A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “Khorshed has told me a few things about this girl,” Mamma told me. “About her misbehavior at school and at home. She doesn’t think twice about the things she does. She doesn’t care about the people around her; she’s so rude, even to her own masi and masa.”

  “They are not always kind to her,” I argued, remembering the bruises I had seen on her arm. “It’s not … things are not always what they seem.”

  My mother looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were sad. “Porus, you are so much like your father. Always giving people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Please listen to what I’m saying. Think long and hard before you get too involved with this girl.”

  Yet, when it came to Zarin, anything that resembled thought always went out the window. There was something about her that instinctively drew me, that I could not explain to myself, let alone to my mother.

  The nights I couldn’t sleep, I took to sneaking out and driving around aimlessly—something that was easier to do in Jeddah than it was in Mumbai, where many of the roads were narrow and poorly lit. In Jeddah, streetlights burned like fireflies, following me everywhere from the dazzling glamor of Palestine Street to quiet residential lanes. I could pretend I was with Pappa, showing him the city the way Zarin had showed it to me, pointing out landmarks that flashed by between palm trees, joking about how lucky I was that the gas here was cheaper than drinking water.

  Once, on a whim, I even drove to Aziziyah and parked across the street near Zarin’s small, four-story apartment building, a few feet behind the municipal garbage bin. A gibbous moon hung in the sky and for several moments I sat in silence, mesmerized, until a pair of cats leaped out of the garbage bin, their screeches piercing the air.

  I jerked upright, heart pounding. Lights glared down at me, reflecting in the hood of my car. They made me realize suddenly how bright everything was—how easy it would be for anyone to look outside and catch me lurking. If Zarin saw me now, she would probably call me a stalker. Or maybe even a roadside Romeo, the way the boys at the deli did whenever they caught me staring at her. I was about to drive off again when a shadow appeared at the ground-floor window of Zarin’s apartment, followed by the brush of a pale hand against the grille. “I get nightmares,” Zarin had told me. “Sometimes I think it’s better if I don’t sleep.”

  I wondered if it was her now, if she would turn around and catch me watching her. But she never did. Seconds later, the hand disappeared and the shadow went back to bed.

  A GIRL LIKE ANY OTHER

  Zarin

  There were different kinds of love, Porus said. The kind that struck you instantaneously—“Lust at first sight!” I interrupted—and the kind that grew with time—“Desperation!”—which was what he hoped would happen between him and me.

  “It doesn’t work that way, Zarin,” he said irritably. “Falling in love does not mean you’re desperate.”

  “Of course it does!” I countered. “There’s no other way I would fall in love with you.”

  Pain flashed in his eyes, as quick as liquid, and then was gone with a blink. My own smart mouth didn’t surprise me. It was the regret that came with using it on Porus that did. I was never known for censoring myself when talking to anyone, especially not the boys I went out with. But saying something intentionally (mostly unintentionally) cruel to Porus always made me feel guilty. Any other boy would have left by now.

  To my surprise, apart from the few rare occasions when he revealed his pain, Porus generally laughed at me. Tohfani, he called me in Gujarati. Tempestuous.

  It was an apt description. If I was like a tempest, then Porus was like a rock, solid and unflappable. And, as bad as this sounded, each time he laughed at my cruelty, I couldn’t help but test his limits, see how much he could take before snapping back.

  “Do you ever get angry?” I asked him one day at the deli, though my tone was more curious than taunting. “I mean, don’t you want to bash in someone’s head at times?”

  “Yours, you mean?” His lips curved up into a small smile—the kind he sometimes flashed at giddy female customers. I was annoyed to feel my heart skip a beat.

  “You don’t want to see me angry, Zarin,” he said. “I have a really bad temper.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said with a snort, even though I sometimes wondered if he was telling the truth, if his biceps were really as rock hard as they had felt when my fingers had accidentally brushed against them that one time in his car.

  I could have, perhaps, ignored my irritation over Porus’s Gandhian temperament or unexpected charisma. But somehow he’d also penetrated the barriers Masa and Masi had set up for me as a girl. “Such a decent boy!” Masa called him, and this annoyed me the most. Masi also approved of Porus, though I knew this had less to do with decency and more to do with the fact that Porus was Parsi—a pure Parsi born of two Parsi parents—which automatically made him 99 percent better than any other guy who liked her half-Hindu niece.

  “Our people are our people,” I would often hear her tell Persis. “If there were some nice Parsi families—some nice Parsi boys—around here, I would not feel so anxious about her.”

  As hypocritical as I found them both over this idea, I couldn’t really complain about it. Being with Porus was one of the few ways I could leave the house without having to sneak out, and sometimes he even acted as a cover for my dates with Abdullah, though he didn’t like that.

  Porus had penetrated some of my barriers too. Unlike Abdullah, Porus was easy to talk to about Mumbai and being Parsi. I didn’t have to think twice before switching from English to Gujarati when I spoke with Porus; didn’t have to figure out ways to explain a joke about Masi humming during prayers or the eccentricities of the Dog Lady at Cama colony. I didn’t even mind it when Porus texted me a cheesy picture and quote that said Keep Calm and Love a Parsi. (Even though, for the sake of appearances, I texted back, “You wish.”)

  There was wonder in Porus’s eyes about everything Jeddah. And, if I was honest, everything me. He asked me questions ranging from what book I’d take with me if I was stranded on a desert island to what I thought about women not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. I’d never talked like this with a boy before. Not even Abdullah.

  Though I had initially enjoyed the lack of personal conversation on my dates with Abdullah, nowadays it left me feeling a little bored, as it left us very little to do except eat, smoke, or kiss. There were times when we would drive past the familiar palm tree engraving and WELCOME TO JEDDAH sign near the arch on Madinah Road and I would remember Porus and his comment about how he’d never seen so many date palms in one place. Abdullah would ask why I was smiling and I’d say “No reason,” which made me feel incredibly guilty.

  But Abdullah never seemed to notice how distracted I was, often brushing aside any attempts at conversation with a hard kiss on my mouth. Slowly but surely, he tried to take things further than kissing, inching his hand up my thigh or my torso, always getting pissed off when I stopped him from unbuttoning the hooks on the back of my kameez or pulling down the elastic of my salwar.

  The Thursday before, we’d had our biggest fight about the subject.

  “Since when did you turn into a prude?” he’d asked me. “Boyfriends and girlfriends do these things. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Maybe—if you’re in America,” I pointed out. “I told you I’m not ready yet, Abdullah. I mean, we’ve only been dating for a couple of months.”

  Abdullah snorted. “Give me a break, Zarin. It’s that deli boy, isn’t it? You have the hots for him now.”

  “Porus is my friend. He knows I’m with you.”

  “Yeah, well, if that’s the case, I really don’t know what your problem is.”

  I didn’t know either. As much as I liked kissing Abdullah, the idea of having sex with him made me uneasy, felt wrong on some level. It was something I could barely explain to myself, let alone to a boy who worked off his sexual frustration by callin
g me a tease and then giving me the silent treatment for the entire twenty-minute drive back to my apartment building.

  With Porus, everything was different. For one: he was my friend, not my boyfriend. Two: despite his annoying comments about how he was going to win me over, I knew he would never really pressure me into doing anything. There was something about Porus, a kindness in his eyes, maybe, or that goofy smile of his that made me instinctively feel safe around him. His curiosity was endless, his questions moving randomly from one subject to another, making me talk and talk and talk until I blurted out things I had never meant to in the first place.

  “Do you want me to talk to Rusi Uncle?” Porus had asked one day, and pointed toward a new bruise on my arm. “Maybe if I told him, he would stop it.”

  I’d vehemently shaken my head. Masi’s “anxiety issues,” as Masa called them, often took precedence over whatever she did to me, though I didn’t tell this to Porus.

  “Please, dikra,” Masa would plead whenever I told him. “Please try to be patient with her.”

  Masa, who would lose his own patience whenever I said that Masi simply used her illness as a shield for her mean behavior. Who had never seen the calculating look in her eyes when she’d smacked her head the day Fali died.

  “It’s nothing,” I had snapped at Porus. “People beat their kids all the time. Even our teachers beat us at school.” The week before, I’d seen our Physics teacher twisting some hapless Class VI girl’s ear for wearing the wrong-colored shoes to the school assembly. “It isn’t anything new. I’m not a weakling, Porus. I can handle it.”

  “You’re not weak if you talk to someone about your abuse. Beating children is wrong. My father always said so. He never beat me, and neither did my mother.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.” I’d forced myself to look away from his penetrating stare. “I’m not like you, you know. I’m not a nice person.”

  Even Porus’s mother knew this. I’d overheard Masi talking to her plenty of times about my bad behavior when she visited our apartment. “What to do, Arnavaz? Children these days! They never listen.”

  Once, I overheard the two of them discussing my mother: “I don’t even want to talk about the things they called her,” Masi told Arnavaz Aunty. “The things they said behind her back. When our grandfather died, Dina didn’t want anyone’s help. She got up one day, went off to the cabaret bar near the chawl, and got a job there. She said that it was for me. For her little sister.

  “But no one cared about that. In this world, no one cares if you are starving to death. No one even looks at you. They only care when you start doing things they don’t approve of—like dancing with your clothes off. Zarin doesn’t understand this. She thinks I am ungrateful. She calls me a hypocrite. She is so much like Dina in that way that it terrifies me.”

  There were times when I wondered if Porus would have been better suited to living with Masa and Masi than I was—if he could have been that steady, patient child Masa always longed for.

  “Love is the answer,” Porus told me, when I asked him once. “Love is always the answer when things go wrong.”

  * * *

  A day later Farhan Rizvi’s sister, Asma, used a similar phrase during the Class XI English debate at Qala Academy, before she began waxing poetic about an eye for an eye making the whole world blind—and about how women who were victims of domestic abuse should not retaliate with deadly violence against their aggressors.

  “There are other things that women have to often think of,” Asma announced, her cheeks turning pink, the way they always did when she spoke in public. “Their children, for instance. What example does it set for the child if both parents are violent? Who will teach the child right from wrong? Also, who is to say that the husband isn’t capable of change?”

  I watched the judges sitting at a table in front of the stage, strained expressions on their faces. There were two from the boys’ section, and two from the girls’. I recognized our headmistress in her long Pakistani-style salwar-kameez and our English teacher, Khan Madam, who was wearing her usual sari and white cardigan, her hennaed hair vivid in the bright lights of the auditorium. Her eyes met mine, the skin around them ringed brown. She gave me a slight smile and looked away.

  One afternoon when I’d gone to see her in the staff room for a book, the sleeve of her sweater had slipped a bit and I’d seen a mark on her arm that looked a lot like a bruise. The mark had made something inside me tighten and for a brief moment I wanted to show her my own bruises—the scar on my knee that looked like a crater, the brown patch on my left arm from the time Masi had hit it with a hot spoon. We are alike, you and I, I wanted to say. But then Khan Madam had looked up into my eyes and asked, “Is something the matter?” and the moment passed. “No, ma’am,” I’d replied. How could she help me, this woman who could not help herself? I’d walked away, pretending I had seen nothing.

  Mishal Al-Abdulaziz sat across from me, with the team arguing against the topic. Over the past month or so, I had caught her and Layla watching me from time to time and giving me dirty looks. Earlier in the week, they’d been sneering at me, at one point pausing in midconversation to burst into laughter. While it wasn’t uncommon for either Mishal or Layla to do such things, ever since my fight with Abdullah I couldn’t help wondering if they somehow knew about it, even though my mind told me I was being paranoid. Abdullah did not discuss me with his sister, I reminded myself. “If I told Mishal anything, it would spread over the whole school,” he’d told me once. “Don’t worry. I would never tell her anything about us.”

  At the moment, however, Mishal wasn’t watching me. She was calmly making notes in her book, probably for the rebuttal. Or maybe it was an intimidation tactic for the opposition. Already I could see the way it was affecting the others on my team: Alisha Babu, who was calmer than any other girl I knew, was making notes like a maniac, copying down Asma’s speech word for word.

  But I kept only one ear on Asma’s argument. I could already tell it wouldn’t be any good from the vague way she had begun. I allowed my mind to wander for a while. To Abdullah, first. The puzzling discomfort that always seemed to accompany any thoughts of having sex with him. The anger he displayed now—more and more frequently. I thought of Porus. How strange that a boy so burly could be hurt with a few chosen words. Then, out of the blue, I thought of Farhan Rizvi. A boy I’d seen only from a distance. A boy whose pictures I sometimes studied in my bedroom after my fights with Abdullah, wondering, imagining what it would have been like if he’d seen me smile at him two years before.

  Alisha’s elbow nudged mine. “Your turn!” she said.

  He vanished into the lights and a hundred faces were staring at me then—girls from classes IX, X, and XI forced out of their classes into the ground-floor auditorium used for indoor sports and exhibitions, girls shutting their eyes, scribbling notes to each other, girls bored out of their minds over a debate they’d probably expected to be more exciting considering the topic: “Is it permissible for victims of domestic abuse to retaliate with deadly violence or other illegal action?”

  I hastily got to my feet, leaving the papers behind. I placed my hands on both sides of the podium and looked the audience right in the eye: “Should women who are victims of domestic abuse respond by any means possible? Even if it includes deadly violence? Is violence right or morally permissible? Is the case as simple as saying ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’?” I paused, waiting for the silence to spread around the room, a tactic I’d seen the headmistress use when she gave her speeches.

  “Is it as simple as turning the other cheek and hoping the husband will suddenly remember the love he once had for his wife—as Ms. Rizvi suggested? Or will it simply mean another visit to the hospital, as it was for Savitri Sharma in Amritsar, Punjab? A woman who was placed in intensive care for severe burns because she didn’t bring her husband’s family the car they wanted as part of her dowry? Or will the case be that of Megan Forester in Colum
bus, Ohio, whose husband held their daughter at gunpoint so Megan would not leave him? What if these women had reacted differently? What if they had fought back? In self-defense?”

  I looked at the judges again to gauge their reactions. Instead of looking disinterested and bored, the male judges were listening closely to what I had to say. Our headmistress was smiling and nodding her head. Only Khan Madam looked pale and uneasy.

  “Seema Rao in Mumbai did this in 2013. She hit her husband on the head with a cricket bat before he sliced into her with a knife. It was later discovered that her husband was mentally ill. With her quick actions, she managed to save herself and her husband. The judge assigned to the case found her actions justified even though under normal circumstances they would be illegal.”

  Little witch, Masi had called me when she first smelled the cigarettes on me when I was in Class X. I could still remember the pinch of her nails, the burn of the hot spoon on my skin, her scream in my ear when I brought my foot down in retaliation, crushing her toes with the heel of my shoe. It was the only time I’d ever fought back physically. She had never tried that on me again.

  “When we talk about violence, we do not always talk about death,” I said. “Sometimes violence can mean the difference between life and death. The difference between waiting for someone’s help and continuing to suffer abuse, and helping yourself when you most need it. Even the law recognizes this idea of self-preservation. In Seema Rao’s case, the Mumbai High Court judge defined it as the absolute right of human beings to protect themselves from harm—with violence, if necessary.”

  I paused and looked around the quiet auditorium. “When I went through these cases for my research, I came across so many instances when the victim of the abuse said ‘I wish I’d done something.’ Or ‘I wish I hadn’t been so scared.’ And you know what? I wish they had as well. I wish they hadn’t been scared and that they had tried to fight back. Because maybe if they had, they would have found that the law was on their side.