Good Indian Girls: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

squatted down on the floor and took out the scissors hidden in my jacket. With a surgeon’s precision I began cutting out each entry from the book, each time the notcountry, the notnationality, the notword appeared I made sure it found its way into my pocket. By the time the morning was over, I had four bulging pockets, and had gone through most of the books on the shelf. I couldn’t touch the spines or covers unfortunately. I had to make sure it would be some time before my healing of these history books was discovered. I was still under the impression then that this was some passing madness, a flu on the political geography of the planet. That within a week it would pass, be spent, and that no one would ever mention the notcountry again. NotIndia would revert, as it had always been, to a scrap of paper pinned to a Punjabi family’s molehill in Fresno, California, blowing in the hot, late summer wind.
    At home, I spread the cuttings out across the small kitchen table. There were so many that I had to put some on the sparse counter space by the stove, next to my jar of masala and box of Stovetop Stuffing. I even laid some on the floor. Many had been crumpled in my pocket, and I spent a good hourtrying to straighten or flatten some of the most damaged. This further complicated the kitchen, as between the neat, flat lying cuttings were groups weighted down and hidden beneath books, or flattened with plates or salt shakers at either end to keep them straight.
    Soon after, I stopped watching TV or reading the newspaper. There were other notcountries. Even the newspapers acknowledged them. Creating them in one sentence and destroying them in the next. I learned that the notcountry notNorth Yemen was no more. That the notSoviet Union had fractured and splintered back into what it was. That notYugoslavia was, in fact, not. As was notEthiopia. Even my favorite newscaster, the woman whose lips I often imagined caressing my body or licking with soft, fish-like lips the tip of my penis, began sprinkling her speech with more and more notcountries and notwords.
    My friends decided I was joking. “Not India,” they laughed. “Very good, Ranjit. It’s the only way to get away from that bloody country, eh, just disappear it, make it dissolve. Very good.” No one believed me. Many talked about it as though it were real, as though under its umbrella it somehow sheltered all those places we had come from. NotIndia, I learned, was home to Punjab and Gujarat, Patiala and Delhi. Bombay was in notIndia, as was Bengal, and the Sutlej flowed into the Indus within the boundaries of an ancient notIndia. Some even spoke of visiting the notcountry, of returning permanently. I was horrified. “Next year,” said Sunil, “I’m going back for good. I’m leaving these damn goras to their own damn country. There’s nothing here for us. Our home is India.” What could I do but bring him to my apartment. I had to show him.
    “What is all this?” asked Sunil, his jaw dropping in what I thought at first was proper respect for the scale of the problem, of the spreading disease. “Why all these words, all these cutouts?”
    Everywhere, in my whole apartment, on tabletops and countertops, over every inch of floor and wall and ceiling. Words. Notwords, I mean. Even covering the slits of the toaster there was Czechoslovakia and industrial . I ate among the notwords, the notcountries and notverbs, notpeople. I drank my morning coffee staring at their nonexistence, drinking it in with every sip. When I sat on the sofa, I had to clear a space for myself, pushing the nots aside. Sunil didn’t stay long enough for me to clear a space on the sofa for him. I wanted to say to him, not everything is covered. Not the sink, or the bathtub or the nottoilet.
    He was gone before I could tell him, and I was left alone.
    I have since stopped leaving the apartment. Sunil continues to visit and brings with him food. So much of it I can’t eat. I don’t know why he