.

She raises herself on her elbows and looks at him hard.

“Pig,” she says.

His cell phone rings.

“Hey Jack,” Anu says. “Long time no speakee.”

“Annie,” Jack says. “I need Harry.”

“He’s all tied up.”

“Darling,” Hari says. “Hold it to my face.”

She shakes her head. “Fuck you.”

“Jack,” he shouts. “Ignore her. She’s talking to me.”

She shuts the phone and drops it on the floor.

“Cunt,” he says.

“Prick,” she says.

“Fuck me,” he says.

“No,” she says.

The phone rings again.

“Hold it this time.”

She sticks her tongue out and holds the phone to his ear.

“Harry, that you?”

“I’m right here, Jack.”

“I’m having a crisis, Harry. You’re the only man I can talk to about these things. The two of us share a natural affinity for order and a well-regulated life. We are blood brothers, we are kin of a higher order. I look upon you as my spiritual body double. I’ll hire you to impersonate me in heaven one day.”

Anu bites his nipple and he stops himself from letting out a cry.

“Do you mind if I call you Dick?”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay, Dick. Don’t you like the sound of that?”

“Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“Could it be that I am not who I am?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Those movies, you must have seen them when you were a kid. Body snatchers, aliens with the power of mind control, top secret government experiments. Maybe I am an alien in my own body, maybe I am someone else entirely. I might be sitting right now in a room in Arlington, Virginia, and here is my body, walking around an office in midtown.”

“That’s the movies. In the movies, no one is who he is.”

Anu is running her tongue along his throat, his chin, a foot playing over his crotch.

“That’s an interesting idea, Dick. I’m impressed. But what about the one where Heston plays Van Gogh? Is he Heston? Is he the painter? Who is he, if he’s not one or the other?”

“Jack?”

“Yes, Dick?”

“What are we talking about?”

“I’ll tell you a story, Dick. I once put a loaded pistol up my first wife’s cunt. It was my grandfather’s gun. He carried it in the Great War. Then it was my father’s. He carried in the Second World War. Then it was mine. I pushed it up my wife’s cunt one night and I told her I was going to kill her if she refused to give me a divorce.”

“What happened?”

“She said no. I pulled the trigger. I’m not kidding. The gun was loaded and I pulled the trigger. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Dick. I’ve never told anyone, not even my lawyer.”

“Did she die, Jack? Did you kill her?”

Jack says nothing.

“Jack?”

Anu releases one of Hari’s wrists and brings his hand to the phone. She raises herself, first on all fours, straddling his body like a cat, the sari falling from her figure and across his chest, then is free of him.

“That’s the beautiful thing,” Jack says finally. “In all those years, that gun never once misfired. That was the one time it did. I tell you, Dick, I had the best sex of my life that night, the very best. It remains unequalled.”

Hari shoots her a look of alarm and she puts a finger to her lips and tiptoes out.

In the kitchen, all the way at the back of the cupboard over the microwave, she finds her stash of Dunhills. Not even Hari knows about them. She pulls out a pack and matches and takes them outside, to the concrete porch, and sits down in the cool night air. She can hear Hari calling after her.

She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply. It has been six months since she last smoked. The tobacco tastes stale, glorious. Despite the high, it goes straight to her head.

Across the street, she sees Mrs. Kastenbaum at her kitchen window, face framed by bright yellow ruffled curtains. Her face is deformed and ugly and frightening. Her eyes are enormous insect eyes, staring through the window glass. It takes Anu a moment to realize Mrs. Kastenbaum is holding a pair of binoculars to her face. The old woman lowers them and raises an arm and waves.

The Bolinas razorback kicks in. It is sudden, like the drug has been puttering her along in second gear for miles and with one punch of the pedal shoots her up to fifth.

Everything transforms.

She looks up at the few stars, the sky is burning, it is on fire, stars are falling from the heavens. She is melting into the
concrete. Everything is molten, the street, the houses, the whole city is a river of flames. She can see Mrs. Kastenbaum. The two large insect eyes are at her face again, hovering in the kitchen.

Anu wants to say something. She wants to tell Mrs. Kastenbaum something desperately important. She tries. She opens her mouth. She forms the words. Nothing comes out. The words are stuck in her throat. They are not even words, they are sounds, the sounds people made before they could say anything.

She stubs the cigarette out, lights another. Inhales. The world is fire, she thinks, and tries to make a sound and fails. When she looks up, Mrs. Kastenbaum is gone.

Hero of the Nation

THE FIRST TIME I MET PAPA WAS WHEN HE CAME TO LIVE
with us in the spring, when things were growing. In an uncharacteristic mood of celebration, Mom planted a row of colorful flowers in the front yard along both sides of the driveway. Daisies and buttercups and even a rose bush. A week later, I was the one who found Papa peeing on the flowers. His ancient penis was gripped between his fingers, his lower lip curled over his upper. He looked like a garden gnome, except that he was out-sized and he had, strangely, a working dick.

“The bastard,” Mom said, shooing him back into the house. “I’ll never do another thing for him.”

I clipped two roses for Papa and left them on his pillow. I was on his side, I decided.

Papa was Dad’s father, a man in his seventies who had spent his life in the military in India. I asked Dad how many wars he’d fought in and Dad said, “Don’t be an idiot. Girls don’t need to know about things like that.”

I’d heard stories, mostly in whispers, of my soldier grandfather, far away in India. The few photographs of him hanging in the house showed him stern and handsome in his turban and his neat beard and proper military moustache,
decked out in his crisp uniform. I dreamt of his adventures on the front lines of wars I knew nothing about, and in my mind all his battles took place on the slopes of high snow-covered mountains. He would struggle for hours through the mist, carrying an enormous pack, only to suddenly confront the enemy directly in the zero-visibility of a blizzard. He always won these hand-to-hand fights, and he always slit the throat of his enemy with his bayonet so that blood splattered gregarious and red across the white snow.

It was a shock to meet him finally, bent, his eyes filmy with age, his figure straining against collapse.

“The old fool has come here to die,” Dad mused when he arrived. It was Papa’s first time in the US. Dad invited him every year and every year Papa refused. Dad said Papa was stubborn, that he never liked the idea of his children moving away. Now he came because there was nowhere else for him to go. The old man had lost his strength, while his mind, Dad said, was going. He’d also lost the power of speech. When he tried to talk, he moved his jaw up and down and a painful rattle emerged. Dad refused to tell me what happened. I searched Papa’s old neck for a gunshot wound but found only a thin, inconclusive scar. At night I’d lie awake thinking of him, this one-time hero of his nation, reduced to wordless sorrow and a life little better than that of an animal chained and dying in its pen.

My brother Johnny said they cut your tongue out when you left the army, that way you couldn’t reveal state secrets. I knew that’s not what happened, for there was Papa’s tongue, a curled sentry greeting all when he opened and shut his great mouth. Johnny had another name, an Indian name, but no one used it. I hated mine, Ruby, short for Rupinder. Every week
I secretly changed it. One week it was Gloriana, the next it was Xerxes. I’d exhausted the standards: Ashley, Heather, Mary, Juliet. I was worried one day I’d run out and have to become a boy to find a name that suited me.

A month after Papa arrived I learned why he couldn’t speak. He was a lifelong smoker, contracted throat cancer, and the operation that saved his life cost him the power of speech. I learned this by listening in on a phone conversation Dad was having with his sister in Phoenix.

“Papa used to smoke,” I said to Dad that evening.