Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

night?
    “How long have you lived here?” he said.
    They were sitting together on the sofa. His hand was shaking again.
    It took her a moment to remember. “Two years.”
    The room looked shockingly different with Ian in it. Gone was the clutter, the sense of suffocation. How little she really owned! How much space was there! The walls were bare, the shelves empty, yet for two years she had thought it crowded, almost uninhabitable. She owed him a debt for opening her eyes.
    “People know you?” he asked.
    “Not really.”
    “It’s good to be anonymous. Come and go as you want, no one poking their nose in.”
    “What’s in the camera bag?”
    “A camera.” He laughed.
    She finished the beer and opened a second. “There’s that guy going around killing girls and filming it,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “Have you seen the videos? They show bits on TV. Weird. Just the face.”
    He placed a hand on Lovedeep’s wrist and gripped it tightly. It was the same wrist the instructor had dug her nails into, but instead of the need she had felt in the instructor’s touch, all she felt now was relief. He had shown her, just by walking into her apartment, how much space she really lived in.
    “I like you,” she said.
    He tipped his head back and closed his eyes and talked softly to the ceiling.
    “It’s beautiful,” he said.
    “What is?”
    “The face after death,” he said.
    He spoke as if in a dream, and she wondered if the dream she’d had the night she met him was somehow connected to this moment, that perhaps he was the essence of that very dream made solid.
    “Just lying there,” he continued, “thinking nothing at all. You can think a lot of odd things staring at a dead girl’s face. It makes the mind wander, clears the head of all that other bullshit, makes a man capable of seeing for miles ahead. A man could see straight to Arizona from here. You’d think it’d be nasty, but no. They’re relaxed, they know the answers now, they’ve gone across, they’ve faced the last battle, and they’ve taken a little bit of you with them. That takes courage.”
    He paused and tightened his grip on Lovedeep’s wrist. “Do you have courage?” he asked.
    Nothing happened for a long time after that.
    Ian opened a second can for himself. Lovedeep watched as he took a drink. Time had begun to move in such extraordinary slow motion that she was sure, at first, that the can would never reach his lips; and when it did, that it wouldnever leave them. It did that too. The moment released a flood of thoughts. They all tumbled on top of her at once, as though a bookshelf had been pushed over and crashed down on her, with all its ideas and people and stories intact. He was the killer. She laughed inwardly. He was going to kill her. Was he? Yes, of course he was. That’s what killers do. They kill people. She laughed inwardly at that too. Killers kill people. It was so true it was absurd. But here he was, waiting to kill. Nothing like this had ever happened to Lovedeep before. She had to laugh at that too. Of course it hadn’t. If it had, she’d be dead. She thought suddenly of her mother, sitting at home. She would be watching cable at this hour. Her father would be complaining about her mother watching cable. Her mother always watched the same shows, and he always complained. Yet he watched the same shows and others besides. She had said this to him, so had Mom. He never listened. He could watch whatever he wanted, he paid the cable bill.
    Ian’s grip tightened and she realized she was crying.
    “I won’t scream,” she said suddenly. “I won’t make any noise.”
    The words came out of her. She had no idea why, or whether she would scream or not. Ian’s grip relaxed momentarily and she felt the soothing brush of his fingers across her sweat-moistened skin.
    “It doesn’t matter either way,” he said. “Do whatever you want.”
    What a flood of memories! She wanted to talk about all of them. She wanted to