Though a part of me wanted to laugh, another part felt a little bad for the boy. I was inching forward to make sure that he was okay when a voice shouted in the background: “Porus! What happened to you, boy?”
Porus.
In India, this wasn’t an uncommon name. In India, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Even here, I might have managed to push it aside had the boy not smiled at the other man: the slight gap between his front teeth sent me reeling back into a past of colony cricket matches and tentative waves.
“S-sorry, sir.” His voice had deepened over the years, but he still spoke with the same lilt to his voice, with the same soft Gujarati accent. “I … fell down.”
I don’t know why instead of saying hello, I turned around and fled, ignoring the man at the counter who called for me—“Hey, miss! Don’t you want your turkey anymore?”
I barely even registered Masi’s reprimand when I reached home—“Why did you stay so long if there was such a long line?”
In my room that night I was the one doing the scolding. Zarin Wadia did not run away from boys, I reminded myself. Zarin Wadia didn’t act like a silly, lovestruck Bollywood damsel, hearing cheesy love songs playing in the background when she saw a boy staring at her.
I snorted. Okay, the last bit definitely hadn’t happened. As for running away—that was silly in itself, but maybe it was from the shock of seeing Porus Dumasia again after so long, I reasoned. The Dumasias had changed residences shortly after we left Mumbai for Jeddah, after Porus’s father got a better-paying job. I remembered feeling terribly disappointed upon hearing the news. I had been having a hard time at my new school in Jeddah and was hoping to see a friendly face when I visited Mumbai again, even if I didn’t really intend to speak to Porus.
It had been an effective lesson in the ways of the world. People came into our lives, people left. Sometimes for good, like my mother and father. Sometimes they returned, like Masa’s old school friend who showed up one night for dinner in Jeddah after nearly fifteen years of no contact, and then was never seen again.
There was no reason to give special meaning to a reencounter, I told myself. Even if it was after ten years, and the first boy who had ever called me pretty. I had yet to meet a boy who could flip my world entirely on its head and turn every answer I knew into a question.
Porus
Stories, my father used to say, would always change the course of our lives, the greatest ones being retold over and over again not to simply convey morals or life lessons, but to bring people together. “That is the reason a storyteller tells stories,” he declared even during his last days, while lying in the hospital bed. “So he can connect to another human being!”
Pappa was smart in that way even though he didn’t go to school for long. He was one of the top salesmen in the life insurance department at the New India Assurance Company until the leukemia began eating away at him, forcing him to quit his job twenty years before retirement, and forcing us to cash in on his own policy the year I turned seventeen.
When it came to storytelling, my mother said that I had Pappa’s skills, the same capacity to fabricate truths for survival when needed.
It wasn’t a compliment, but it was how I managed to bring her to Jeddah a year after Pappa died. (“Yes, sir. Labor visa, sir. Arabic? Of course I know Arabic. Bad accent? Sorry, sir. What to do? I’m Indian, no? But don’t worry, I will learn fast-fast.”) It was also how I later got a job at the Lahm b’Ajin deli and cheese shop in Aziziyah. (“Of course I’ve seen that machine before! And I’m a quick learner.”)
It wasn’t difficult lying about my age. Twenty-one, I told the labor agents, even though I was eighteen. I was taller than most boys my age, and big-boned like my father. After scraping a thousand rupees together, I managed to get a new birth certificate from the chawl near our old Mumbai apartment building where, for the right price, you could buy everything from fake report cards to real Beretta handguns.
Porus Dumasia. S/o Neville and Arnavaz Dumasia. Born June 21, 1993, at the Parsi General Hospital. June 21 was the longest day of the year, Pappa had told me. It was also the first day of summer, a good day for new beginnings, I’d thought when I asked the forger to write it down.
There were times, however, when stories came alive. When someone who you thought you’d never see again stepped back into your world and knocked the wind out of you—the way Zarin Wadia did to me in the deli in Jeddah a few weeks after I began to work there, her face so familiar that I accidentally tripped over my own feet, my rear slamming hard against the freshly mopped tiles.
For a moment, I sat on the floor, staring at her startled face. The short black hair that curled in waves around her head. The sharp, angled brows over her brown eyes. The tiny birthmark, perfectly placed, right above her soft pink lips.
It was the birthmark that tipped me off, and that look in her eyes—part wildcat, part startled doe. It was the same look she gave me when I first clambered up the sagging wooden stairs of Building Number 4 in Cama colony and stood next to her, waiting, curious about the cute girl with the funny haircut.
Twelve years had passed since then and the haircut was still the same. The girl, however, had morphed, might have stepped out of my favorite story in Pappa’s old copy of Classic Persian Myths, her heart-shaped face and delicate curves reminding me of the fair, dark-haired Armenian princess Shirin.
“Porus!” my boss yelled. “What happened to you, boy?”
“S-sorry, sir.” Heat rushed to my ears and I scrambled to my feet. “I … fell down.”
By the time I got up, however, she was gone. I shook my head, wondering if my work combined with the Saudi heat was simply making me hallucinate.
But a week later, I saw her at the store again, this time accompanied by her aunt and uncle, who I recognized from my years at the colony. To my surprise, Rustom Wadia, who might only have patted my head in passing when Pappa was still alive, came up to the counter and started talking to me in Gujarati. “So you’re the Parsi old Hamza was telling me about!” He glanced at the new name tag on my apron. “Dumasia, Dumasia … You wouldn’t happen to know Neville Dumasia, would you? From Cama colony?”
“He was my father,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, Mr. Wadia, but we used to stay in the building across from yours. My mother, Arnavaz, used to give Gujarati tuitions over there.”
“Call me Rusi Uncle, my boy. Or just Rusi, if you feel like it. I’m not so old yet.”
For the first time in months I felt my mouth curve into a genuine smile. “Okay, Rusi Uncle.”
“What a small world we live in! Yes, yes, of course I remember you. In fact, I should have seen it earlier; you look so much like your father, young man. Khorshed? Khorshed, come here. Arrey, where has that woman gone to?” he said, waving over his wife, who was standing next to Zarin by the meat-chopping counter in the middle of the store.
“It’s a wonder,” Rusi Uncle said after he’d made the introductions—or, rather, reintroductions. “Khorshed and I hardly know any Parsis here in Jeddah, you know. So when Hamza told me that he’d hired you to work here, we decided that we had to meet you.”
As we continued talking, I found myself glancing at Zarin from time to time, hoping for a hint of recognition, a sign acknowledging our accidental meeting the week before. Earlier, when her uncle had introduced her to me, she’d simply given me a stiff nod, ignoring the hand I held out to shake hers. She probably didn’t even remember who I was. And why would she? Even back then, despite the teasing, I’d known several boys in the colony who had crushes on her. It was partly why they teased her so much. I was one among many.
Now she was staring at the floor, sliding a well-worn sneaker across the speckled tiles. Had it been another girl, I would have taken the hint and given up. But a part of me—a stubborn part that Mamma accused me of inheriting from my father—still remembered the old Zarin. The one who would peek out her window and then slip back into hiding when she caught a glimpse of me. Za
rin of the cautious smiles and shy waves. Someone I considered a friend even though we hadn’t talked.
Or maybe it was the way her curls looked in the light, black and shiny; the way she exhaled and glanced up at the ceiling, her lips parted in a sigh. Clearly there was something about this girl that short-circuited the rational parts of my brain, that addled me enough to say what I said next.
“You know”—I directed the comment to Rusi Uncle again, but kept my eyes on her—“when I saw Zarin at the shop last week I thought I was in a dream. She looks exactly like Shirin from the great love story by Nizami, you know. For a moment I thought I was staring at a painting.”
Zarin finally looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. When I first saw you, I thought I was staring at Bakasura. Without the giant mustache and the big teeth.”
I felt my face go warm.
“Stop being so rude, dear.” Rusi Uncle’s voice was pleasant, but there were tight lines around his mouth and his face had turned red. Zarin did not seem to notice. While her uncle studied the blocks of cheeses and meats in the glass display case and asked me a few questions about the products, Zarin looked around at the people in the store, the men in particular, as if she was looking for someone, or maybe even daydreaming.
Zarin’s aunt, who was small and insectlike in her movements, did not participate in any of the conversation either. She, too, watched the men, her eyes magnified to giant proportions by her bifocals, ready with a glare for anyone who seemed to reciprocate her niece’s interest. Anyone, it seemed, except for me.
Moments later, Zarin let out a sigh and turned back to me, the only male in the shop her aunt had not deemed worthy of her notice: “Do you have a car?”
* * *
The car was a story in itself. A ’98 Nissan station wagon in green, the muffler gone, rust blistering the left back passenger door. “Not very good,” the man I bought it from said. “But the price is superb, ya habibi! You will not get a better car than this!”
A few days after I got it, which was a few days after I’d first met Zarin, I drove up to a small four-story apartment building in Aziziyah with black-and-gold grilles over the windows. I looked at the address Rusi Uncle had scribbled down for me on a piece of paper, making sure it was the right one. “Please do come over, my boy,” he had said with a smile. “Both Khorshed and I think that it will be good for Zarin to have a Parsi friend.”
As I pulled into an empty parking space, a face peeped out from behind the curtain of a ground-floor window. Moments later Zarin emerged, a scarf carelessly wrapped around her head, her abaya unbuttoned at the front, flying open like a cape, revealing a pair of baggy blue jeans and a checkered shirt that could have been a boy’s.
Another set of eyes appeared at the window behind Zarin, the large glasses glinting in the afternoon sunlight. I straightened and waved. “Hello, Aunty, how are you?”
But Zarin’s aunt did not reply. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard me. Her gaze was trained on us both, but mostly on Zarin, and after a few seconds I lowered my hand, feeling awkward.
Zarin, on the other hand, gave no indication of seeing her aunt or my feeble attempt at common courtesy. “A bloody khatara,” she called my car. “This car is as old as I am!”
“Good. I was going to name her after you,” I said, stroking the bumper lovingly, pleased to see the alarm that flashed across Zarin’s face.
Then she laughed. “You were nicer when we were kids.”
“So were you.” It was the first time she had acknowledged that we knew each other. I couldn’t help grinning.
“Why? Because I kept my mouth shut?” She laughed again.
She had a nice laugh, I thought. It brought out the warmth in her face and a sparkle in her eyes.
“Can we go for a drive?” she asked.
I glanced at the window again. The curtain had fallen back in place, but I thought I could see a shadow behind it, waiting.
I hesitated. “But Zarin, your aunt … How can I … without…?”
“You mean, go in to ask for her permission like a good Parsi boy?” she asked sarcastically. “Don’t worry. If she wanted to interrogate you, I wouldn’t be standing here next to your car. Even she knows you’re not my type.”
I was tempted to ask Zarin what exactly her type was. Instead I simply sighed and opened the front passenger door. “Make sure you wear your seat belt.”
“Okay,” Zarin said the moment she sat down. “I think I was impaled by a spring.”
“Im-what?”
“Impaled. You know, skewered like a shish kebab?”
I frowned. I was eighteen years old, two years older than this girl, but her English was, I suspected, already at college level, certainly beyond the reach of my Gujarati-medium understanding. “Your English is too high for me. Will you please speak in Gujarati like any normal Parsi girl?”
“I’m not entirely Parsi. I’m half Hindu too. Or that’s what my aunt keeps saying. It’s a surprise they even let me into the fire temple when I go to Mumbai. I think it’s probably because the priest’s wife used to like my mother and feels sorry for me.”
“Do you always talk like this with everyone?” I asked after a pause, and then realized that she probably did. There was a recklessness about her that reminded me of acrobats in a circus I’d once seen, a trapeze artist leaping high in the air without a net.
She raised an eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to tell your dear Rusi Uncle?”
I felt my ears going red. Saying nothing, I decided to change the subject by turning on the ignition and reversing back onto the road.
Zarin reached out a hand to turn on the AC. I caught hold of her wrist. “No. It will overheat the engine. It will be better if you roll down the window. Also, the radio drains the battery.”
She pried my fingers off. “Okay. Got it. No need to get touchy-feely.”
For a moment I kept driving. Next to me, she whistled. Some English song, probably. A tune I did not know.
Do you have a boyfriend? I wanted to ask her. Instead, what came out of my mouth was: “You go to school, right?”
“Qala Academy.”
“How was your day?”
“Boring.”
“Why?”
“What why? School’s school. Boring.”
“So nothing happened? Nothing at all?”
“Well, I got caught smoking on the terrace. Thank God it was only our English teacher. She loves me because I’m so good at the subject. I sobbed a little bit and she promised not to tell anyone. Just got away with a scolding.”
The car jerked to a stop at the signal. “You smoke?”
She smirked. A patch of light slanted across her face, shimmered lightly on her pink lips. “She sounded scandalized too. She’d never seen me smoking before this.”
I glanced at my own reflection in the rearview mirror—my hooked nose, my sweaty forehead, my thick, hairy eyebrows. From this angle I almost looked like a tough guy. Or maybe a demon from Hindu mythology. It was probably the reason Zarin had called me Bakasura in the first place. I wondered if she would be impressed if I told her about the time my friends and I had smoked a beedi outside our school in Mumbai, though I would have had to leave out the parts about how disgusting I found the cheap hand-rolled cigarette and how upset Mamma had been when she smelled the smoke on my clothes, making me promise never to do it again.
“When did you start smoking?” I asked instead.
“When I was fourteen,” Zarin said. “I used to skip classes sometimes and go up to the academy roof and climb the ladder to sit on the water tank with my bag.”
She smiled slightly, a real one, I noticed. “It’s quite nice in the afternoons, especially on the breezy days. You can see the whole school from up there, and the grounds. Sometimes in the afternoon, if you time it right, you can even hear the prayers from the mosque. Anyway, there was this girl called Asfiya there too, one of the seniors. She was the one who gave me my first cig. Most of the time, though,
I sat with her for the company. It made me think I wasn’t quite as alone.”
She uncrossed her legs and placed her feet on the floor. The silence between us stretched and I began to get the feeling that she had grown a little uncomfortable after making that revelation. I wanted to take Zarin to the Al-Hamra Corniche—the fancier part of the city, with giant malls, hotels, and restaurants, where at night you could see the Jeddah Fountain: a white jet of water against the black sky. But being around Zarin made me so nervous that I was sure I would forget where I was going. So instead of turning onto Palestine Street like I’d originally planned, I cut into a familiar inner lane behind Madinah Road, sticking to the comfort of one of the few areas I knew well thanks to having lived there for about a month now. There weren’t any malls in this area, but the apartment buildings were clean and well maintained. Instinctively, I took the route back to my house and parked across the street, in my usual spot, under a bent palm tree.
“That’s where I live.” I pointed out a small brown building. “Right over the barbershop sign.”
Zarin leaned forward. She wasn’t looking at the building. Her eyes were peering into the distance, as if she was remembering something she had forgotten. “Isn’t this the area of the old Hanoody warehouse?”
I frowned, trying to remember. The Arabic signs in Jeddah were still a challenge for me, but I knew most buildings in my area.
“There is some sort of warehouse a few kilometers away from here,” I said. “But I think it’s abandoned. No one goes there.”
Now, this wasn’t exactly true. There were times when I would see a car parked there, a group of guys leaning against the doors and talking. Sometimes there would be a single car with no passengers in sight. I felt strangely uncomfortable thinking about the warehouse, even more so because of the gleam that had come into Zarin’s eyes when she heard me talk about it.
A Girl Like That Page 10
