Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu Read Free Book Online Page A

channel and on her third margarita, Lovedeep looked up to be confronted by a video close-up of a dead woman’s face. The woman had been strangled.
    “Another one?” Marjorie said.
    “Is that number two or three?”
    “Number three.”
    The killer was known as the Internet Strangler because after each murder he released a video-nasty onto the internet of the dead woman’s face. Nothing else, just a close-up running for as long as five minutes. The report excerpted a few seconds from the whole video and the stricken face ofthe newscaster returned. The music was loud in the bar and the television sound was switched off. The running subtitles for the deaf were largely incomprehensible due to the high number of spelling errors and typos. A composite sketch appeared, showing a round, balding head and a man with sleepy, humorless eyes.
    Lovedeep decided he looked cute.
    On her fourth drink and third free personal pizza, Marjorie confessed that last week she had lied when she said she had a date. She had wanted to do something different, by herself, maybe go to a different bar, maybe get picked up by a stranger, get fucked in the bathroom, that kind of thing. She didn’t. She went home and watched television and, in the middle of the night, woke up in a fright, walked into the living room naked, switched on all the lights and opened the curtains, and took hold of her one potted plant and threw it out the window. It landed and shattered on a car’s hood with a thundering crash. In seconds, an alarm started blasting.
    “What happened?” Lovedeep was mesmerized.
    Nothing happened, Marjorie said. After five minutes, the alarm went silent and in the morning, she woke, naked and sprawled in the living room as if the victim of a rape. She passed the car as she left for work. The remnants of the potted plant were still there and a dent bruised the hood. On her return in the evening, the car had vanished, and so had any sign of the plant.
    Marjorie lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Lovedeep’s face. Then she pulled back and grinned, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” though it was unclear exactly what Marjorie was apologizing for. A lingering sense of discomfort followed Lovedeep to the women’s room. It was here she first spottedthe flyer taped to the wall, next to the mirror. “CLOSET FULL? LIFE EMPTY?” the bold letters stated. “Change your life. Throw out the old you. Start from scratch. Get moving today on the path to a clutter-free future.” She tore off one of the tabs with the phone number for information; then suddenly, as if possessed, ripped the flyer from the tiles and walked out. She slapped it onto the counter in front of Marjorie. “I’m going to this next week,” she said. “Do you want to come?” Marjorie’s head was down, her fingers curled around the stem of a margarita glass. A minute passed before Lovedeep realized her friend was asleep.
    The only reason Lovedeep returned for the second week of the de-cluttering class was in the hope of seeing Ian again. The same short-haired instructor sat cross-legged on the metal desk at the front of the room and started proceedings with a breathing and affirmation exercise. “Imagine you are sitting in a garden surrounded by empty shelves,” she said softly. “You hear a waterfall and see a closet with absolutely nothing in it. You are the closet. Say it to yourself, with each inward breath. Say, I am the empty closet waiting for life to fill me up.” Lovedeep kept her eyes wide open and remained furious while around her women mostly expanded their chests and breathed out noisily through their mouths.
    Ian was nowhere, and she felt humiliated and cheated.
    During the break, she confronted the instructor. Did she remember the man with the round head from last week, so tall, a little pudgy, with sleepy eyes? Yes, the instructor said, he was a weird one. She was glad he didn’t come back. “Bad vibes. Ugly, even. I’d stay clear if I was you.”