A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “So is it now a crime to look at people?”

  “Stop it,” Masa interrupted. He gave me one of the packs of cotton candy. “Stop it, both of you.”

  I tore out a chunk of the spun pink sugar with my fingers and stuffed it into my mouth, barely listening to Masi’s lecture about bad manners. To my relief, we did not see either the boy or Nadia again for the rest of the evening—not that we stayed there very long.

  Hours later, I pulled out the school yearbook in my bedroom, turning page after page until I came across one with his photo. Farhan Rizvi. Captain, Qala Academy soccer team. Second-place winner at the regional school debate held last year in Dubai.

  His smile didn’t seem that special now. It was too toothy, I told myself, too white. Like he was modeling for a toothpaste commercial. His nose looked like it had been modeled by a plastic surgeon, it was so perfectly shaped and centered. Fake, I decided. Completely fake.

  I stared at the photo for a few more moments, remembering the way his gaze had traveled over my body, almost as if he was mapping it, the slight narrowing of the eyes, as if something was missing, as if there was something about me that fell short of his expectations.

  “It will be difficult,” I’d heard Masi telling Masa once, in reference to me. “So difficult to find her a good boy once they find out about her family.”

  “That happened a long time ago. It won’t matter.”

  “Not everyone is like you, Rusi.” It was the first time I’d heard her sound sad, resigned. “Most boys listen to their parents. And they are not going to ignore her past.”

  The taint of bad blood, the Dog Lady called it. It didn’t matter how good your reputation was or how pretty you looked. Though I had never thought about marriage before, I could imagine what the Dog Lady and Masi would say when the time came.

  “She will be lucky if she can even find someone,” the Dog Lady would say in her patronizing tone. “As is, it is so troublesome, you know, Khorshed dear, when it comes to finding someone for a child from a mixed marriage, and in her case … well, you know how people talk.”

  Of course Masi knew. I knew as well.

  Illegitimate. Half-Hindu. Gangster’s daughter. I’d heard the words before.

  I looked at Farhan Rizvi’s photo again. Blood rose to my cheeks and I was suddenly angry with him for reminding me of these things. For ogling me first and then chasing after the head girl. For flashing me his perfect smile: a crumb of affection for a lovesick little girl. Pain flickered deep inside my chest. I snapped the yearbook shut and tossed it aside.

  * * *

  The first time I smoked a cigarette, it felt like I’d swallowed a piece of burning coal. Asfiya, the girl who’d offered it to me on the academy roof, did not seem surprised by my coughing fit.

  “It happens,” she said in a gravelly voice. “You’ll get used to it, though.”

  It was the longest thing she had said to me since I’d started coming up here, halfway through Class IX. Neither of us had planned that first meeting. In those days, I would skip Phys Ed and sneak off to a quiet stairwell on the second floor, where I read a novel I had borrowed from the school library. One day, however, instead of going to the stairwell again, I’d climbed up to the top floor of the academy, a roof terrace that acted as storage for broken desks and blackboards, and a water tank with white paint chipping off its sides. Atop the water tank sat Asfiya—a senior I knew only by her first name mostly because everyone kept saying she was a bad student and a smoker. A smoker! You’d think she was Satan incarnate, the way the girls in my class spoke about her.

  She had been blowing smoke rings into the air, one short puff after another, squiggly white circles that rose toward the blue sky before dissipating into nothing. I had expected her to stop when she saw me, maybe even yell, but she hadn’t done either of those things. We had stared at each other for a long moment until I pointed to the base of the water tank and asked: “Can I sit here?”

  Asfiya had shrugged and simply said, “Whatever.”

  As the weeks went on, it became a sort of ritual—me sitting at the base of the water tank and reading, her sitting on top and smoking, both of us with a bird’s-eye view of three of the four whitewashed buildings that made up the enclosed Qala Academy girls’-section complex, and parts of the neighborhood that lay beyond—shadowy apartment buildings with their clotheslines and dusty satellite dishes, the crescent tip of a mosque glinting in the sunlight. On windy days, I didn’t read and Asfiya didn’t smoke. We simply sat together, enjoying the respite from the moist Jeddah heat, and watched the grounds below, where girls played volleyball, basketball, and cricket, their voices high and thin from down there, the sort of voices I imagined dolls would have if they ever came to life.

  “Is it interesting?” Asfiya asked me a few days after she gave me my first cigarette. “That book you’re reading?”

  I looked up. “It’s pretty good. Animals making up their own rules. Running a farm. The pigs are kind of creepy though.”

  “Hmm, I guess. Not much of an animal person myself.”

  I stared out into the distance, my vision blurring slightly in the heat. “I had a kitten once,” I said. “I found him here in the academy four years ago, in the second-floor corridor. His mom had died.”

  The dead cat was a pile of ribs draped with dirty white-gray fur, its back pressed against the freshly painted wall. “Call the maid,” the headmistress had said. As if the body was a stubborn piece of chewed gum to be scraped off the speckled marble tiles. It was then that I’d seen something move out of the corner of my eye. The kitten stared up at me with wide lamp-yellow eyes and shrank behind its mother’s body. I slowly reached out to touch it. Tiny claws dug into my hands. The kitten wailed and tried to get free. My head had spun from the combined smells of fresh paint and dead cat. “It’s okay,” I had told the kitten. “My mother is dead too.”

  “Did it have a name?” Asfiya said, interrupting my reverie.

  “Fali.”

  Masa was the one who had helped me come up with the name. Masi had hated Fali from the very beginning—she called him an Unwanted Expense. “Does money grow on trees?” she had snarled at me, her nostrils flaring. “Who is going to pay for the animal’s food?” When I pointed out that she could take the money from the bank account my father left me, she slapped me for “being impertinent.”

  “Calm down, jaanu.” Masa always called Masi his jaanu, or his life, during her temper tantrums. “What is the harm in a few tins of cat food? We can easily afford it with my new raise.”

  Since Masi did not really have a good excuse in the face of Masa’s reasonable explanation, she switched tracks from cat food costs to household cleanliness. She started off small at first—with complaints about Fali shedding on the sofa and coughing up fur balls. Typical Masi mumbles and grumbles that I’d trained myself to ignore over the years. Then, one afternoon, when I was doing my Science homework, she snapped.

  “Bringing in allergies and feces in our house!” she shouted at Fali, as if he could understand what she was saying. “Who is going to clean this?” She caught Fali by his scruff, threw him out of the apartment, and slammed the door shut.

  Then she locked me in my room, kicking and screaming, until Masa came home from work. “Have you seen the way this girl answers back to me?” she demanded. “And the way she fights and pulls at my arms? Acts like a bloody woman wrestler!”

  I flew out as soon as Masa unlocked the door. We found Fali lying in a pile of garbage outside the building. Stiff. Bloody.

  She didn’t mean it, Masi kept telling Masa. Pleading with him as if Fali had belonged to him and not me. She didn’t mean for the cat to die. She was sorry. So sorry.

  I had never believed her.

  “I hate you,” I’d said. “You’re nothing but a mean old witch.”

  Neither Masa’s pleas nor his threats made me take back my words.

  Asfiya remained silent for a long time after I told her the story. Then, with a sig
h, she nudged me with a cigarette. “Come on. Let’s see if you can smoke without coughing today.”

  When she graduated the following year, I found a half-used pack tucked into a crevice behind the ladder, likely forgotten—a surprise because Asfiya usually hoarded her cigarettes with great care. It was not until I was smoking my second cigarette that afternoon that it struck me that she may not have forgotten them. That she may have intentionally left them there for me.

  * * *

  Over the years, I learned to deal with my nightmares by focusing on my surroundings. The good things in my life, as I began to think of them. The bedside lamp Masa had gotten me from the souk in Balad, its shade made of green-glass leaves glowing like a fairy bush in the dark. The crunch of the Lion bars that I kept hidden in my drawers, followed by the sweetness of chocolate and caramel melting on my tongue. The call for prayer from the mosque across our apartment: loud, nasal, soothing.

  Some nights I allowed myself to remember Porus Dumasia—the closest I’d come to having a friend in the two years I’d stayed at Cama colony.

  I first saw Porus a couple of months after my mother’s death. By then I had discovered that evenings were the only time I would get some semblance of peace from Masi’s constant scrutiny, when the Dog Lady would come over for tea, to gossip with Masi about everyone else in the colony.

  Masa often escaped as well, usually on the pretext of talking to his brother, Merzi Kaka, who lived in the building across from ours, where I watched them growing red and smiley each evening as they downed peg after peg of whiskey on the balcony. One of Merzi Kaka’s sons would sit cross-legged on the floor behind them, wearing headphones, his eyes focused on the flat gray remote control–like object he held in his hands. Merzi Kaka kept saying the kid needed to get out more and play something other than video games, but right now even Merzi Kaka didn’t seem to care where he was. Not like Masi, whose eyes seemed to follow me wherever I went.

  That evening, I glanced back to make sure that Masi and the Dog Lady were still talking and then stepped out onto the common balcony shared by the second-floor residents. Cama colony was a cluster of six buildings facing one another with a large, unpaved courtyard in the middle. Outside the colony, autos, buses, and cars blared horns. Inside, music from radios and CD players clashed: the high voice of Freddie Mercury combating with a popular Hindi song from an Aamir Khan movie about cricket. Here and there, smells emerged. Mothers frying fish and stewing dal in their kitchens, peering out windows from time to time to watch their children playing below.

  On my balcony, however, there was no one. When I sat down, I spread out my skirt like a cloud, feeling the tiles, cool against my bare skin. I then moved forward inch by inch, using my hands and shoulders. I got closer and closer, until I could wrap my arms and legs around the wooden banister and watch the children playing below—girls of my age skipping rope, the older ones racing bikes; boys from the colony’s junior cricket club racing up and down a long, well-worn strip of dirt. One of them, a boy in a pale blue Tendulkar jersey, squinted when he looked up at me, his eyebrows knitting together. I squinted back. He gave me a wide, gap-toothed smile that nearly split his face in two. Though he looked like he was a couple of years older than me—maybe six or seven—he didn’t look as old as the other boys, who were nine or ten years old. It was probably why they bossed him around, making him field the whole time, chase the worn ball around the colony on his stubby legs. After someone hit a ball that zoomed right out of the gate (“SIX! SIX!” the other boys chanted), he plopped onto the dusty ground, panting, and looked toward my balcony again. Pleased to see that I was still there, he gave me that goofy grin again and waved. This time, I smiled and waved back. The older boys were laughing. “Looks like Porus has found himself a girlfriend,” one of them said, making the boy in the blue jersey blush.

  I did not hear the voices behind me cease conversation; in fact I noticed nothing until a pair of skeletal, long-fingered hands curled around my arms, yanking me upright.

  “What are you doing?” Masi shook me by the shoulders. “Spreading your legs and sitting like a boy! Do you have no sense?”

  “I-I’m s-sorry…” I pressed my knees together. I did not know what exactly I’d done wrong, but I knew that I didn’t want her to see me shaking. She marched me back into the flat and slammed the door shut.

  Even the Dog Lady looked startled. She cleared her throat. “Khorshed, she is a child.”

  “I don’t care.” Streaks of red colored Masi’s cheekbones. “She may be young, but not everyone around her is. I saw those boys. The way some of them were gawking. In this day and age, you can never be too sure.”

  She walked to the cupboard where my clothes were kept, next to a framed photo of my mother on the wall, now garlanded with sandalwood flowers to signify her death. Masi pulled out a neatly folded pajama set and handed it to me, two hours before bedtime. “Here. Put these on.”

  A week later, she called the kabaadi to the colony and sold my frocks to him at a bargain price.

  “They were getting old,” she lied when Masa asked her why. “She’ll grow out of them anyway.”

  “But what about her hair?” Masa looked perplexed and, for some reason, a little angry. “She had such pretty hair, Khorshi. Did you have to cut it off?”

  “Do you want her to have lice, then?”

  Crawling gray things that would eat away at my head, Masi had explained moments before she had made me lower my head into the bathroom sink, dousing my curly, shoulder-length hair with a shock of cold water before slowly, methodically snipping it off with a pair of scissors.

  Masa frowned. “She looks like a boy now.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Masi let out a strange, bitter-sounding laugh and then pressed down the iron on the secondhand pair of corduroy pants she’d bought for me at the thrift store across the street. Steam rose from the cloth, partly shielding her face. “She’s my sister’s daughter. She won’t look like a boy forever.”

  It didn’t take long for the kids at the colony to notice the change in my appearance or remark on it—especially Merzi Kaka’s sons, who instantly began calling me by a boy’s name.

  “Is that Zarin?” my oldest cousin asked, pretending to be astonished. “Why, she looks exactly like Snot-Nose, doesn’t she? That little brat from school? All she needs is phlegm running down her mouth and an open fly.”

  A few days after this, I often had boys from the colony, mostly my cousin and his friends, shouting at me from different directions and then bursting into laughter when I threw a rock at them in frustration.

  The teasing grew worse when a new milkman started delivering bottles to the colony. “Ey boy, need any milk today?” he would call out whenever he saw me. Or, “Is Mummy-Pappa at home, boy?” I never knew if he was doing it on purpose or was simply myopic. None of the other deliverymen called me a boy; but then again, they had probably seen me when I still wore dresses and had longer hair.

  I saw the boy from the cricket pitch from time to time, usually going out with his parents during the evenings or cycling with the other boys in the compound. He was one of the few kids at Cama colony who didn’t call me names. There were times when he would glance up at the balcony where he’d seen me before, almost as if he could sense my presence there, as I peered at him through a gap between Masi’s curtains. I always ducked when this happened, remaining hidden until I was certain he was gone.

  My heart leaped to my throat when I saw him one evening on the second-floor balcony of our building—my balcony, as I’d begun to think of it. He was wearing the blue jersey again and his lips were curved up slightly. Had he noticed me spying on him? Was he going to complain to Masi? I hoped he wouldn’t. It had taken me two months to work up the courage to come out here again during the evenings. Two months of being holed up inside, on my cot, staring out the window while Masi and the Dog Lady jawed about boring things like rava recipes and vacuum cleaners or the people they worked with at Zoroastrian community organ
izations like the Parsi Panchayat.

  “Hi,” he said after staring at me for a few moments. “How are you?” His voice was raspy and a little shy.

  I glanced back quickly and edged along the balcony, closer to the boy, out of Masi’s line of vision.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I told him sternly, careful to keep my voice quiet. “My masi doesn’t want me talking to boys. And if you’re here to make fun of me, I will kick you.”

  I didn’t like the way he frowned. It made his lips turn down and the space between his eyebrows wrinkle. I much preferred his goofy, gap-toothed smile. But obviously I couldn’t say that to him.

  “Ey su che? I won’t make fun of you. I want to be friends with you.” Unlike my cousins, who flaunted their convent education by speaking in English whenever they could, this boy spoke in the smooth, flowing Gujarati common to the kids who went to the vernacular school run by the Parsi Charitable Trust in Mumbai.

  “I can’t be friends with you. I don’t even know you.” I felt bad the moment I said the words, mostly because the boy looked hurt. But I didn’t take them back. Masa had promised to get me a book next year for my fifth birthday. One of those big Disney picture books with perfect sketches of ragged street urchins, bookish French girls, and dancing lions on the African savanna. I was desperately looking forward to those pretty pictures that would take me away, far away, from the life I lived here, if only for a few hours. If I made Masi angry by talking to this boy, I wouldn’t even get that.

  After a moment, the boy nodded, a strange, determined look on his face. “My name is Porus. What’s yours?”

  “Zarin,” I said, too puzzled to think hard about this line of questioning.

  “Okay, so now you know me.” He grinned when I scowled. “And your name is as pretty as you are.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I know I look like a boy. Everyone says so.”

  “Those people are lying, then,” Porus told me seriously. “You’re too pretty to be a boy.” Then, to my astonishment, he leaned forward and sniffed my shoulder. I pushed him away.