A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “What are you doing?”

  “See? I was right. You don’t even smell like a boy,” he said. “You smell like Pond’s Magic Powder and flowers. Boys don’t smell like that.”

  “Zarin,” Masi called from inside the flat. “Zarin, where are you?”

  “I have to go.” I turned around, grateful that I had an excuse to avoid him—this strange boy who went around smelling people to prove a point. Except for the few times I had told my cousins and their friends to shut up when they called me Snot-Nose, I’d never even talked to a boy before. He was probably making fun of me. However, unlike my cousins, whose words sometimes made me stew for hours on end, Porus’s words made me feel strangely good about myself. I replayed them in my head that night, over and over again, long after Masa and Masi fell asleep.

  In the weeks to come, I saw Porus more often, though never again on my balcony. Maybe I’d scared him off. Or maybe he somehow sensed that I would get in trouble with Masi for encouraging his friendship. In the mornings, when Masi was busy praying, I sometimes sneaked out onto the balcony to watch the comings and goings of the other residents. This was where I usually saw Porus, clinging to his father’s hand as they walked to the bus stop across the road. Porus’s gaze would somehow always gravitate toward me and he would grin and wave each time. Sometimes Porus’s father would wave as well, and I would be treated to older and younger versions of the same smile.

  Slowly, after a week or two of this, I began to wave back. It was the polite thing to do, I reasoned. And though I didn’t like to admit it, I almost always felt calmer on the days I saw Porus and his father walking to the bus stop. Some mornings I even walked around with a smile on my face—a fact that did not escape my uncle’s notice.

  “Someone looks happy today,” Masa said. “Did something special happen?”

  I shrugged, saying nothing. I kept it hidden away—this strange “waving friendship” of ours—along with the memories of my last birthday cake, my hopes for a Disney picture book, and the toothy smiles from a boy who thought I was pretty.

  * * *

  By the time I was sixteen, I’d learned a couple of things.

  I learned that Thursdays were the best days for sneaking out of school with a guy—by catching the sweet spot between the last two periods (Home Science and Phys Ed) and slipping out the unmanned side gate at the south end of Qala Academy and into a waiting car. I would have an hour and a half to eat a shawarma and smoke a cigarette or two, maybe talk if the boy was chatty, before he dropped me off a block away from our apartment building moments before the school bus drove by.

  I’d also learned that, when faced with the threat of being locked up forever in my room or in an unwanted marriage, I could school my features into a mask and lie to my aunt with conviction.

  “Where were you?” Masi had shouted one Thursday when I had come home later than expected. “I was about to call your masa.”

  “We had debate practice at the last minute and I missed the bus. My friend Noor’s father dropped me off.” I didn’t even know anyone by the name of Noor, but luckily Masi didn’t ask any more questions.

  After that, however, I didn’t take any chances. Dates were cut shorter, despite the boy’s complaints, and I came home quicker. Normally debate practices took place on Mondays and ran for about two hours after school. If Masi made inquiries with my teacher or the headmistress, I would be in deep trouble. I might have learned ways to pull one over on my aunt and uncle, but I couldn’t use that excuse again.

  For the other girls, Thursdays held a different sort of allure. They marked the end of the school week in Saudi Arabia, a time when most academy students threw aside their books for two days of respite from the rigorous Class XI coursework.

  “Any year without board exams is a good one,” our class monitor, Alisha Babu, declared to everyone on the day school reopened after two months of summer vacation. “Too bad our teachers are such poor sports about it!”

  Our teachers, who piled us up with essays and problem sets the day we returned, who scolded us for not completing our holiday homework on time, who reminded us of our dismal scores from the first term test in May. They started handing out punishments by the dozen, usually in the form of more problem sets or lines to write out.

  Even Khan Madam, our mild-mannered English teacher, grew irritable. “Don’t forget—you will still have the boards next year,” she said one day when she caught Mishal Al-Abdulaziz yawning in English class. “So failing English this year will not help you much, my dear Mishal.”

  It was really quite an unfair statement, a surprising and rare display of temper that had most girls diagnosing Khan Madam with early-onset menopause. I couldn’t really blame them. As much as I disliked Mishal, she was by no means a poor student. Thanks to our perpetual rivalry since Class II, she was only five marks away from the highest English score in our class—mine.

  Unlike other subjects, English was easy for me—so much easier than Hindi, which needed a lot more than a rudimentary knowledge of Bollywood songs. My edge over Mishal in the subject often lay in debates; arguing with my aunt over the years had given me enough practice with snappy comebacks.

  English, Masa told me once, had been Masi’s favorite subject too. “She used to read lots of books!” he had said cheerfully. “Like you, Zarin.”

  My interest in reading had been a surprise to Masi as well, not that we had many books in our apartment except for a few old Famous Fives and a tattered copy of Jane Eyre. Trips to Jarir Bookstore, the only place you could get any interesting novels, were extremely rare. Jarir was expensive—even Masa said so—and who was going to spend forty-two riyals (“Six hundred and seven rupees?!” Masi exclaimed) on a book about a group of teenagers trying to kill each other on reality TV?

  “Sorry, dear,” Khan Madam had said when I asked if the school library kept these books, “but these aren’t usually on our prescribed teaching lists.” Her eyes twinkled like dark gems and for a moment I did not see the pouches underneath. “Why don’t you borrow them from one of the girls?”

  It was a nice idea, except that most girls would not lend me a broken pencil. My reputation as a smoker and my general unfriendliness often preceded everything I’d ever done in school, good or bad. At one point, some girl had been blunt enough to tell me straight up, “My mother wouldn’t like it if I was friends with someone like you.”

  “I want to borrow your book. It doesn’t make us friends.”

  Alisha Babu, who eventually lent me her own copy of The Hunger Games, told me that most of my classmates found me intimidating. “If you were a little friendlier, people would begin to like you more. You’d see that the rest of us aren’t so bad.”

  But I knew better. I could see the sly curiosity beneath their offers of friendship. I’d seen women like the Dog Lady in action at the colony, women who were experts at such backbiting friendliness. First they would ask questions about your life. Really? Tell me more! Then they would tell everyone else. Do you know what she did? I would never have imagined it! They would first giggle about you and then criticize you and later converge on you as a pack. You know there are things about yourself that you should change. We’re telling you this because we care.

  The Dog Lady was part of the reason Masi was so neurotic. My aunt depended on her for advice even here in Jeddah, sometimes making long-distance calls to Mumbai for up to thirty minutes. “What do you think, Persis?” I had heard her often ask. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

  I wondered if Masi knew how ridiculous she sounded when she spoke like that, how weak. You couldn’t win anyone’s approval by trying to fit in or even by doing what they expected you to do, I wanted to tell her. I had learned as much when I was seven.

  It was easier, much easier to say nothing. To skip Phys Ed and go up to the water tank to smoke in silence, to think instead of talk. Talking, I’d learned from observing these girls and the Dog Lady, only led to revelation of secrets. Secrets that could open up again l
ike a barely healed wound under a bandage and bleed through the white surface.

  Class XI wasn’t Class II. We were sixteen now and other things were going on apart from rivalries over being a teacher’s pet or student of the year. Boys had entered the picture. Not only celebrities, but real ones, mostly captains and vice-captains from the boys’ section in Sharafiyah. Many of the girls didn’t get to see them up close, let alone go out on dates with them (unless you counted texting each other from different stores at the same mall), which made those who did automatically become objects of envy and derision.

  “Slut,” Mishal had called a girl for going out with Farhan Rizvi in Class X. “Wore a scarf around her neck like a muffler to hide the marks he’d made on her skin.”

  “That’s gross,” her friend Layla Sharif had replied before bursting into giggles. “But I don’t blame her. He’s so hot.”

  That Farhan Rizvi had been appointed head boy this year added to his hotness. The title allowed most girls to overlook the many rumors that had been floating around about him ever since he had broken up with the head girl: that he was drifting down highways in his black BMW, partying with Saudi boys from a local college, changing girlfriends like pairs of socks.

  “That face.” Another girl sighed. “Oh my God, I swear it has grown better looking every year.”

  A face that I still could not look at without remembering that day at the fair, without feeling the old sting of rejection.

  However, not everyone in our classroom was susceptible to Farhan Rizvi’s charms. Mishal Al-Abdulaziz hated him, often bringing us rumors of his wild escapades, some of the stories so far-fetched that I wondered if she spent her free time making them up.

  “You should have seen the way he and his friends were behaving at the fair this year,” Mishal said the week we returned to school after the holidays. “Getting together in groups of six or seven and cornering three or four girls in a stall to dry hump them. I swear! I’m not lying! It was disgusting, really, the way they were going about it—and those girls were giggling, encouraging their cheap behavior!”

  I rolled my eyes, wondering if Mishal even knew what dry humping meant. The fair was certainly one of the few times the boys and girls from the academy could see one another without the interference of the religious police, but it was still a public place, with stall owners, teachers, and parents milling about. Poking a girl on Facebook or throwing her your number in the mall was one thing, but the idea of a boy—or a group of boys—attempting something like that in such a chaperone-heavy location was so ludicrous that even Mishal’s friends had burst out laughing.

  Mishal may have talked about penises and vaginas with the detached inflections of a college biology teacher, but everyone knew she would jump a mile if a boy so much as winked at her. She would probably have blown a fuse if she’d found out about me dating her brother, Abdullah, a boy whose advances I had initially ignored, mostly because I knew who he was related to.

  Tall, handsome Abdullah, with his broad shoulders and curly black hair. Abdullah, who glared at boys for eyeing his sister, but had no problem eyeing girls himself, which was quite evident when I finally met him face-to-face this past summer at the school fair.

  “Hey.” He’d paused by the used-books stall I was standing next to and leaned an elbow across the counter. “You in Class XI?”

  In response, I had pulled out a magazine on display and studied the cover—an old copy of Vogue featuring an American pop singer, her bare legs colored over with Magic Marker. Neat black lines followed the curves of her calves and thighs, giving the appearance of leggings.

  “Hellooo.” Abdullah snapped a finger next to my ear.

  “Not interested,” I said out loud. Good-looking though he might have been, I knew who Abdullah was. I had seen enough of his pictures in the school yearbook, read enough newsletter bulletins about his trophies and track team records. In any case, his last name, on a badge clipped to the lapel of his navy-blue school blazer along with the title Sports Captain was a dead giveaway. There was only one Al-Abdulaziz in the boys’ school who had been appointed to that position that year, and he was the brother of a girl who hated my guts.

  “You’re being rude, you know,” he said, following me when I left the stall. “I wanted your opinion on the Independence Day exhibition stalls. I’m writing an article for the newsletter and I wanted an eleventh-grade girl’s opinion.”

  “Oh really?” I raised my eyebrows. “Why don’t you ask your sister, then?”

  “Well, because she’s my sister, duh,” he said with a grin. “What’s the point of writing an article if you can’t interview pretty girls?”

  I couldn’t help smirking. “You’d be guilty of khilwa, you know.”

  His eyes widened in mock horror. “Uh-oh, don’t tell me that I found another religious policewoman at QA. I thought Mishal was the only one!”

  The joke made me laugh out loud. It stuck with me through the rest of our conversation, as he showed me the Independence Day exhibits and asked questions, taking notes whenever I said something. The Dog Lady always said that if you could make a girl laugh, you could make her yours. Maybe there was some truth to that statement, because at the end of the interview, when Abdullah finally asked for my number, I scribbled it down on his interview sheet along with my name.

  * * *

  “You’re fairly brave,” I told Abdullah a week later as I slid into the front passenger seat of his big maroon GMC. “Most guys would be worried about getting in trouble with the cops. Or the Hai’a.”

  Unlike the other boys I’d dated, Abdullah never seemed threatened by the religious police, which might have partly been the effect of having a Saudi father with connections in the government. Jeddah, Abdullah told me, was considered Saudi Arabia’s liberal city even though its name translated to grandmother in English. A city seemingly devoid of sentinels from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice: an old lady with mischief up her black sleeves. Here, it seemed perfectly natural for elaborately designed mosques to coexist with giant sculptures of bicycles and geometry sets. Jeddah offered those few courting opportunities that couples were denied in most other parts of the Kingdom, even though few such relationships lasted long. I’d learned from experience that a love story that began with a phone number tossed on a piece of paper at a crowded mall could end abruptly, within days, leaving behind radio silence.

  Abdullah laughed at me now. “You’re talking about trouble? You’ll be in more trouble than me if we’re caught. At least I’m a Muslim. You’re not that; heck, you’re not even a Christian. You could die in an accident tomorrow, but you’d still get jack from the government. Let me think—what is the going rate for Parsi chicks found dead in ditches?”

  “Three thousand three hundred thirty-three riyals,” I replied. “Not even half your father’s salary, ya walad.”

  He laughed even harder at that. “Your Arabic accent is so Indian.”

  The comment brought out a question I’d been thinking of ever since Abdullah and I had started going out. “How come you and Mishal didn’t go to a Saudi school?”

  Segregation in Saudi Arabia wasn’t limited to gender alone. Apart from rare gatherings to celebrate Eid at offices, there seemed to be a natural divide between the Saudis and the expatriates, each community keeping to itself in matters of education and socializing. The Saudis had their own school system with an all-Arabic curriculum and a focus on Islamic studies. There were also private schools that Abdullah had told me about where wealthy Arabs sent their kids for an English education, whose graduates had the chance to apply to universities in America and Europe. It seemed more likely to me that both Abdullah and Mishal would have gone to one of these schools instead of Qala Academy, which wasn’t that fancy, and where the curriculum mainly focused on South Asians planning to return to their home countries.

  He gave me a tight-lipped smile. “My mother wanted it. Father agreed. Besides, I’m half-Indian too, remember?”r />
  There was a brief, awkward silence before he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Want one?” He offered them casually, in a way that told me he didn’t really expect me to take him up on his offer.

  “Sure.” I flicked one from the pack and lit up.

  He smiled. It was a nice smile, accentuating a cleft in his chin that I had not noticed before. “You’re different,” he said. “Different from any other girl I know.”

  “You’re different too,” I admitted. “I’m surprised you’re even related to Mishal.”

  Which made him laugh again.

  A year ago, Mishal had tried to get me in trouble by reporting to our sadistic Physics teacher that I carried cigarettes in my backpack. It had been a close call. It was sheer luck that I’d run through my last pack that morning and thrown it away before I entered the classroom; luck that my breath smelled of mint and not tobacco when the teacher made me open my mouth and sniffed like a rabid bloodhound. After that, I never carried cigarettes on my person, usually stashing them in little nooks and crannies at school—in that space behind the ladder at the water tank on the terrace.

  By the time I was sixteen, however, it was boys like Abdullah who would help me skip school, who offered me their own cigarettes and smoked with me in their cars, parked in a deserted lot by the Corniche on Thursday afternoons.

  Only Abdullah became a lot more than a guy I simply went out with for cigarettes or food—and that became evident when he kissed me on our third date—a light, pleasing dance of lips and tongues that made me forget for a few moments that we were in a public place.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked when I pushed him away. “I thought you liked me.”

  I laughed, gently tracing his frown away with a finger. “I do like you. But maybe we should not keep doing this here.”

  I gestured toward the railing in the distance, where a lone man stood, staring at the sunlight glittering on the waves.

  Abdullah rolled his eyes. “He’s so far, Zarin. He’s not even turned this way.”