“Thank you.”
I sat down next to my teammates again, my face flushed, my heart racing, the applause ringing in my ears. Alisha gripped my wrist. “You got the most claps so far! Khan Madam looked like she was about to cry. The opposition doesn’t stand a chance!”
But I wasn’t too sure. Over the years, I’d learned not to underestimate the tall girl who now stood from her chair and made her way to the podium.
Mishal mimicked my posture at the stand, placing her hands on both sides. “My partner has already discussed the moral issues pertaining to retaliating with violence in a violent situation. So I will not go into that. I will address the legal issues pertaining to the topic. Or self-defense, as Ms. Wadia calls it. Yet is self-defense so easy to prove in a court of law? The first question a lawyer will ask you is: Why not a divorce? The law allows a woman to escape the abuse of a violent spouse. We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore. What is the need to retaliate with violence? Why risk a jail sentence or the loss of one’s children in a custody battle? Yes, the law may permit you to defend yourself—but the burden of proving yourself innocent in such scenarios may be much harder than the burden of being a divorced woman.”
My teammates scribbled furiously, some arguments about women having little to no choice in countries like Saudi Arabia, etc., etc., but I could already see that Mishal’s argument had changed things around, knitting everything that her team members had said earlier into something more structured, cohesive. They would be winning the team trophy, no matter what we said during rebuttals; I was quite sure of that.
Ten minutes later, after Mishal and I faced off again in one-minute comebacks, my prediction proved right.
“The winning team,” our headmistress announced, “is the Against team, led by Mishal Al-Abdulaziz!”
Alisha hung her head. “Who cares?” I whispered in her ear. “It’s a silly debate.”
A lie. I’d worked hard on this debate. Harder than anything I’d ever worked on in school.
“Now, choosing the best speaker was a bit difficult,” the headmistress continued when the applause died down. “There were two contenders—one from each team—both so good they could end up pursuing legal careers in the future.” She smiled. “But there is a winner. By one mark: Zarin Wadia from the For team! Mishal Al-Abdulaziz was a very close—”
Her voice was drowned by the applause that broke out for me, which was much louder than that for the winning team. The audience had spoken, and it was clear which side they’d supported. “We should’ve won,” my teammates whispered to one another, their voices full of angry triumph. “See?”
What I saw was the look on Mishal’s face. She was smiling, but it was a smile of disappointment and for a moment I felt sorry for her, having felt that same dejection seconds before, when my team lost. She was the only one onstage who didn’t congratulate me, but I didn’t realize that until much later, when I boarded the school bus to head back home. I looked at my reflection in the window—my eyes were brighter than usual and my face still held the afterglow of victory. I grinned to myself, teeth flashing bright, and for a second I wasn’t the Zarin Wadia everyone knew, but a girl, a normal schoolgirl who had won something and was proud of it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I grew aware of someone else watching me. I turned warily. It was a boy wearing sunglasses, leaning against the door of a black car, a BMW. His head was tilted sideways and he had a slight smile on his face. Under normal circumstances, I would have raised an eyebrow or even smiled back. But this was Farhan Rizvi. And he was openly checking me out. Heat rose to my cheeks and again, for the second time in my life, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do.
I didn’t have the time to do much anyway. A moment later, Asma came racing out of the gateway, scattering girls left and right, her abaya flying, a small gold trophy clutched in her hand. She gave her brother a high five and then brandished the little gold cup.
I won. I could read her lips. I won, Farhan-bhai.
I turned away from both of them and focused on the seat in front of me—the maroon leather discolored to a fleshy pink by the sun, the white thread holding it together unraveling, exposing yellow sponge. I plucked at a thread curling up into the air, dug my nails into the soft leather. I took a deep breath and willed myself to calm down. I examined my trophy again—a small silver-and-gold cup with Best Speaker engraved on the front.
When I looked up, I saw Mishal standing at her usual place at the front of the bus. She was staring at me with an odd smile on her face, one I couldn’t quite understand.
“Congrats!” I called out, raising a hand, not realizing at first that it was the one that held the trophy. Mishal’s face hardened and she sat down without saying thanks. Obviously she thought I was making fun of her. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I should approach and tell her that it had been unintentional.
“Okay, girls, settle down!” the bus driver called from the front. I would apologize afterward, I told myself. But somehow I knew it was too late. The moment was already gone. I turned off the knob of the air conditioner overhead and closed my eyes, giving in fully to the afternoon heat and the headache that now seemed to press on me from all sides.
* * *
The next morning, Mishal approached me a few minutes into break.
“Hey, Zarin. Can I talk to you for a bit?” She slid into the empty chair next to mine.
I closed my book. “Hi. Sure.” I hesitated for a brief moment. “By the way, I didn’t mean … I wasn’t rubbing it in your face yesterday when I said ‘congrats,’ you know. I meant it. You did a good job in the debate.”
Mishal’s eyes narrowed for a split second, as if surprised. Then she shook her head. Smiled, even. “That’s okay. You win some, you lose some, I guess.”
“Right.”
There was an awkward silence. “You wanted to—”
“Look.” Mishal leaned in to keep our conversation private. “I know you’re going out with Abdullah.” A small shock went through me, but Mishal kept going, placing a hand over my arm. “I don’t really care about that, okay? It doesn’t really matter to me who he messes around with in his spare time.”
“As it shouldn’t,” I said calmly. I should have known this was too good to be true.
“You should hear the things he says about you.” She laughed, her pretty face glowing even more than usual. “Let’s see. He called you a tease, didn’t he? Oh yes, I can see from your face that he did. He was telling his friends about it this weekend.”
She went on to tell me the other names Abdullah called me. Some so awful that they were unforgivable.
The things they called her, Masi had said about my mother. The things they said behind her back.
The smile Mishal gave me was almost gentle. She rose to her feet again. “Anyway, I wanted to say congrats too,” she said in a clear voice. “You did a good job at the debate, even if you were a little emotional.”
Mishal
It didn’t surprise me when Zarin phoned Abdullah that evening to confront him about the things I’d said. What did surprise me was that she did not give him my name—like it didn’t even matter that her only source of information against her boyfriend was a girl who hated her in school.
Luck favored me even more when Abdullah did not choose to deny her allegations. I bit my lip to hold back a laugh. Though I was no longer afraid of being the target of my brother’s wrath, the less he knew about my involvement in this, the better. As far as Abdullah was concerned, I was clueless about his “secret relationship” with Zarin, even though it was thanks to me that their relationship was still secret from the rest of the school. I rolled my eyes as my brother’s voice rose in pitch and volume.
In any case, what I’d done didn’t really matter. From the sound of their conversation—if you could call a five-minute insult fest a conversation—it seemed that the relationship had already been a little rocky and a breakup would have been inevitable at some point. Zarin probably th
ought the same thing, especially when Abdullah lost his temper and said: “Who told you? Was it one of my friends? Are you screwing one of them now?”
I carefully switched the cordless phone I was using to eavesdrop on their conversation from my right ear to the left.
Not now, I thought, mentally answering my brother’s question. But if the way she and Rizvi had looked at each other after the debate yesterday was any indication, it would happen fairly soon.
Rizvi had stared at her so hard I thought his eyes would pop right out of his shades. It was also clear that Zarin was not unaffected. I had watched the slow drop of her smile when she realized Rizvi was watching. The nervous way she bit her lip. How quickly she’d turned around after Asma burst through the gates, her cheeks flushed pink. In that moment, she wasn’t the Zarin Wadia I knew, but a girl like any other in the face of a crush: insecure, tongue-tied, and shy.
“Don’t bother calling me again,” Zarin told Abdullah before hanging up.
I waited for Abdullah to slam the receiver on his end before clicking off the phone and placing it back in its cradle. I thought back to the insults Abdullah had thrown my way over the years. Crybaby. Twit. Blabbermouth. Fool. I muffled my laughter in my pillow. Who is the fool, Abdullah? I wanted to ask him. Who is the fool now?
When I finally ventured out of my room, I found Abdullah stretched out on the living room sofa, his bare feet resting on the coffee table, the television switched on, but muted.
“What happened?” I asked. “I heard you yelling on the phone.”
He shrugged. “I broke up with this girl I was seeing.”
I sat down next to Abdullah. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked softly.
“She knew I was talking to my friends about her. That I called her … some terrible things.” His swallow was audible in the silence. “Don’t even know how she found out—she wouldn’t tell me.”
Heat rose to my cheeks at this statement, but thankfully Abdullah didn’t seem to notice.
“It doesn’t matter,” he was saying. “It’s not like I said anything behind her back that I didn’t say to her face.” Abdullah let out a bitter laugh. “I thought I’d finally found someone who was different from everyone else. A girl who didn’t need to yak the whole time, someone I thought I actually liked. But she was like every other girl I know—luring me with her body for free food and cigarettes.”
I frowned. Abdullah’s words did not surprise me. But the pain in his voice did—a pain I had last seen the day Father married Jawahir, when my brother and I were still children. I studied his glassy eyes, the straight nose, so much like our mother’s, the cleft in his chin that I used to poke as a little girl, wondering if it was the indent of someone’s finger. My heart swelled uncomfortably and I began to wonder if I had done the right thing.
Then I shook my head. It didn’t matter, I reminded myself. It didn’t matter how much Abdullah liked Zarin. Father would never have allowed Abdullah to marry a non-Muslim. In fact, it was better that they broke up now, rather than later. Who knew what Abdullah would have done if they’d grown closer, if they’d fallen in love? They might have eloped, even run away for good, leaving me alone in Jeddah—with our vacant mother in this big house, at the mercy of Father and Jawahir. My stomach clenched at the thought. As bad as my relationship with Abdullah could be at times, I knew that when it came down to it, he would never let anyone harm me or our mother. He was the only person Father talked to these days, the one who kept Jawahir’s visits to our house to a bare minimum, the one who still, somehow, held our dysfunctional family in place.
“You’re probably better off without her,” I said after a pause. “I mean, sometimes bad things happen for a good reason, right?”
Abdullah stared at me for a moment. There was a strange expression on his face—anger, mingled with sadness.
“I’m going to go take a shower,” he said abruptly. “You better check on Mother to see if she’ll come downstairs for dinner.”
As a child, a bee had once landed on my finger. In those days, I had not known enough to be scared of it. I’d studied its elliptical insect body, the black and yellow stripes on its back, its small translucent wings, and listened to the soft humming noise it made. When I’d reached out to touch it, it reacted predictably, rising into the air with an angry buzz, leaving me with a stinging boil on my hand—and a sense of confusion mingled with inexplicable loss.
That evening, when Abdullah walked away from me, I felt the same way—as if I’d come close to seeing something strange and incredible, only to have it slip away before I could fully grasp it.
* * *
Instead of updating BlueNiqab with the news of my brother’s epic breakup with Zarin, I went over to Mother’s room.
“Ummi?” I gently knocked on the door. “Ummi, it’s me. I know you don’t like being disturbed, but I … I need to talk.”
On the other side of the door, I could hear the faint, familiar strains of a sitar. On her good days, Mother played sarangi music by Ustad Sultan Khan. Flute compositions by Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. Even some old Bollywood semiclassical pieces by singer Lata Mangeshkar. On her bad days, though, it was always maestro Ravi Shankar. Ravi Shankar and his sitar.
My hand curled into a fist. Silence. Withdrawal. Sudden switches from relatively calm to very sad. I knew the symptoms. I’d googled them a year earlier, along with the cures for clinical depression.
I slammed my fist against the door. It rattled in the frame. The music stopped.
“I need to talk to you,” I told the door loudly. “I really need to talk to you, but you’re not here. You never are. I mean, it was one thing when Abu left us for Jawahir, but did you have to abandon us too? Do you know Abdullah and I barely talk now? That Abu and Jawahir are talking about marrying me off to the first guy they find?
“You … you make me so angry, Ummi! It’s like you’ve completely forgotten you have kids of your own. Neither Abdullah nor I exist for you anymore. And I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for it.”
That night, my mother played no more music. And it was only as I was falling asleep that I began to wonder why.
Porus
Till Zarin, I had, for the most part, known enough about what I needed to say to be considered reasonably charming around women. In the business of selling meat and cheese at the deli shop, I had to keep my wits about me. “The woman may be your customer,” my boss told me, “but you cannot let that intimidate you. You must always be in charge.”
In charge, like some of the men I worked with—men like Hamza himself, who unloaded twenty-kilo bags of meat and cheese off the truck with the green-and-yellow Lahm b’Ajin logo without gritting their teeth or squinting their eyes. Men who could curse at each other and then smile and charm at the counter, selling our customers (mainly women) sliced beef and turkey, blocks of jibneh, akkawi, and shanklish cheese rings covered with zaatar and pine nuts. “Peppered salami with that, sayeedati?” “Smoked turkey? Of course.” “You are French, no?”
“You cannot be charming with everyone though,” my boss had cautioned. “Some women do not like you smiling at them. Some women want you to be polite and courteous and not look into their faces directly, even if they are covered with a niqab.”
I practiced that same courtesy on Zarin the week after she won that debate of hers—though not exactly for the same reasons: never looking at her in the face directly, while she smoked four Marlboros in my car within half an hour. I knew that if I did look at her directly, she would simply bat her eyelashes and I would foolishly end up giving her whatever she wanted—in this case, more cigarettes.
“No,” I said when she held out her hand for the fifth one. “You’ve had enough.”
“Another!”
“I said no, na?”
“‘I said no, na?’” she mimicked, her voice high and whiny. “Stop being a muttawa, Porus. You know I’m stressed.”
Stress that may have been caused by anything, from something her
masi may have done at home to something that may have happened at her school. I knew she would not tell me about it right away, and by now I knew better than to ask her about it directly. Distraction, I had learned, was one way to get Zarin to start talking about herself—even a little bit—and so that’s what I began to do.
I began telling her about the great love story between Khusrow, Shirin, and Farhad—a tale that Pappa had told me so often when he was alive that it stayed in my mind, word for word, long after he died. The story, Pappa had told me, represented love in its many forms. Khusrow’s jealousy, Farhad’s passion, and Shirin’s confusion in choosing between the Sassanian king she was destined to marry, and the poor stonecutter who devoted his life to tunneling an entire passageway for her through an impenetrable mountain.
Zarin, as expected, did not seem that impressed. She called Khusrow a Peeping Tom: “What else do you call a man who stares at a woman from behind the bushes while she’s bathing?”
Farhad, on the other hand, was a fool. “So some old lady tells him that Shirin is dead and he kills himself because of it?” Zarin said.
“He loved her,” I said, willing her to see Farhad the way I saw him. “He spent years tunneling through the great mountain of Beysitoun so that two rivers joined and became one. He accepted Khusrow’s challenge and fulfilled it. He had even begun to win over Shirin’s heart with his devotion. Imagine what it must have made him feel like to hear that his love, his very reason for living, was gone?”
“Psh. I’m sure there were less tiring women out there. He should have spent his energy on them instead of some princess.”
“I don’t think it mattered to him that she was a princess. And maybe he wasn’t doing it for her. Maybe he was doing it to show Khusrow that even an ordinary man could do great things. That he could win over the heart of an unreachable woman by showing her his love and devotion and expecting nothing in return. Why else would Khusrow grow so jealous that he would send over that old woman to plant false rumors about Shirin’s death in Farhad’s ears? For Farhad, even an accidental glance from Shirin had been enough—a joy, a miracle. He proved how selfless love could be.”
A Girl Like That Page 13
