A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  She noticed neither my grades nor Abdullah’s prolonged absences from home, a fact that Abdullah took full advantage of once Father bought him his first car, a GMC that he drove around in with his friends, sometimes not returning for two or three days.

  At school, girls were often surprised to find out that Abdullah was my brother, which to me wasn’t that surprising. While my brother had inherited my mother’s looks, I had inherited my father’s, my skin as dark as his even though I did my best to keep out of the sun, my eyes large and protruding in a face that was much too long and thin.

  “Your brother is so hot!” my classmates would gush whenever they got the chance. They hoped I would play matchmaker to their Bollywood dreams and give them a happy ending with a guy they’d stalked on Facebook and at the annual school fair that brought the boys and girls of Qala Academy out of their segregated buildings and into the enormous boys’-section parking lot.

  Unlike the academy’s girls’ section in Aziziyah, where the courtyard was enclosed by four white buildings, leaving the school buses to line up outside the gates, the boys’ section’s parking lot remained open to the public and functioned as a soccer field during the school year. On fair days, it was the only plot of land the school administration considered large (and therefore safe) enough to accommodate hormonal males and females at the same time without pissing off the parents or the religious police.

  “He snorts Pepsi through his nose,” I would tell some of these giggly girls, most times getting the grossed-out reaction I’d been hoping for—a yuck! or an eww! followed by an end to an irritating conversation. My brother chose his own girls, as far as I knew from snooping through his texts or from eavesdropping on the conversations he had with the friends he sometimes invited over to our house. He had a preference, I wanted to tell them, for blondes with big boobs.

  The girls, of course, did not know this. They did not know of the magazine I’d come across in Abdullah’s room when I was thirteen, or what he’d told me when he saw me flipping through it, part fascinated, part horrified.

  Instead, they called me names behind my back. Some even called me jealous, thinking that my feelings for Abdullah were more than sisterly: “She probably wants to keep him to herself.”

  But no one had the courage to say those words to my face. Not only were they intimidated by my sharp tongue, they wanted my friendship for the information I provided to them—the gossip, the scandals, the stories I knew about everyone in school.

  Except for Zarin, of course. The only girl Abdullah had ever asked me about, probably because she’d completely ignored him at the school fair when she was fifteen. The girl everyone in school would now discuss for ages for being found with a boy—evidence, they would call it, for the rumors that had been circulating around her. Zarin, a girl as scandalous in death as she had been in life, the memory of her etched into my skin like the bite she’d marked me with when we were both seven, in the courtyard behind the school bookstore.

  My hand automatically went to my arm and rubbed at it even though the marks had long since faded.

  The fight had begun with an innocent question spurred by that morning’s Social Studies lesson: “What are you? Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jew?”

  I had posed the question to the girls during break—or at least to the ones who weren’t chasing one another, skipping rope, or playing hopscotch in a chalk-drawn grid on the tarmac.

  Muslim, Muslim, Hindu, Muslim.

  Christian, Muslim, Christian, Muslim.

  “Zoroastrian,” Zarin said.

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “There is.” Lines appeared on the skin over her brows, reminding me of the pictures I’d seen of the Hindu men the teacher had shown us in class—three pale skin-colored streaks on a forehead that was now pink with anger.

  “Come on,” I said, irritated by the sound of a word I’d never heard before, a word that to me sounded like something Zarin had made up out of the sheer boredom of having no friends in class. “You don’t have to lie to us. What are you? Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jew?”

  “I’m not lying.” Her dusty black Mary Janes scraped the ground as she got to her feet. Her knees, darker than the rest of her legs, were bruised, red blots and scratches slowly turning purple from the fights she sometimes got into with the girls in the classroom beside ours.

  I felt myself growing stiff, even though outwardly my voice showed no change. “Well, you told us you had parents too. But you don’t. You live with your aunt and uncle.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said, snarling the last word.

  “You are too,” I insisted loudly, in an effort to be heard over the general din on the playground. “You don’t have parents and you don’t have a religion either.”

  In fact, my voice was so loud that many of the girls playing nearby had fallen silent and stopped their game-play to watch Zarin’s reaction.

  And what a reaction she gave them.

  Before I realized what was happening, she caught hold of my arm and sank her teeth into it. We rolled in the courtyard, bit, pulled, scratched, and screamed, until a teacher yanked us apart and called us a pair of hooligans.

  Of course, Zarin wasn’t lying about her religion, and my mother told me as much when I came home that afternoon.

  “You learn this now, Mishal,” Mother scolded, “while there is still time. Tomorrow you will go and say sorry to that girl.”

  Yet, though I filed away this fact on Zoroastrianism for future reference, I had no intention of apologizing to Zarin. She did not apologize to me either. Instead, we always tried to top each other in the classes we liked best, though I’d never beaten Zarin in English and she’d never beaten me in Arabic. When not competing in the classroom, we competed outside of it, usually on the school bus we both took home, our battles limited to taunts and name-calling.

  I stared at the page in my textbook: Consider the motion of a car along a straight line …

  From the mosque outside my window, the muezzin sang a call for the isha prayer.

  Downstairs, Abdullah switched the channel to The X Factor Arabia. On another night, I might have shouted at him for turning up the volume so loud. I might even have unrolled my mat and prayed. But I couldn’t study anyway. And I was not sure if any of my prayers would be accepted after the things I’d done. I tossed my book aside.

  In the room next to mine, Mother had begun another song. Quiet plucks of the strings that were slow at first and then quick. Staccato notes, I think she called them. Rapid little jabs to the heart.

  BEGINNINGS

  Zarin

  There was something about the boy’s back that caught my eye, that made me pause on the way to the used-books stall and watch him string lights over a painted wooden stand at the annual school fair the summer I turned fourteen. Hours later, when the air cooled and the sky darkened, the lights would flash red, blue, green, and yellow and hordes of students would squeeze into the parking lot at Qala Academy’s boys’ section in Sharafiyah to stuff their faces with popcorn and cotton candy, buy bangles and DVDs, and throw darts at colored balloons to win cheap two-riyal toys made of old sofa foam and lint-covered velvet.

  Maybe it was the translucent white polyester of his shirt that revealed the absence of the white undershirt worn by most schoolboys. Or the breeze that pressed said shirt to the long, smooth indent of his spine: a tunnel that trailed from nape to waist, flanked with thick muscle on both sides. Or maybe it was simply the novelty of being able to leisurely stare at a boy, without Masi constantly hovering around me like an overprotective bulldog.

  “She’s growing up fast,” I had often heard her complain to Masa. “Too fast.”

  Too fast based on the looks she said I got from boys and even from some men at the deli, the supermarket, and the mall. From the way I walked, my “hips swaying like a loose woman’s,” if the boy that followed me home from the DVD store when I was eleven was any indication—even though at the time I had not known what it meant t
o be a loose woman.

  Too fast, like my mother. A woman who, even as a teenager, wore no sudreh under her clothes and tied no kusti around her waist.

  “How could she?” Masi’s voice would boom through the house, as loud as a priest’s at prayer time. “With those small-small shirts that she wore? ‘It wouldn’t be fashionable,’ she would always say.”

  According to Masi, the story of my birth could have been made into a tragic film for Indian parallel cinema. My mother had worked as a bar girl in Mumbai, a woman who danced to remixed versions of popular Hindi songs in a shower of Gandhi-faced rupee notes, accompanied by drunken compliments and whistles. After my great-grandfather’s death, it was the only way she could make money to support herself and her younger sister, my masi—not that Masi was ever grateful. My father worked as a hit man for a Mumbai don. He and my mother fell in love, did not marry, but had me. Then my father abandoned my mother, went off to Dubai, and got blown up by a pair of guns. The End.

  There had been several articles in the newspapers about my father’s death. “Fugitive Mumbai Gangster Shot Dead in Dubai.” “Massacre in Deira.” “Suraj Shinde’s Final Salaam.” On a trip back to Mumbai, I looked up these headlines one afternoon in the archives of a public library and even managed to find a small color photo of him—a broad-shouldered man with a square jaw, warm brown skin, and a frown exactly like mine.

  My mother’s death, on the other hand, was not documented anywhere, except perhaps in a Mumbai morgue. I would hear Masi talking to the Dog Lady about it at times over the phone—how some of my mother’s bar patrons had shown up at the funeral—until the talk inevitably turned to me and the way I behaved after my mother died. “Never even cried, that girl,” Masi would always say. “You’d think she had no feelings whatsoever. She makes me so angry sometimes. Keeps egging me on until I hit her.”

  My uncle had never approved of her hitting me. I had heard them fighting about it once a couple of years ago, when she’d left a bruise on my cheek for failing a Math test. But apart from that, he rarely, if ever, intervened about any other form of punishment Masi doled out. My disobedience was something he didn’t approve of either; he often told me that Masi and I would get along better if I listened to her more, if I tried harder at school, if I didn’t make her so angry by being argumentative.

  In any case, Masa could never stay mad at her for long. The night they had argued, Masi woke us up with her screams. “I won’t let you!” Masi’s body jerked upward as she struggled against my uncle’s grip on her wrists. Her teeth gnashed. White drool gathered at the corners of her lips. “She isn’t—she isn’t going with you!”

  I’d watched Masa gently coax her out of the episode, the way he had several times before in Mumbai. “It’s okay, Khorshi. It’s okay. Did you forget your medicine again?” It took him two hours to make her take the pills and then soothe her back to sleep, crooning an old Hindi love song. A lullaby for a grown woman. Neither of them seemed to notice that I was there, watching from behind the partly open bedroom door.

  I, on the other hand, never screamed when I had a nightmare. Neither Masa nor Masi knew about the cold sweats I woke up to late at night when I first came to live with them in Mumbai, or the ones I sometimes woke up to even now in Jeddah. Most nights I dreamed of my mother, saw candles glowing, tasted chocolate flakes on my lips. “Smile!” she would say, and a flash would go off repeatedly, until I woke up with a start. Other nights, I would have different dreams. Scarier ones of a man tossing me up high into the air. A loud cracking sound. A woman’s scream. But then, just as quickly, the mornings would come and Masi’s voice would rise, sonorous in prayer. I would turn once more into the Zarin they knew—a girl who no longer cried or jumped back in surprise when her aunt gave her a beating.

  One day she made me so angry that I stuffed my underwear in a clothes drawer, allowing the navy-blue cloth of my academy kameez to touch my skin without hindrance, resisting the itch of the rough cotton. It had been worth it to hear Masi screech when she saw the outline of my nipples through the cloth—even more satisfying than the way her face purpled each time I winked at a boy at the mall or exchanged smiles with one at the supermarket.

  It no longer mattered what Rusi Masa said in her defense—“She means well!” or “It’s for your own good!” By then, I was fourteen and I already knew the truth: that Masi’s protectionism stemmed not out of a genuine concern for my well-being, but from a paranoia of having males around me, especially those who reminded her of my “good-for-nothing gangster father.”

  It was basic psychology, Mishal Al-Abdulaziz told us at school. Girls were often attracted to boys who reminded them of their fathers, and boys, in turn, to girls who reminded them of their mothers.

  But that day, at the academy fair, I was not looking for a fight with my aunt. I glanced around quickly, scanning the faces of the growing crowd of fairgoers for the glint of her big gold-rimmed spectacles or my uncle’s bald head. I couldn’t see either, which meant they were still talking to that man from Masa’s office on the other side of the fairgrounds. It had been the man who’d suggested the used-books stall when Masa told him that I liked to read.

  “Let her go,” Masa had told Masi. “Maybe she can find those Harry Potter books the kids are always talking about.”

  Masi had frowned for a moment, but to my surprise, she did let me go, probably unwilling to create a scene in front of Masa’s colleague. “No wandering around,” she had told me in her curt voice. “We will join you very shortly.”

  The faint call for the maghrib prayer floated through the air from a nearby mosque. It would soon be followed by the rustle of prayer mats being rolled out in front of the stalls on the tarmac, the snap of shoelaces and the scrape of Velcro as men slipped off their shoes, splashed their faces, hands, and feet with water from a bottle, and stepped onto colorful rectangles with paisley designs, their heads covered with kerchiefs or netted skullcaps.

  The sound of salah was one I always associated with Saudi Arabia, a time when work came to a pause and shops rolled down their shutters for several minutes, five times every day. In Mumbai, life went on as usual, the blare of traffic horns competing with mosques, temples, and churches alike. In Jeddah, however, a sort of stillness fell over everything. Here, prayer’s melody was distinct, audible over every other sound. As a six-year-old, I’d often fallen asleep listening to a salah after a nightmare. Even as I grew older, the sound had never failed to ease my restlessness. Until now.

  The boy stretched back his arms and then leaped off the chair, his sneakers throwing up dust as they hit the ground. Unlike the men near the stalls, he didn’t kneel or turn in the direction of Makkah, but spun around to face me.

  Black hair. Tanned skin. Narrow jaw. But it was his eyes that caught and held my attention, the irises hazel, almost pale gold in the fading afternoon light. They traveled over me: from the top of my scarf to the tips of my sneakers peeking from underneath the black abaya. I was aware of the shapelessness of the garment, the worn laces of my shoes, the boyish crop Masi had been forcing on me ever since I was four years old. For a moment I wished my abaya was fancier: a pastel shade of white, sky blue, or yellow instead of the usual black, or embroidered and sequined like the ones Mishal and her friends wore. I wished I could, like some other girls at the fair, feel bold enough to leave my abaya open at the front and show off glimpses of a colorful new outfit. But even underneath the abaya, my clothes weren’t much better—an old T-shirt and the cheap jeans that Masi bought by the dozen from Manara Market.

  “It’s not like anyone’s going to see what you’re wearing,” she had always said and I had never found a reason to question this rationale. Until tonight.

  The boy tilted his head slightly and then flashed me a smile—white teeth, a dimple deep in his left cheek.

  My face warmed. It was ridiculous, really. I had never blushed in front of a boy before—not even in Masi’s presence. Smile back, my mind told me. Smile back.

  Ho
wever, by the time I felt the corners of my mouth turn up, the boy was distracted by other matters, more specifically by the head girl, who jogged by us with a money box clutched in her hands, her big breasts bouncing like a pair of water balloons.

  “Nadia!” the boy called after her. “Hey, Nadia, do you need some help?”

  “Farhaaaan.” I’d never heard the head girl sound so breathless. She held the box out to him. “Oh Farhan, you’re a lifesaver. May Allah forgive me for missing my prayers today, but I’ve been so busy! Could you please get this to the headmistress for me?”

  “Of course, Nadia.” This time his smile was for her, only turned up in brightness. The dizzy, megawatt grin of a guy who’d finally been noticed by a girl he’d been eyeing for ages. Instead of walking away, they continued to talk, the head girl giggling at something the boy said, seemingly oblivious to the glares they drew from the praying men. By the time they walked off, the salah had ended and voices around me rose again, indicating that the stalls had reopened for business.

  “There you are.” Masi’s voice floated to my ears a moment later, as pleasant as the snap of a rubber band on skin. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  I turned away from the boy and the head girl, my face burning. My aunt and uncle approached: Masa, smiling, with plastic packets of blue and pink cotton candy in his hands, and Masi, frowning, her magnified bifocal eyes focused somewhere over my head.

  “Who’s that boy?” she asked.

  “No one.”

  “You were staring at him. Clearly he isn’t no one.”