In the space between the TV and the showcase lay Masi, her arms and legs sprawled over the carpet, breathing hard, her nightgown stuck to her chest. Halima was crouched beside her, sprinkling water over her face from a glass. “It’s okay, Khorshed. It’s okay. Halima’s here now.”
My mind registered the absence of danger before my body did, taking in the scene before me. My hand slowly fell back to its side.
What you’d find if you ever peeked into Rustom and Khorshed Wadia’s living room: a complete mess.
Which wasn’t really as surprising as the embarrassment that unfurled in my belly and flooded my face when Halima finally registered my presence and turned around to greet me, her chubby cheeks sleek with perspiration, her smile strained and extra wide.
Halima was one of the newer tenants of our building, having moved in next door a couple of years ago. From the very beginning, she’d tried to ingratiate herself with Masi, bringing a CorningWare bowl of fava bean stew and fresh lemons one Friday after moving in. She’d stood at our threshold, holding out the bowl wrapped with aluminum foil, and grinned at Masi. “I’m Halima. Your new neighbor.”
Then she shoved her way into the apartment, past my speechless aunt, and made herself comfortable on the living room sofa, making stilted conversation with Masi for about fifteen minutes: “What’s your name?” “Do you work?” “Your daughter is pretty, Masha’Allah.” “Oh, she’s not your daughter? Then, what a pretty niece.” “Where does your husband work?” “How much does he make?”
The final question, which took even me by surprise, had Masi immediately making an excuse about “guests coming over” and unceremoniously escorting Halima to the door. Not that this seemed to bother our new neighbor.
“I’ll be back,” Halima had promised. And she was. Time and time again.
Before long, Masi began finding ways and means to avoid Halima, pretending to be sleeping or showering whenever the other woman came knocking at her door.
I wasn’t sure if this was the universe’s way of giving Masi exactly what she’d asked for a few years before in the way of friendly neighbors. Unlike the other Arab tenants in our building, Halima spoke perfect English and was twice as nosy as Masi herself. I could never look at Halima with a straight face after our first interaction, my lips automatically curving up into a grin when I saw her. Halima seemed oblivious to the mocking nature of my smile, greeting me each time with a smile and a “Hello, little Zarin.”
“As’salamu alaykum, Halima,” I would say in response. The greeting always seemed to make her happy. After the first few times, I even managed to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
I never knew what Halima saw in Masi or why she always went out of her way to be friendly in spite of my aunt’s coldness. But that afternoon I was grateful that it was Halima who was inside our house and not a burglar wielding a crowbar.
“What happened?” I allowed my bag to slide to the floor and closed the door with a click.
“I heard Khorshed screaming. I didn’t know if she was in trouble. The door wasn’t locked, so I came here with that.” Halima pointed at a rolling pin lying on the sofa.
I stared at my aunt’s pallid face, which was slowly filling with color, and wondered if she’d forgotten to take her pills again. Our family physician continued to prescribe them at my uncle’s insistence, even though they seemed to make little difference in Masi’s temperament or mood, only knocking her out cold for a few hours when she took them.
“There is nothing wrong with Khorshed,” Masa told Dr. Rensil Thomas when he suggested psychiatric referral. “She’s okay when she has enough sleep.”
But I knew that what Masa was really afraid of was having people treat Masi the way they treated old Freny Bharucha in Cama colony. Cracked Freny, they used to call her in the years before she was finally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, laughing at how she forgot the simplest of things or lost her way within the compound where she lived. So, to a degree, I saw Masa’s point. People in Mumbai—and especially at the colony—weren’t exactly sensitive when it came to mental health issues. Masa’s colleagues in Jeddah weren’t any better. Just a year earlier, I’d heard one of them casually disparage a common friend whose wife had depression, and seen the way Masa’s smile had frozen on his face.
Halima pointed at me and then at the phone. “Should I tell your uncle? Call him home?”
I shook my head. Calling Masa would infuriate my aunt, if she wasn’t already angry over Halima finding her like this. Masi never liked appearing out of control to anyone. Masa once told me it was because of the life she’d led in Mumbai before I was born, a life that I’d heard her blame my mother for, many times.
“Thank you, Halima,” I said. “I’ll take care of things from here.”
“You sure, little Zarin?” She hesitated, watching Masi, who had not moved from the floor, her eyes still closed.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
After checking that the door was locked this time around, I tiptoed back to the living room and stood next to my aunt, watching the rise and fall of her chest, listening to her raspy, shallow breaths.
She whispered something—a name I couldn’t quite catch—and then gnashed her teeth.
“Masi?” I called out hesitantly. “Masi?”
“My sister,” she muttered in Gujarati. “Get away from my sister.”
Always her sister—my mother—haunting a part of her mind I couldn’t see. Whenever Masi forgot (or more likely spat out) her meds, my mother always paid her a visit in her head.
Another time, she told me that she’d considered suffocating me the day I was born. “It was the monsoons. The streets were flooded. The doctor was late and your mother had fallen asleep after the labor. It would have been easy,” she had told me. “So easy to get rid of you and, through you, him.”
Him meaning my father, of course, the other part of the equation that almost always resulted in a Masi episode.
“She didn’t mean it, Zarin,” Masa had told me repeatedly when I was ten, in the days after my kitten, Fali, died. “She didn’t know Fali would get into trouble if she put it outside. Can’t you simply accept that? It was a cat, not a human being!”
It. Like Fali was a thing and not a living creature.
I picked up the glass of water Halima had left on the coffee table and sipped, watching Masi twitch on the floor for a few more moments. Then, slowly and carefully, I poured the rest of it over her face, watching her sputter back to consciousness before taking the glass to the kitchen and placing it in the sink.
* * *
In the weeks following Fali’s death, I had started slowly. Small pranks like stealing a toothbrush. Muddying the corridor carpet with shoe prints. Dropping a face towel on the wet bathroom floor. Sneaking into the bathroom after Masa went to bed and putting the toilet seat back up, so I could hear them argue about it in the morning.
The small pranks eventually became bigger ones. A newly lit oil lamp blown out the moment Masi left the kitchen after a prayer. Crows flocking to the ledge of the kitchen window, pecking at scattered lumps of golden-brown semolina and whole wheat pudding—the special malido Masi had made the night before for my mother’s and great-grandfather’s annual death-day prayers, littering the orange kitchen tiles with black and gray feathers.
“What did you do?” The long vein at the side of Masi’s neck stood out in sharp green relief under her pale skin. The hands at her sides shook. “No beating,” I heard her mutter under her breath. No beating, no beating, no beating—a mantra she managed to abide by until I started laughing at her and stuck out my tongue.
To my surprise, Masa defended me for once that day, yelling at Masi when he saw the bruise on my cheek. “Why would you do that?” he demanded. “Don’t you see how hard she’s becoming? How she will become if this continues?”
“So what do you expect me to do, Rusi? Do you want me to beg her to behave? Should I sit around doing nothing—saying ‘Please, dikra, don’t do this!’—while she
continues to taunt and disrespect me?”
“She’s going through a phase. She will grow out of it. She will find other things to do.”
And I did.
Boys entered the picture shortly after I began pranking Masi, the first showing up when I was eleven years old, at the DVD store next to our apartment building in Aziziyah, between the racks of pirated discs, their cases shaded black with Magic Marker, covering every bit of the actresses’ exposed skin, and in some instances even their faces.
The boy was around fourteen or fifteen years old, with fair skin and a skullcap over his golden-brown curls. His gaze met mine nearly the instant he entered the store. It wasn’t a real surprise. Ever since I’d hit puberty, a lot more boys had begun noticing me. It was in the boobs, I wanted to tell them mockingly. Two fleshy bumps that had sprouted on my chest seemingly overnight, and declared that I was no longer a girl who looked like a boy.
Had this particular fact not annoyed Masi so much, I might have been embarrassed, even made uncomfortable by the attention I was getting. But I had to admit that I was also curious back then about what made her so annoyed. What, I wondered, could happen between a boy and a girl who had hit puberty that could make an already angry aunt angrier?
As if sensing my curiosity, the boy picked up one of the DVDs from the back—an older one released a few years before. A man and woman flanked the sides of the cover, the woman wearing a black dress split up to the thigh, a gun tucked into her garter belt. Someone, probably the DVD store guy, had colored in her legs and arms with green magic marker, giving the effect of an oddly designed salwar-kameez.
The boy placed his index finger in his mouth and then, with a glistening tip, traced the arch of the woman’s heel, her ankle, her calf, her thigh. The marker probably wasn’t permanent because his finger came up green, revealing the bare skin underneath. He curled the finger inward and gestured that I approach. His dark eyes were fixed on my face.
Curious and a little disgusted, I stepped forward. Once, twice. Again. A voice roared in my ears, “ZARIN!” and my feet halted in their tracks.
The DVD slipped from the boy’s smudged fingers and clattered onto the floor.
I felt Masa’s fingers grip my arm. “Come! We’re leaving.”
As we were leaving the store, however, I turned around once and caught the boy’s eye. He gave me a slight, wobbly smile. It was strange how quickly I went from being disgusted to feeling sorry for him. I smiled back, the barest upward flick of the mouth, a quick nod.
Days later, I saw the boy again outside our apartment building, tossing pebbles at my bedroom window. It was probably the worst thing he could have done because Masi was in my room at the time, placing a load of newly folded laundry on my bed.
A moment later, Masa and I watched, a little shell-shocked, as Masi marched out of the building, her long nightgown whipping outward from her bone-thin body, her hair still covered with the white cotton scarf she wore for prayers, and threw a slipper at the boy, hitting him right in the back as he ran.
When she returned, Masi gripped me by the shoulders and shook me hard, her words buzzing in my ears like bees: “Who was that boy? What was he doing throwing stones at your window? Did you know him? Did you call him here?”
“Stop it!” Masa pulled her off me. “Khorshed, stop! Of course she doesn’t know him. He was that boy from the DVD store last week.”
“What boy? You didn’t tell me anything about a boy!”
“He was…” The flush on Masa’s face nearly reached the top of his bald head. “He was watching her. I didn’t think much of it. Boys and girls at this age. You know what it’s like, Khorshed.”
“How could you be so foolish?” Masi’s head swiveled from window to window, a manic bobble-head doll. “I know you’re a man, but don’t you even think?”
“I’m sorry! But how could I have known he would follow us?” Masa turned to face me. “Zarin, did you tell him we lived here? Did you ask him to come? You know how wrong that is, don’t you?”
“I never even talked to him,” I said. “He was the one who was watching me. He followed us. I didn’t do anything wrong!”
I gritted my teeth. Sure, I wasn’t exactly innocent here. I had smiled at the boy at the end. But how could Masa assume I would give our address to anyone anywhere?
“You didn’t, did you?” Masi’s lips were turning white. “Oh no, you knew nothing!”
“Khorshed, please, it was most likely a mistake.” Masa’s voice, so sharp and accusing when he’d talked to me, softened, sweetened. “She’s only eleven … she was probably curious.”
* * *
It took a few more years for my curiosity to be satisfied. And I had to admit that Abdullah, who started calling me his girlfriend at the end of our third date, did it quite well with his kisses.
In stores, I continued to aggravate Masi, looking boys and men in the eye, forcing them to take second looks with a twist of my hips, a slightly swaying walk.
By the time I was sixteen, I considered myself an expert on boys and the sorts of looks they gave me. It was also during this time that I began questioning my expertise when I discovered another kind of boy, another kind of stare.
* * *
A few blocks from our apartment building in Aziziyah stood a Lahm b’Ajin deli shop, one of many meat and cheese franchises owned by the Lahm b’Ajin group of companies headquartered in the capital city of Riyadh. The words lahm b’ajin referred to the minced-meat pizzas they initially sold out of a small shop in Riyadh many years before. These days, the same pizzas were sold in the cooked-goods section at each of their deli shops and as frozen goods in big supermarkets like Tamimi and Danube.
Masa worked as plant manager at Lahm b’Ajin’s meatpacking factory in Jeddah’s fourth industrial city. From what he told us at dinnertime and from the various newspaper articles he pointed out, I understood that the company was expanding rapidly across the Kingdom and the UAE, opening new branches and shutting down old, unprofitable ones.
The deli we visited was one of the few older shops that still turned a profit. Run ever since we came to Jeddah by an old Palestinian named Hamza, it was as familiar to me as the back of my hand, with its gleaming white walls and speckled tiles. Meat hung from hooks at the far end of the store, where the butchery was set up—skinned goat and lamb parts, whole goats in the days leading up to Eid al-Adha. The deli section, at the center, nearly always ran out of the peppercorn-beef salami, but there was usually plenty of smoked turkey on hand. The cases displaying the cheeses at the other end of the butchery always had red plastic roses in them. Masa and Masi knew every man who worked at the deli counter by name, some of whom still called me “Baby,” which, though embarrassing, was something I tolerated.
Being treated like I was still seven years old was a small price to pay for a few minutes, sometimes even half an hour, of real freedom if the line at the counter was long—the kind of freedom that Masi had sanctioned, the kind I didn’t have to steal. The deli shop was one of the few places Masi sometimes sent me to alone, on errands to pick up a tray of smoked turkey. This had begun happening more and more often over the previous year or so, after Masa got promoted to senior plant manager and began working longer hours and Masi grew more sluggish—probably because of the medication she was taking then.
“Make yourself of use for once,” Masi had said one afternoon after I came back from school, and handed me a fifty-riyal note. “And bring back the change.”
And so it began. Each time she sent me off, I kept my face neutral, biting the inside of my cheek so I didn’t reveal my excitement. I wasn’t foolish enough to think Masi would send me on these errands if she ever thought they made me happy.
Seven weeks into dating Abdullah, Masi sent me on another one of these errands. I was in line at the deli counter, which was even slower than usual, and contemplated texting him from my cell phone. It was a risk—my phone was pay-as-you-go and Masa had the habit of going over the bills at the apartment
and shouting out discrepancies so that Masi could hear about them: “Zarin, dikra, whose number is this?” or “Zarin, dikra, are you still getting those spam texts?”
Had I been any other girl, I would have resented this intrusion into my privacy. I had classmates who threw fits if their phones didn’t load their texts on time, who smacked their mothers during parent-teacher conferences. I, on the other hand, barely used the Internet except for research—Yes, even my computer time is monitored, I wanted to tell those spoiled girls—and knew better than to question the scraps of privilege my guardians threw my way.
A draft of air from the central AC cooled my hot skin. I slipped the phone back into the pocket of my kameez. No boy was worth this freedom, I decided. Not even Abdullah.
It was then that I sensed someone watching me, the fine hairs at the back of my neck rising. When I turned around, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was a boy standing a few feet away—tall, broad-shouldered, with features that struck me as Persian or, even more specifically, as Parsi, from India: dark, deep-set brown eyes, thick black eyebrows, and a hooked nose.
A new worker, by the looks of his pristine white uniform and cap and unstained Lahm b’Ajin deli apron, a cardboard box of assorted cheeses held closely to his chest. His sturdy hands had multiple cuts on them, probably occupational injuries. But it was the expression on his face that struck me the most.
One of recognition, not lust.
A slight smile hovered over his lips. He stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak.
I never found out what he intended to say to me then because he slipped on a patch of tile, knocking over the yellow wet-floor sign, and fell to the floor with a painful grunt.
A Girl Like That Page 9
