Good Indian Girls: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

words breaking news as an aside to her teeth biting my nipple, only caught the splintered bodies falling from the plane in the reflection on an imagined ruby blood bead as her teeth pierced my skin. Sikh terrorists , she said. My hand found my crotch, and slowly, I unzipped my pants.
    The next morning, the newspaper lying motionless and folded on the kitchen table, a bland, emasculated exclamation point, the unease of the night before returned. There was something in the news I suspected I didn’t want to read about, and, unaccountably, my hands were shaking when I unfolded the paper.
    Instead of looking at the headline, I took the first short sip of coffee. Hot, almost scalding. My tongue retreated. But I had to laugh at the headline when I saw it. 213 DIE IN AIR INDIA CRASH. What an amazing mistake, a fabulous error. We had made up that name as kids. My sister and I playing in the backyard creating countries out of molehills. She had Czechoslovakia, a real country. And I made up India. Dreambirth nation whose dry, California dirt borders were no more certain than a cowpat, a yellow-grass-surrounded-India.
    I scanned quickly through the story, hoping that perhaps there was only the single typo, the sole error. But the word repeated itself, again and again—Air India, India, Indians . With each repetition the newscaster’s voice from the night before found an ugly path into my brain— Sikh terrorists from the North Indian state of Punjab have claimed . . . The word almost gave itself meaning, as though seeing it printed and repeated, the mirror image of a lie flashing endlessly, gave it a core of truth. But what responsibility could these terrorists have claimed? Killing not-Indians from not-India on an Air not-India. This must be a joke, some tremendous and ridiculous trick.
    I walked into the other room, forgetting my coffee, and picked up the heavy tan phone from off the telephone book, and soon found the newspaper’s number.
    The assistant editor’s voice was frantic, on edge about something. I tried explaining my problem, in fact, my basic sense of confusion, in a slow, controlled tone so as not to disturb him further. It was no doubt a clerical error, a simple typo, a computer glitch. However, when I was about to say the word, or more correctly, the non-word, I found I couldn’tget it out of my mouth. My lips were paralyzed, became rock and formed a high dam against the not-word.
    “You say in your paper,” I said, “that terrorists from . . .” I started again. “A plane from . . .” The river of my speech was blocked mid-sentence.
    “Are you talking about the Air India explosion, sir?”
    “Yes . . . I mean, no.” I couldn’t easily explain my dilemma. “There was no explosion, there couldn’t have been. There was no plane. There is no country. There are no people. No word.” Without saying a word, the assistant editor hung up on me.
    I walked back into the kitchen and picked up the newspaper again. From the short drawer to the right of the stove I pulled out a pair of orange handled scissors. I clipped the non-word out of the headline, and out of every occurrence in the story and in the paper. As I searched through the pages, the word multiplied, it fractured and splintered, spreading like a fungus across almost every page. My hand was tired when I finished. On the table the shallow breast of clippings lay awkwardly, as though demanding something from me. I had nothing to give it. Only its negation.
    The next day was Monday, and in the morning I telephoned the gas station I worked at. Without even a word of greeting, Sandeep, the manager, asked angrily where I was. Words vanished momentarily from my mouth.
    “Is it that late?” I asked finally.
    “You should be here an hour ago,” and then he swore at me in Gujarati. Speaking only Hindi and English, I didn’t know what he said.
    “Talk in English,” and I swore in Hindi.
    “Don’t you . . .”
    I cut him off. “Let me tell you. My aunt,