Good Indian Girls: Stories (3 page)

Several days passed before I saw her again and I was given time to think over her confession and the Seventh Avatar’s crime. After work one afternoon, I purchased a gun at an antique store south of the city, the kind I remembered from old westerns, with a silver barrel and a dark leather handle and a solid weight to it. Once home, the gun felt strangely
light in my hand. When I bought it, I had no clear purpose, only guessing a gun might somehow help me free Double Love. Now I could protect her. That night I loaded the gun and slept easily with it close by on my bedside table.

I picked up a bottle of bourbon before work and opened it in the car. Baggie looked at me with concern when I walked in—he could smell the alcohol. By the early afternoon, when Baggie knocked to tell me I was wanted upstairs, I was drunk. The Consul again.

I allowed a half hour to pass before I stood and made my cautious way to the Consul’s office. Along the corridor the same sounds echoed—faint strains of music, a chisel on stone, a man beating a desk. It occurred to me that I had seldom encountered my co-workers. The few I’d met appeared the dour and quiet fellows indigenous to diplomatic postings, except that here, the bustle of other consulates was absent, as was the morning rush when employees gathered to chat over tea.

The Consul offered me a jalebi but I refused. The bright orange sweet looked distasteful after the whisky. In the corner, instead of the sitar, stood a white marble statue of a hermaphrodite with a thick, erect penis and rounded breasts. The Consul’s desk was free from the pile of papers that had littered it previously.

“So what of it?” he asked immediately.

“What?”

“How goes it? The work and all.”

“Very well. I saw five people yesterday and—”

“Yes, yes—that’s not what I asked. The poetry. No one comes here to work. We do other things. The poetry. How does it go?” He violently thumped the desk with his index finger.

I looked at him with hatred. “It doesn’t,” I said as bluntly as I could. “I am not a poet.”

He breathed in loudly through his nostrils and let his head fall back. He sat like this for some moments, examining the ceiling, eyes rolling from corner to corner as if seeking inspiration in such a truncated vision of heaven.

“Your ghazals are fine, modern ghazals. Some of the finest. When I read them I thought of Faiz.”

I responded derisively. “Why did you bring me here?”

He looked back at me and for a moment appeared genuinely puzzled. “To write, yes. Why else?”

I dropped my head into my hands. It felt pointless to protest further.

“I thought maybe seeing all your poems on my desk made you shy, so I have hidden them this time.” He pulled open a drawer and there appeared again the many faxes. He started to read. It was atrocious and I insisted that he stop.

“Why?”

His incomprehension touched me. His motive truly was an uncomplicated one. He had brought me here to write, like an ancient Khan who gathered around him the writers and artists of his time.

“I did not write those. I could not have. Didn’t you get my file? I am a drunk. I am drunk. Now. I have the lowest rating in my office. Probably the lowest in the whole service. No one dared promote me.”

“Yes, yes. I know. But you poets are like that. We have a tabla player. One of the best here on the West Coast. He beats his wife and children and every now and then the police take him away for a few days. But he is a tabla player.”

I wanted to hit him now. He had begun to resemble the
ambassador in Nairobi—if I poked hard enough I was sure he would burst. In a single gesture, I threw my arm across the desk and snatched the few poems he held in his hand; then standing, I tore them violently and scattered the fragments over the desk and floor. He rushed forward, surprised, and tried to stop me.

“There! That’s the only poetry I’m capable of!”

Soon he was on his knees frantically gathering the pieces of paper. “You don’t understand!” he shouted. “You can write here!” His pleas followed me out through the door.

In the corridor I heard steps hurrying toward me. It was Baggie, he was running and breathless.

“What is it?” I demanded.

“That boy’s father is here.”

“Who?”

“That boy. Remember, the one you told all the tales to. The father is screaming downstairs. I couldn’t keep him out of your office.”

“Come on,” I said. I walked quickly past Baggie and down along the corridor. His footsteps echoed mine and arriving at my office I didn’t hesitate throwing the door open with a thrust of my hand and walking inside.

He was a tall man with short blond hair and I was struck by how much he resembled his son. They both displayed an arrogant air about their eyes, their noses sleek and elegant. His cheeks were red and I could see the simmering fury in his face.

“Was it you?” His voice was deeper than his son’s, and it carried in it the familiar menace of weak but violent men. I knew immediately he was no match for me.

“Who told your son stories? Yes.” I walked across to my
desk and casually picked up a file that lay among my papers and pretended to study it.

“Do you know what you did?”

“I can’t imagine. Why don’t you tell me?” I didn’t look at the man.

“The teacher threw him out of the class. This was an honors class. He was going to go to Stanford. I went to Stanford.” He spoke with a metered determination at the end of which I knew waited a fist.

“The teacher told him if he couldn’t take his papers seriously he obviously wasn’t cut out for the honors program. They threw him out of all the honors classes. You ruined him.”

“Your son didn’t deserve to be in that class. He should have checked out what I told him. That kid was stupider than he looked.”

Much to my joy, he raised a fist and prepared to strike. As he did so, the door burst open and Baggie charged in with two guards. The man stood motionless for a brief second and before the guards reached him, I had time to get a punch in. My fist landed square on his face and he fell back scrambling for balance and crying out in pain. The guards took hold of him and carried him out while he kicked and swore.

“I know your name,” he shouted from the doorway, trying to fight his way free. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

I could still feel his face on my fist. I’d been cheated from a real fight. I turned to Baggie. “Who asked for your help?”

“That man is a maniac.”

For a moment I thought of striking Baggie, but turned away and told him to get out.

I took a drink of the bourbon and felt for the pistol in my briefcase. There it was and now was the time. Swinging the
briefcase wildly, I walked out telling Baggie to cancel all appointments for the rest of the day. If Double Love came by, I told him to keep her occupied. “Give her tea and read her ghazals.” His eyes telegraphed turmoil and confusion, but thankfully he said nothing, and I was able to escape without resorting to explanations.

The drive to Dr. Boyce’s house had me speeding through several stop signs. In the daylight, I saw how close the building stood to the ocean. The water stretched at the end of the road and a breeze swept along the street.

The pistol felt like a toy when I pulled it from my briefcase. It was hard to believe it could kill. I thrust it into my inside pocket where it pressed hard against my lung.

Dr. Boyce smiled when he took my hand and said he was always glad to meet with a disciple of Atatatata. He looked smaller than I remembered and walked like an old man, and his joints appeared stiff from arthritis.

Nothing was changed from my previous visit, except for Double Love’s absence, and I took a seat on the same sofa while the Divine Avatar prepared coffee in the kitchen. The air of mustiness mixed with the aroma of recently burned incense. A faint haze of smoke hung lazily in the room.

Soon the doctor was talking, as he had before, about the coming union of East and West, having shown no interest in why I’d come. In reality, he explained, there was no such thing as East or West. “You stand in China and what is to the east? America. We are the Chinese east. And you stand on the coast here in California and it is Japan that is our west.” His voice sung crisply from the kitchen and, on returning with the coffee, he resumed his familiar peregrination around the room, forming the same, simple figure eight while his eyes
searched the corners and the masks and the books for that other, spectral guest. The bright afternoon light revealed a heavy coating of dust burying all his possessions.

Taking a sip from the coffee, I placed the cup on the table and pulled the gun out from under my coat. It was best to end this quickly, in case anyone else should arrive, or I should lose my resolve. I didn’t know what to expect when Dr. Boyce saw the gun, but the last thing was that he would simply continue his figure eight, talking as if nothing had changed. Even the rhythm of his speech remained unaltered. “There will come a time,” he said, “when the West will have taken so much from the East and the East will have taken so much from the West that the one will become the other. East will be West but West will be East.” I raised the gun and pointed it at him, following him with the barrel. Still, he did nothing. His body passed so close that if I hadn’t pulled the gun away his thigh would have struck it.

“That is when the Divine Atatatata will make his appearance.”

Then I understood: he was blind.

I waved the gun in the air as he passed by, making sure it crossed his field of vision. No reaction. There I sat, following him with the gun for several minutes, not knowing what to do.

Finally I asked what I had wanted to ask all along. Did he really kill his wife?

The question brought a pause from Dr. Boyce and he turned toward my voice, not in the least surprised. “Yes,” he said. “It was because of me she died.”

I cocked the hammer of the pistol and prepared to squeeze the trigger.

“If I had not married her,” he continued. “If I had not wanted a child.”

“What?” I said, holding the pressure firmly on the trigger.

“She died giving birth. Twenty years ago.”

Then, searching among the objects in that small room, I saw what I had not seen before. Not one photograph of Double Love showed her with her mother, though several showed Dr. Boyce with his wife, a young couple starting out. Not proof, for sure, but right then that wasn’t what I needed. I released the pressure on the trigger and dropped the gun into my lap. My body began to shake and I no longer knew what to do. What was it that I wanted? Dr. Boyce continued his ramble around the room, unaware of what had just occurred.

Double Love was standing on the sidewalk, leaning against my car. She saw the gun in my hand and looked into my face. I don’t know what she read there.

“Did you do it?” she said, as I ran down the steps toward her. She revealed little emotion, neither hope nor fear, but a generic lack of curiosity used when asking about the lives of distant, little known relations, and maybe a sense of trepidation.

“What?”

She pointed to the gun. “I was hoping—” she said but broke off and turned away. “I hear him calling,” she said, indifferently, showing no concern at discovering he was still alive. She frowned. “I guess I’ve got to go.” She climbed the stairs but stopped before reaching the door.

“You can live here,” she called out from the top of the steps. “Like me. Pretend this is home.”

Her voice was empty of animosity or affection, containing only the unpolished tone of that young woman whose name
I had learned the first day I entered their house. What I had heard as trepidation moments before I now imagined as something else. She knew me better than I knew myself.

I pressed the gun into my pocket and, saying nothing, hurried down the street and toward the ocean, while behind me I sensed her eyes following me from the stoop with the same unvarying attention with which she might follow a plastic bag tossed violently in the air by the wind.

On the coast road, early rush-hour cars blasted their horns as I ran across the weather-beaten blacktop. The rays of sun sliced across at a sharp angle over the Pacific and my movements soon slowed as I progressed across the sand toward the water. Wading up to my waist, I remembered myself as a child doing exactly this. Crests foamed against my shirt and I experienced the fleeting excitement of a possible life, a different life, with Double Love and Dr. Boyce, living right at the ocean’s edge. Here I could run in the mornings and swim, and in the evenings sit with Double Love while we listened to her father’s madness unfurl through the long and lonely nights.

When I pulled the gun from my pocket, the sun glinted off the silver barrel. I flung it as far as I could, watching it arc against the sky then become lost, almost instantly, in a rising white swell. It appeared again for a moment, a crisp, black shape amid the waves, and then was gone forever. When I turned to make my passage back toward the beach, I saw that a small crowd had gathered some distance along the edge and were staring at me with suspicion and fear. Someone would no doubt call the police and with that thought I felt myself jolted back into the world—the possible life vanished as quickly as I had conjured it.

I waded through the water and every step was a struggle. Only now did the cold hit me as I progressed back up the beach and toward the road. This time, I chose to wait for a break in the traffic. Double Love was gone from outside her house. I climbed into my car and dropped my head onto the steering wheel, exhausted and shivering.