Trees are slowly turning color—hints of russet and gold interspersing pointed evergreens. I revel in the difference for a few moments, in the absence of the brine and humidity that makes up Jeddah air.
The sound of bells under my window distracts me, a series of clings accompanying a pair of girls who weave across the street, dodging cars, pedaling in the direction of a park a few blocks away.
Are you happy there, Suzy? Appa often asks when we talk on Skype. Do you like the new condo?
Yes, Appa, I always tell him. I love it here.
He does not want another answer. He does not want to know that sometimes, when I Skype him, I try to time it so that I can overhear the muezzin calling for prayer from the mosque next to our apartment in Jeddah. He does not want to know how every night, after Amma falls asleep, I scroll through Qala Academy’s secret student group on Facebook and read the messages there, feeling a pang go through me whenever my friends plan a trip to the beach or joke about a new teacher.
A red car screeches up the driveway, a rap song blasting from its speakers, startling an old lady walking her poodle on the sidewalk. I watch it zoom up the ramp and then smoothly, flawlessly reverse park into one of the numbered slots to the side of our building. This person probably had no trouble during their driving lessons, I think resentfully.
Moments later, a group of boys stumble out, the rough sound of their laughter rising in the air. I instinctively cringe. Boys. Another element that my parents expect me to adapt to after growing up with no brothers, after next to no male interaction in an all-girls school for most of my life.
I have a year to do it before university starts, they keep reminding me. A whole year to take advantage of the free high school education every immigration agency and lawyer touts in the Gulf. A year I will spend with strangers instead of my best friend and the girls I grew up with. At Qala Academy, I would have been arts editor for the school yearbook this year. The headmistress had promised me free rein to do what I wanted, including comics. But that was before the Class XI finals. Before Appa came home, declaring that our application for permanent residence had been approved.
When I look at the parking lot again the boys from the red car have disappeared. I am about to turn and reluctantly go back to the living room, to Amma, when I catch sight of a figure standing near the building entrance, right under my window.
The boy, probably seventeen or eighteen years old, is looking right at me, his eyes wide and curious, his spiked hair shimmering in the fading afternoon light. A desi boy, I think initially—though I can’t be sure without speaking to him—his skin the same shade of brown as mine. When my gaze meets his, his chest rises and falls quickly the way a runner’s might after a couple of laps around the park.
I feel my cheeks grow warm. Under normal circumstances, I would step back or simply close the curtain, embarrassed to be the center of a boy’s attention. But something feels different today—maybe because of Alisha and her constant prodding. It’s ridiculous, I tell myself. Silly to be nervous over boys just because I haven’t interacted with them before.
So I do the unthinkable. I draw up my courage and look back at the spiky-haired guy who stands on the pavement three floors below.
It’s easier, perhaps, because he isn’t looking right into my eyes when I decide to look back, his gaze resting on my hair which is lying loose over one shoulder. Easier because when he does look at me, I decide that he isn’t handsome in the traditional sense. His head is disproportionately large compared to his small, lean body, his nose flat and somewhat off center. But there are parts of his face that I like as well: the strong, square jaw, eyes that shimmer with warmth in the fading light, even from this distance. He takes out a hand from the pocket of his shorts, grins at me, and waves.
What I want to do is smile and wave back. It’s what my brain urges me to do. But then Amma calls for me and I remember why this is a bad idea, why dating and boys and marriage have been bad ideas all along. I retreat into the shadows again, waiting for a long moment until I hear the door below open and shut.
Malcolm
When I see her again the next day, the new girl’s hair is in a ponytail. It brings her features into sharp relief, the small, triangular jaw, the too-high forehead, the nervous, somewhat cynical look in her dark eyes.
She’s so different from the curious girl I saw yesterday at Ahmed’s apartment building that I am tempted to look around and check to see if she has a twin. But I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. Ahmed, Steve, and I are smoking by the ramp outside the school cafeteria when I see her getting off a bright yellow school bus and I am pretty sure there’s only one of her. A wave of ninth graders rumble past, fresh-faced kids with new backpacks over light fall jackets. Many wear eyeglasses and look nearly as confused as the new girl.
A hand rises from the rear of the pack, a familiar bracelet tied to the wrist. My sister, Mahtab, grins when she sees she has caught my attention. Her long brown hair shields her face when she looks down at her phone and jabs at the screen. Seconds later, a text pings on mine.
Can I come talk to you? Or will you be embarrassed by your little sister’s presence?
I grin and wave back hard. Mahtab weaves around the lost-looking ninth graders, completely unaware of the way jaws drop when she passes some of the boys. I glare at them and take a step forward.
“Malu. Stop it,” Mahtab admonishes.
If I wasn’t glaring at the boys, I would glare at her. Mahtab knows how much I despise that nickname.
“Hello, Mahtab. How was your summer?” I see Steve scan my little sister from head to toe, observe how his eyes widen a little, as if he’s surprised by how much she has grown. I jab him with an elbow. He grins at me sheepishly.
“Boring,” Mahtab says, cheerfully unaware of what passed between me and Steve. She stretches her hands over her head and I frown at the shortness of the crop top she wears under her denim jacket, the stud in her belly button that she got on her fourteenth birthday this summer.
“You’re not wearing your sudreh,” I say, referring to the sacred undershirt we both are supposed to wear for religious reasons, day in and day out, come life or death. “Or your kusti,” I add, which is the sacred thread tied around the sudreh.
“It’s a crop top.” She slips into pidgin Gujarati, the way she always does when she wants to keep our conversation private. “Who’ll wear a sudreh-kusti with that?”
I make note of the warning embedded in her tone: Back off, and don’t be a chauvinistic jerk, big brother.
“Hey, I’m not the religious one.” I raise my hands. “How do you think Ronnie will feel? Doesn’t he want you to cover up head to foot like those old Parsi widows back in India?”
“Ronnie is not like that!”
Mahtab’s face turns pink with guilt. Not many people know about the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism or its followers, the Parsis, who migrated from Iran to India centuries ago, but a single conversation with my sister on the topic usually changes that. She has always been more Zoroastrian than I’ll ever be, with her daily prayers, her involvement in the ZCC Youth Committee, and that whiny Rohinton “Ronnie” Mehta, the Parsi boyfriend she brought home last month at a family dinner. Ronnie is the guy who will stop a speeding car to let a group of ducks cross the street, the sort of guy who will do anything for the betterment of the world. Me, on the other hand? You’d be lucky if you caught me praying, let alone found me with any one of Mahtab’s or our father’s uptight ZCC friends.
“Just because you spent the whole summer moping over You-Know-Who—”
Steve coughs, cutting Mahtab off. “Wait, so your ex is Voldemort now? We can’t mention her by name?”
My face heats up.
Mahtab’s mouth, pursed tight, softens into a smile for Steve. “He has been grouchy all summer. I couldn’t wait for school to start.”
I give her a stern look. Or try to.
The trouble is, I can’t hold on to my anger, not around Mahtab. She wrapped her
hand around my heart as surely as she got me wrapped around her finger, ever since the day Mom first put her in my old crib, a brown-haired, brown-eyed cherub who always laughed more than she cried.
Steve blows a line of smoke to the side. He watches me warily, as if expecting me to break down and collapse on the pavement the way I did a couple of months ago, after my breakup with Afrin. The swoon was more from heatstroke than anything else, but Steve and Ahmed still think it was because I saw Afrin kissing a random guy outside the mall. I drop my cigarette butt to the ground and stub it out with my sneaker, watching the ash smear over the concrete, and then kick the butt into the bushes nearby.
“Don’t do that!” Mahtab gives me an annoyed look and picks up the cigarette butt. She walks over to the trash can a few feet away and drops it in. “If you insist on ruining your lungs, at least don’t ruin the environment in the process.”
“He’s already doing that with the smoke,” Ahmed points out before taking a drag of his own cigarette. Next to him, Steve rolls his butt between his fingers. If Mahtab was not around, I know he would have done exactly what I did and tossed it into the bushes.
My sister rolls her eyes. “Fine. Whatever. I need to go now or I’ll be late.”
“Do you know where your homeroom is?” I ask. “Want me to go with you?”
“Don’t worry.” She wraps me in a hug that smells of the sandalwood incense of our prayer room at home. “Text if you need me,” she whispers in my ear.
I close my eyes. I hate the sound of worry in her voice. Hate how she was forced to grow up over the past two years because of my mess-ups.
“I promise.”
“Really?”
I flick her nose with my finger. “Really.”
I watch her make her way to the front doors, the sun in her hair as she merges into the crowd of backpacks, jackets, and jeans, the flash of a neon sole as she skips up the stairs, her silver bracelet glinting as she waves at me one last time.
I ignore the faint twinge of worry in my chest and tell myself that Mahtab will be okay. She has always been the stronger one out of the two of us, sticking to the straight and narrow, even after Mom died. Unlike me.
First days, unlike other days at school, smell of waxed floors and artificial air freshener. Sounds gather and disperse in pockets: the metallic squeal of lockers opening and closing, the thump of a basketball on the floor, the high melody of a girl’s laugh. Hallways shrink with the added crush of students milling about and teachers in every corner, wearing pasted smiles, on the lookout for anyone breaking the school dress code. Last year, a guy from the basketball team came in wearing a neon-orange bikini top and jeans, and sang an old Queen song at the top of his voice while a couple of teachers escorted him to the principal’s office.
Nothing that exciting seems to be happening today. In the crowd gathered around the guidance counselor’s office, I catch a glimpse of the new girl again, standing at the very back, a puzzled expression on her face as she glances at the bright pink schedule she holds in her hands and then at the kids waiting outside the doors.
A boy swears, kicking a nearby locker, and the new girl jerks back slightly, even though the comment isn’t directed at her. Body language says a lot about a person and, unlike my sister, who looks like she has been going here forever, the new girl is clearly out of her element. Glancing at her schedule one last time, she shakes her head and turns to leave, her eyes averted from everyone else around her, her lips straight and unsmiling—signs that point to extreme shyness or extreme snobbery, though for the moment I can’t tell which.
I think I like her better with her hair all loose, hanging over her shoulder like a perfectly cut sheet of ebony, like those old-school Bollywood heroines, her face perked up with a secret smile—the kind that happens when you think no one’s watching you. The best kind on a face like hers.
“Hey.” Ahmed nudges me out of my attempt at telepathically communicating with the girl. “Are you listening? There’s this party tonight at Justin’s place. Wanna go?”
Justin and I go back. Way back to when I was raising hell as a fifteen-year-old and my old man was making my life a living one. But things are different now. I don’t drink as much, don’t smoke as much. I definitely don’t take any pills anymore and that’s what we’ll find at Justin’s: a candy bowl of pharmaceuticals that he gets from God knows where.
“You know I don’t do that anymore, Ahmed,” I tell him.
“You don’t have to take anything.” Ahmed shrugs his broad shoulders. “I don’t.”
“Not all of us are Muslims with balls of steel.”
Ahmed laughs.
But the truth is that I’m simply not strong enough. Not like Ahmed, who’s so secure in his faith that the peer pressure to drink or get high never gets to him the way it does with me and Steve. Cigarettes are Ahmed’s only vice and, even then, he usually stops after one.
“Besides, Mahtab will kill me.”
My sister and my mother, the two best people in my life. Only one of them remains with me now.
“By the way, Voldemort—I mean, Afrin was asking about you,” Steve says.
“Oh yeah?” I try to sound disinterested.
“She was saying she misses you.”
Sure she does. Several times she missed me so much that she didn’t know or care who she made out with or hooked up with when she got high. When I broke up with Afrin earlier this year, she kept crying, saying that she hadn’t meant it, that the guy she’d slept with looked exactly like me after she’d taken Justin’s favorite blue pills. Except for that time at the mall, I didn’t see Afrin for the whole summer. I want to pretend I’m over what she did, but even now the thought of her sleeping with some random, faceless guy pricks the inside of my chest.
“I don’t want to get into that anymore, Steve. If you want to date her, you have my blessing.”
Steve snorts. “And take away your only opportunity for a true Zoroastrian girlfriend?”
“Says the guy who drooled all over the floor when he first saw her at the ZCC.”
“She has great boobs! Where else was I supposed to look? Besides, you know I don’t date desi girls. No time for them—especially not another Patel!”
“What’s wrong with desi girls? They’re hot.” Ahmed grins and passes around a pack of gum. I pop two pieces into my mouth and sniff my jacket to make sure it doesn’t smell like cigarettes.
“I could be dating some long-lost Hindu ghotra cousin,” Steve explains. “Besides that’s what my parents want. For me to marry some good Patel chick.”
“Maybe that Patel chick won’t want you,” I tease him. “Ever thought of that, Sma—”
Steve shoves me before I finish the sentence, almost knocking me into Vice Principal Han.
“Sorry, sir,” we chorus. No one wants to get on Han’s bad side on the very first day of school. I did that in grade eleven and ended up in detention, with Han breathing down my neck every five minutes, lecturing me about how lucky I was that corporal punishment was banned by the government.
Today, however, Han does little apart from giving us dirty looks and telling us to behave ourselves. You’d think we were the high school’s biggest troublemakers the way Han keeps his eye on us. At least I know I deserve it for mooning him last year from the window of the bio lab. But Ahmed and Steve only get into trouble for being my friends. For sticking with me through all my phases, including the bad ones.
Ahmed Sharif, the stud. With a beard as thick as a grown man’s even though he’s only seventeen, tall and muscular with a face that has been drawing girls since the ninth grade, even though he has dated only one girl briefly in the time I’ve known him.
Steve Patel, the class clown. Stork-like and skinny, with a smile that perpetually borders on a smirk. A guy who has been friend-zoned by more girls than both Ahmed and I can count, even though Steve always jokes about them getting intimidated by his (nonexistent) good looks.
Then there’s me. Malcolm Vakil, hell-r
aiser. The One Without a Future, according to every adult in his life.
As I walk down the hallway to my locker, I see the new girl again, staring at a locker like it’s some sort of math problem.
I watch her pull out a lock—slender and gold, the three-digit kind that’s super easy to crack. I am partly tempted to call out and warn her about this when she smiles slightly and slides it into the metal holes, closing it with a snap.
I was right about that smile. It changes her face, lingers when she lifts her head up and her gaze clashes with mine. Her eyes, rounded with recognition now, are deep and brown, the fine lines of the irises visible even in the dull fluorescent lights.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and my palms bead with sweat the way they did yesterday afternoon when I saw her leaning out of her window, brown skin aglow, black hair falling over her shoulder. A faint bit of color tints her cheeks before she awkwardly twists her head around, turning this way and that before heading down the math and science hallway, without another glance in my direction.
Behind me, Steve laughs. “Whoa.”
“Shut up, Steve.”
“Come on, man. She’s cute.”
“Whatever.” I bury my face in my locker.
Steve raises his hands. “All right, all right. With my luck, she’s probably a Patel anyway.”
“Don’t think so,” Ahmed says. “She was wearing those tiny gold chandeliers in her ears. South Indian girls wear those.”
“How do you know?”
“Remember my old girlfriend, Noorie? She was from Kerala. She’s the one who told me.”
I continue watching the new girl, the slender curve of her neck as she raises her head to check the room number, the unconsciously graceful sway of her hips.
“Wonder if she lives near Square One, like Noorie. Maybe I should ask around,” Ahmed teases.
The Beauty of the Moment Page 2
