Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

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 theconcrete. 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