Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu Page A

tell Ian. Perhaps he would understand, he would see her clearly, exactly as she was, and let her go, because how could you kill someone you saw clearly? She would tell him about the time when she was four, or was itfive? Oh, it mattered! If she couldn’t remember the age, how could she remember clearly. No, she was five. She knew it now. Walking down the street, lost, her parents disappeared, and an old man appearing out of nowhere and terrifying her with his old hands and his old face. The light of the afternoon seemed to jump away from him and left them both in a circle of darkness. That’s what she remembered. That circle.
    A first drunken kiss in a high school bathroom with Jeremy Drake who had not washed his hair in a month. She kissed him out of pity, terror, curiosity. Everything she did seemed to grow out of those three emotions, the primary colors painting her world. Except she could not remember the last thing she had done solely out of curiosity. Should she tell Ian about the icy arguments that reigned throughout her childhood, how they formed her, an only child, sitting as if on the periphery of a battle she had no part in except as spoils of victory?
    Ian’s pulse beat through his fingertips and against her wrist. She closed her eyes. She was only a year old when her father, laughing giddily, threw her up high into the air. Oh, it was like jumping over the moon! Up high, then down. Whoosh! He caught her with such confidence. Oh, how she loved that! Then up again, high into the spinning, beautiful air! To be held like that again by Papa!
    Could she tell Ian that? Would it melt his heart?
    But she wasn’t a killer. How did she know who killed and why, and what stopped them? She opened her eyes. He had not moved. His head remained tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
    “Should I put music on?” she said. Her voice was thin and weak.
    “I don’t like music.”
    “What do you like?”
    “I don’t like things. I thought I did once. I had aspirations to liking things. I thought I could walk out the door, see the sky, and say to myself, That’s a pretty sky. Or see a girl walking along, and say, That’s a pretty girl. Or just walk, walk down the street, and say, How good it feels to walk down the street.”
    His grip tightened again and Lovedeep stifled a scream.
    After a minute, he relaxed the pressure and continued, “I’d say it, all those things, every one of them. Then one day, it hit me. Every word I said was a lie. I didn’t feel one thing. Good, bad, ugly. I felt nothing. For years I’d been walking around lying to myself. Doesn’t that make you sick? A man who spent his whole life lying to himself. What a miserable creature.”
    “I think you’re a good man,” Lovedeep said. “A man who knows what he wants.”
    He released her wrist and stood and pulled the camera from its case. It was a handheld digital with a fold-out viewfinder. His right arm was shaking violently.
    “Does it always do that?” she asked.
    “Since I was a kid.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    He nodded. “This helps.”
    She pointed to the camera.
    “Do you have the others on there?” she said.
    “The last.”
    “Can I see?”
    “I’ll plug it into your TV. The picture’ll be better.”
    It occurred to Lovedeep that she had grown calm, and she did not know why. As Ian fussed with various cords andconnections, she asked herself if this was what her whole life had been building toward, her test, her proof, her vindication? She would look death in the eye, she would not flinch.
    “Here it is,” he said.
    They watched in silence. The woman’s face did look peaceful. She remembered it from the glimpse at the happy hour bar. And beautiful. Ian was right. It was as if the dead woman had witnessed a final secret. A blissful peace wrapped her features and Lovedeep hoped she would look as pretty, as rested, as completed , as this woman did in the video. But what had she ever done? She felt suddenly small and stupid, that her