Good Indian Girls by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

Author:Ranbir Singh Sidhu [Sidhu, Ranbir Singh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9789350293966
Amazon: 935029396X
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Neanderthal Tongues

I CAN TRACE IT BACK THAT FAR. IT WAS ISMAIL’S DEATH THAT revealed the grammar of the landscape, that allowed me to understand the meaning of the flat desert plain as it fell into the disorder of the badlands.

In Ethiopia, inland from the slim ribbon of beach along the Red Sea, the land rises to a high levee of mountains that hoard what little rain comes down. A desert plain flattens the continent before it splits and falls into the Great Rift. It is here—a realm of gullies and valleys, of infinite variation, yet linked by a communal disarray—that the world is pulling apart.

I am dead, and below me water shuffles into darkness. Contrary to superstition in which the dead become universal—no up, no down, just a bland everything—there is a below me, as there is an above me, and a me. Land is nowhere to be seen—only the wreckage of the plane, fragments of burnt and twisted wing, seat cushions, their springs popping out, the aftermath of what could have been a victory parade: torn barf bags like confetti, magazines, newspapers, boarding passes, passports. And sometimes the dead on the parade route, or at least pieces of them, their limbs, their eyes. I am better at knowing the bones, the small fragments of zygomatic arch, the lumbar vertebrae shattered.

Ismail joined me in Ethiopia that summer. It was the first and only expedition I ever led, a coveted prize after two years teaching at Michigan, and before that, as a graduate student in physical anthropology when I worked on surveys in Pakistan and Kenya.

We were a small team. I was denied NSF funding. A new professor, and though my thesis was published, it was far from groundbreaking and I was thought unproven. Only those students who won travel grants on their own merits were able to accompany me. There were five of us, and a cook. Three were graduate students from Michigan: Bill, Ellen and Steve.

Ismail was the sole Ethiopian among us. He would start as one of my graduate students the following term, and we met him in Addis Ababa. We had planned a preliminary mapping of an area in the north, along the eastern rim of the Great Rift, a bare reconnaissance of the badlands whose thick fingers extended to the far horizon. A team of petroleum geologists who traveled through the area two years earlier had collected fossil mammal remains that suggested the region had exposed layers almost two million years old.

That first night in the desert found us all marveling at the stars, our blanket, at the stillness of a universe that had retracted from us only to show its distant splendor. The cook’s heavy breath as he turned the goat on its spit, the fire bursting open the night—I remember the smells, the sounds. We argued about Binford and Isaac, about the significance of recent excavations. When the fire sputtered, we thought the stars might blind us.

The following day Ismail saw a thin string

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