Good Indian Girls: Stories Read Online Free PDF

she was in that plane yesterday. She died in that plane.” I lied.
    Only the phone line hummed, vibrating in the expanding maw of space between us. I explained I would be out of town for the funeral, and added, “I’ll be in Delhi, in India.” I emphasized notIndia .
    There was a sound like a vacuum filling with gas. Sandeep’s breath yearned after that notword notIndia, as though it were real. I could hear his Adam’s Apple gulping for a taste of that notcountry, shucking back and forth. He wanted it bad. Was I the only one who saw, who could hear, even over an old phone, this desire for an imaginary land, this hard-on for the unreal centerfold of notIndia? I slammed the phone down. No use.
    My hands were shaking as I pocketed the orange handled scissors and left for the library. When I had created the notcountry, my sister had laughed and immediately took out a piece of paper. With a thick brown marker she wrote the notcountry in bold, shaky letters. We pinned the paper with a knitting needle to the spot where notIndia lay in our garden. It was a small, irregular molehill, surrounded by patches of crisp, yellow grass. It stood in one corner of the backyard, in a spot where the sprinkler never quite reached.
    My sister and I threw stones as atom bombs at each other’s countries, but each morning the countries were revived, had grown back from the ashes of their nuclear annihilation. No nuclear winter cast its long shadow over their phoenix-land plains. Until one night I crept out with a thick, palm-filling flashlight and kicked my sister’s country down to the level of soil over an old grave. There was only India left. NotIndia, I mean.
    The librarian’s blonde hair fell in a sharp braid down the back of her neck. Her green pullover outlined her breasts as full-bodied molehills, and her smile showed a dull row of almost regular teeth.
    “What do you mean?” she questioned, her smile fading, nuclear clouding over. I felt a chill of fear immobilize my mouth into wordless anxiety. “The not country, India?” Her voice was direct and honest, a little loud for a library. Her questioning look gave me a moment’s hope. Perhaps she didn’t know the word. Perhaps she wasn’t in on this massive hoax, this trick or joke or disease.
    Then she said, “We have some books on India. The country India. If that’s what you mean?” I nodded and followed her silently across the floor. When she stood she was much taller than I’d expected, and her legs made long, arcing strides as she walked into the stacks. Behind her I felt small and worried. Distrust and not a little anger was growing in me. How could she know? How dare she know about my notword, my notcountry, my notIndia?
    The stack on world history stood at the far back wall and the fluorescent tube overhead was out. The only illumination was the diffuse finger of light which came through a thin rectangular window set high in the adjacent wall. She pointed out the shelves on Asian history and politics.
    “Here,” she said, “this shelf is mostly India.” I saw the series of familiar names. Nehru, Gandhi, Lajpat Rai.
    “My aunt, you know, is married to an Indian man,” she confided. Why I’m not sure. What did I care about her aunt’s marrying a figment of my imagination. “Perhaps you know him. Vishnu Patel.”
    “No,” I said tersely, “I don’t know any Indians.”
    When her long braid disappeared around the corner of the far stack, I knelt down and began inspecting more closely the shelf of books she had pointed out. The Glory That Was India. India’s Century. A Short History of India. Communism in India . I could hardly believe it. Many of these books were old, decades old. Could this deception be so grand, so all encompassing? I paged through one book quickly, seeing the notword repeated over and over, almost at random, an electron-name whose position I couldn’t predict—I could only know its orbit.
    Carefully, making sure no one could see, I