Good Indian Girls: Stories (25 page)

A window framed the dark courtyard and the black shape of the pillar. Only a thin moon shone and no lights showed in any windows. I could see almost nothing. The pillar looked like a darkening of the surrounding blackness, as though in this single spot night had curdled in the stiffening summer heat. The sounds of insects filled the air with their insistent scraping. A minute passed before I made out the shapes of the children. They stood about the pillar and on it, thickening it, smothering it, engulfing it with their bodies, giving it a second skin with the gift of their own backs. I felt a sickening weakness come over me and for some seconds stood paralyzed, watching. They were on my pillar. I walked barefoot toward the door and out into the courtyard.

The children were like locusts swarmed over the pillar and the motion of their bodies made the pillar appear to move and writhe, bucking and squirming like a massive pupa of a great insect beast waiting to be born. The sound of metal scraping against stone rose and fell above the noise of disinterested insects. No one looked at me as I walked toward the pillar. The ground shimmered in the thin film of moonlight, a membrane that hid below its translucent surface a buried fire, golden embers still glowing after some ancient eruption. Every boy was on the pillar now, or standing by it, or on his knees at its side. In their hands they held knives or forks with which they scraped against the surface of the pillar. I saw Howard on top of it, kneeling among the other children, his arms working feverishly, battering at the stone,
gouging at it with a knife in each hand. He would look up every few moments to goad the others on. “Come on, come on,” he demanded. Just that. “Come on, come on,” ever repeated. There was a haze of dust visible around the boys’ bodies that made them appear unreal and phantom-like. The longer I stared, the more ethereal and otherworldly they looked. I walked as though approaching an apparition. I could hear their breaths, stark and insistent, and years later I would imagine it as an orgy nearing its climax. I found Arjun leaning against the pillar, working at one side of it. I pushed his shoulder violently and he turned and looked at me in shock. His face was white with dust. I wanted to shout at him but found myself unable to express any words. For some seconds he showed no recognition and then his face transformed into something angry and ugly and he spat at my leg and turned quickly away and continued his frantic work with heightened fury; his body moved as though he was humping this beast, fucking it, fissuring and raping it, an abysmal initiation into the manhood of destruction, causing great white clouds of dust to rise and coalesce in the filmy light. Their voices were the pants of dogs, their tongues pushed out, pulled in, their thin arms strained. They looked ridiculous and terrifying. I could taste the harsh chalk of the dust. I could feel it on my skin, between my fingers, clogging my throat. I wanted to stop them, to scream at them, but could only stand and stare, paralyzed, in mute testimony, knowing that my anger lay as much in my exclusion from their ranks as at their actions.

I watched this scene for minutes as their bodies heaved up and down, in and out, tossed on some wave, as though they had caught a great fish and were riding its back, sticking their harpoons in, one after the other, trying to push into
the kill, trying to cut its life off, but the fish wouldn’t die, it kept them on, it kept the chase on, racing through more and distant waters, pulling them along, raising them up, throwing them down, drowning them, rescuing them; they were losing home and ship, all hope of land, all hope of ever pulling in the flesh of this beast; their charts were gone, their instruments lost, the sky a black cave offering no stars for guidance, knowledge of the winds eradicated; their voices worked in snarling, urgent breaths and the knives and forks battled at the sides, trying to force any and all capitulation. But the fish pulled them along, out out out to the farthest reaches of the oceans where even the islands believed themselves to be whole worlds unto themselves, alone and without companion.

Acknowledgments

Several of these stories previously appeared in
The Georgia Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Fence, The Barcelona Review, Press, Zyzzyva, Other Voices, The Missouri Review, Living in America, Hot Metal Bridge
and
The Alaska Quarterly Review
.

© Paul Takeuchi

R
ANBIR
S
INGH
S
IDHU
was born in London and grew up in California. He is a winner of the Pushcart Prize in Fiction, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and other awards. Trained as an archaeologist, he has lived and traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.