Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu Page A

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 weekI 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.
    Mom looked at me across the dinner table. “Don’t talk like that in front of your father.”
    Papa was sitting to one side of the dinner table, in his own special chair, a big baby chair, a bib printed with pastel-colored unicorns around his neck and a small table at his elbow.
    “What did I say?”
    “You know exactly what you said,” Mom said.
    I did know. Sikhs don’t smoke. It’s one of the rules. Like Sikhs don’t cut their hair and Sikhs don’t drink. Smoking one cigarette is almost as bad as killing someone.
    “Who told you he smoked?” Dad said.
    “No one. I thought that was why he couldn’t speak.”
    Papa grinned at me each time I spoke.
    “He was in the army,” Dad said. “Things happen in the army.”
    I nodded, “Oh,” and went on eating.
    Johnny jabbed me in the ribs. “Shit for brains,” he whispered.
    Suddenly Mom made a face.
    “Oh god,” she said.
    A thin stream of urine was dripping from along the edge of Papa’s chair and he grinned broadly at all of us now.
    “He’s your father,” Mom said to Dad. “You clean it up.”
    The next day, Mom bought twelve boxes of Depend undergarments. I watched as she stacked one after the other in the cupboard under the stairs. I could tell she was angry. She punched each one into the wall, like she was shoring it up against a flood.
    “Can I try one on?” I said.
    She ignored me and punched the last box into place, slapped her hands together, and turned and bumped straight into me as she was walking out.
    “You,” she said.
    “Can I try one on?” I said again.
    “They’re not for you.” She slammed the cupboard door.
    “How many people did Papa kill?” I said.
    “What?”
    “Papa? How many did he kill?”
    Mom considered me with distaste. “You and your questions. Is that all they teach you at that school?”
    She turned away and walked into the kitchen. It was time for Papa’s lunch.
    That school was a special needs school. I had started there two years ago. I talked too much, asked too many questions, couldn’t concentrate; the doctors said one thing, gave me pills; Mom said I needed discipline; Dad looked around for the right kind of school. We were all girls. Half the universe was erased the moment we walked through the gates. It didn’t bother me, I liked the school well enough, except we learned little and were left mostly to ourselves, to taunt and tease and make up stories as we liked, and during recess we wouldwander in circles through the courtyard and pretend we all had futures which the bright ones amongst us knew we didn’t.
    When Mom was gone, I climbed into the cupboard, switched the light on, a dim, bare bulb, and closed the door behind me. I opened the first box, pulled out one of the adult diapers and held it