Good Indian Girls – Stories

‘The first-person narrator of The Good Poet of Africa” despises poetry, repays compassion with insult, and enjoys lying to children. But, by story’s end, the moral universe will be turned on its head, and the reader will empathize with Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s loathsome protagonist. This is writing of uncommon assurance and skill.’ -Jeet Thayil ‘Ranbir Singh Sidhu is imaginative, with a dry, sly wit, very intelligent, and owns a wicked sensibility, all of which makes his fiction smart, daring, sensitive to human perversity, and keen in its observations.’ -Lynne Tillman A low-level, drunkard Indian diplomat in Africa finds himself mysteriously transferred to the consulate in San Francisco, where everyone believes he is a great and undiscovered Urdu poet. An anthropological expedition searching for early human fossils in Ethiopia goes disastrously wrong as the leader begins to search madly for the very first sounds ever made by humans. When the wife of a retiring consul discovers that her pet python is dead, she decides to pay tribute to him in the way she knows best: by serving him to her dinner guests. A strange skull discovered outside an orphanage in northern India leads to the creation of a cult around one of the charismatic young residents and to acts of sudden violence. A wife knows the one thing her workaholic husband wants for his birthday: handcuffs, whips, sex toys of all sorts. He buys the drugs. These and other stories are brought vividly to life in Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s startling and disturbing debut collection, Good Indian Girls. “