A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  She shook her head and laughed. “You are so cheesy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds cheesy or whatever, but you are undervaluing the strength of emotions. Farhad’s emotions gave him strength; he channeled them into great art.”

  “What was the point, though? His main goal was to get the girl, right? And he didn’t. He believed a howling old lady that Shirin was dead and cracked open his skull with a rock.” She waved her hand in the air and her mouth curved down. “What a waste of art.”

  “Love isn’t wasted, Zarin!”

  But I didn’t think she understood. To her, Romeo and Juliet, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad were myths—“people who did ridiculous things long ago and then died over it. In the name of love, of course.”

  I told her the story of my own parents—of how my father first met my mother and impressed her by racing after a pickpocket who had snatched her purse on Balaram Street. How Mamma spent day after day next to Pappa in the hospital when he was diagnosed with leukemia, how they prayed together every Friday to ease their troubles.

  “Oh, aren’t you lucky?” Zarin had responded, and then held out her hand again. “Cigarette, Porus. Please! I can feel the nicotine draining out of me as we speak.”

  The trouble with girls was that they never told you what they were thinking. In Zarin’s case, the truth often came out in roundabout ways, eked out in little statements and opinions, usually after she’d smoked a good number of cigarettes.

  Even then, when it came to her childhood, Zarin was pretty closed off. “My parents died and I came to live with my aunt and uncle. What else is there to tell?” she had remarked once. However, over the weeks, I learned to tell how angry Zarin was by the number of cigarettes she smoked. One meant Normal Zarin. Slightly calm, slightly grumpy. Two meant Annoyed. Three or more meant Really Annoyed or Going-to-Kill-You Annoyed and most times I didn’t even know which.

  “You have enough nicotine in your system.” I pulled out a can of Vimto from my bag and popped it open. “Here. Have this instead. And maybe, once you’re in a better mood, you will tell me why you’re acting crankier than usual.”

  Zarin sighed, but accepted the soda after a moment. She stared out the window—in the direction of an Arab family spread out on a mat under one of those abstract art sculptures that acted as landmarks at the Corniche and on Jeddah roads. Jeddah, with its giant globe and giant gold fist; with monuments of cars bursting out of a block of concrete and four hanging stained-glass lanterns that lit up at night in glowing colors. A city of sudden and surprising art, mostly abstract. Zarin’s favorite was a sculpture of a boat made with Arabic calligraphy.

  However, that day, I knew she wasn’t thinking about sculptures. “Come and pick me up after school,” she’d told me over the phone that morning. And, fool that I was, I didn’t even think of asking why, although I had to shuffle shifts at work, irritating Hamza so much that he threatened to cut my next paycheck.

  “Look, Zarin, you have to tell me what is wrong now. I am in trouble at work because of you.”

  “You were in trouble before that anyway.”

  She was referring to the time when a group of boys at the deli had stuck a note on my back with the Arabic word for dog written on it in bold letters.

  “Kalb.” Zarin had pulled off the note when she’d come to the deli for a pack of sliced turkey. “Kaaf, laam, and ba. See?”

  She had tried to teach me the Lahm b’Ajin logo as well—pillars of Arabic letters in green over a background of sunny yellow stitched onto the left pocket of my apron; letters, if one looked at them from a distance, that took on the shape of a farmhouse and a silo. “Laam, ha, meem, ba, ain, jeem, ya, noon,” Zarin had said. “Repeat after me; it’s not so hard.”

  The letters had swirled in my mind: the loops and slashes indecipherable from each other, joining to form meaningless squiggles. “I’m glad you told me what this means, Zarin, but I’m pretty sure it was a harmless prank. I don’t see why I have to learn this. What is the point?”

  “The point? Are you serious? The point is you have to know this stuff! Knowledge is power, Porus. You can control people if you know their language. You can shut them up. I can teach you some swear words too, you know.”

  She’d spewed out a series of words and phrases that made my ears heat up.

  “Thanks, but I don’t think my boss would like that very much.”

  “Oooooh, look at you blushing. Is it because I’m a girl?”

  Now, inside my car, she sipped a bit of the soda—so delicate and ladylike that I could almost believe she was one. “Besides, if you were in trouble at work, you shouldn’t have come. I didn’t force you. I could’ve called someone else.”

  Which was exactly what I was afraid of when it came to her: her absolute carelessness about who she went out with. Even when I told her about her GMC-driving boyfriend, about how I’d seen him hanging around Bilal, a boy with a reputation so bad that my boss had banned him from entering our store. “He’s a druggie,” I’d told her about Bilal. “He has some wasta high up with the authorities, which is why he hasn’t been arrested yet.”

  She looked at me now and somehow sensed what I was thinking. “Abdullah isn’t a druggie,” she insisted, referring to the GMC boy by name for the first time. “He smokes and he is a jerk, but he doesn’t do drugs. In any case, I broke up with him, so you shouldn’t really worry about it anymore.”

  On any other day, the news would have had me doing cartwheels. But there was a look on Zarin’s face that was so dejected it did little to lighten my heart. In the distance, the twin chimneys of the Jeddah desalination plant smoked plumes of gray into the orange sky. I stared out at them for a long moment, an odd prickling sensation at the back of my throat. “You broke up with him?” I asked finally. “When? I mean, what happened?”

  She shrugged. “We were fighting anyway and then I found out that he was talking smack about me behind my back. When I confronted him about it over the phone last week, he didn’t even try to deny it. Got flustered and started harping about how I was leading him on and how much money he’d already spent on me, like I owed him or something. The pig.”

  I said nothing. I had wondered for a long time if they’d gone further than kissing or touching, she and this Abdullah guy. Such things happened here, in hotel rooms, or in cars. “Fast-fast” the boys at the deli called those encounters. Even faster now with Skype and FaceTime added to the mix. “Boys and girls these days have no shame,” my boss lamented.

  More than that, though, I wondered if she had liked Abdullah. Loved him, even.

  “They don’t exist in real life,” Zarin said after a pause. “Guys like Shirin’s Farhad. Guys who do whatever they can unconditionally for some girl. Well, maybe your dad. But he was an exception. In real life, no guy would ever race after pickpockets, dig tunnels through mountains for a girl he barely knows. Heck, he wouldn’t even care if she was getting murdered. No one does anything in this world without some kind of expectation.”

  She rolled down the window farther and tossed the half-finished Vimto out of it. It hit the tarmac with a clang and then rolled across the concrete until it fell over the edge into the water, leaving behind a puddle of grape-colored liquid.

  It reminded me of the puddle in Mumbai two years before, that puddle of blood drying in the sun, turning black where the blood congealed. The mugger lying in it, his body broken and then curled like a question mark. I had been the one to deliver the punch that had burst his nose. It was the one time when I turned from ordinary sixteen-year-old Porus Dumasia to one of many in a full-on Mumbai mob.

  I had not known the mugger. Yet the man had been both no one to me and someone. A complete stranger. A representation of the man who’d accosted my parents on their way back home from the hospital the month before. Who’d demanded Pappa’s wallet from him and then sliced into him with a knife before he ripped my mother’s gold chain from her throat and kicked her in the ribs. “Chor!” someone had yelled from th
e crowd. “Chor!” I’d shouted with the rest of them.

  Thief. Thief. Beat. Beat.

  The rhythm gained momentum with every kick, every punch. A constable hovered at the sidelines, stick in hand, unsure about intervening at the risk of getting pummeled by our bare, bloody hands. Behind him, a traffic policeman continued working from his position, his shirt bright white in the sun, his whistle gleaming, cheeks puffed as he blew sharp toots and moved his hands, waving cars and mopeds along; for him it was just another day in Mumbai. They said it took two hours after the mob dispersed to move the body away, and that was because it was impeding the six o’clock office rush from walking along the road to return home.

  Now, two years later, I took a deep breath. “Maybe you’re right,” I told Zarin. “What Farhad felt for Shirin was rare. It does take a lot to get that kind of passion from a guy. It happens once in a lifetime maybe, such love. But…” I hesitated here, wondering if she would even believe me. “… even an ordinary guy can feel that way, Zarin. He may not dig through a mountain for you, but he will do other things. Little things like remembering your birthday, bringing you gifts for no reason, making sure you get the bigger half of a sandwich. It’s the little things that turn into big things, anyway. That can change someone absolutely ordinary into someone who you can one day love back.”

  She stared at me for a long moment. Later, I didn’t remember which one of us moved first. All I remembered was the feel of her lips settling on mine like a butterfly, my own pressing back in response. Her fingers brushed the hollow at the base of my throat and I wondered if she could feel how rapid my pulse was. I’d kissed a couple of girls in Mumbai, before Pappa’s cancer diagnosis, but I didn’t remember feeling like this.

  Unwilling to break the kiss, I shifted my mouth to breathe through my nostrils. Our teeth clicked gently. Zarin cradled my jaw with her hands, readjusting our misaligned mouths so quickly that in hindsight I was pretty sure it had been instinctive. I pulled her lower lip into my mouth and sucked carefully.

  Maybe that’s what scared her. Or maybe she heard something in the distance. The next thing I knew, she was pulling away from me, breathing hard.

  “That was a mistake,” she said quietly. “It can’t happen again.”

  “Zarin, please, don’t do this.”

  But instead of laughing at me or rolling her eyes, she gave me a sad smile. “That boy you were telling me about before. What if I can’t?”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Love him back.”

  The kiss and her subsequent rejection had frazzled me so much that it took me a moment to remember what she was referring to.

  I said nothing in response. The sun dipped into the ocean, staining the sky red. It would be time to take her home soon. Inside my throat was something that felt like a giant ball. I wondered if it was my heart.

  Farhan

  The girl’s scent was the first thing that hit me—a mix of flowers and sandalwood that cut through the milky smells of the dead skinned goats hanging from hooks in the corner of the Lahm b’Ajin deli shop on Aziziyah, over the heads of the uniformed men working at the counters—a smell that was fresh and gardenlike and female. It brushed past me along with the girl, her abaya sleeve accidentally slapping against my arm. She was wearing one of those abayas that had sequins and corded wire designs on the sleeves and the bottom, the kind that scraped my skin as she passed by, leaving behind a thin white scratch.

  She stormed into the store, ignoring the surprised looks she attracted from the people around her, ignoring everyone except for the tall boy who stood behind the glass display case in his white deli uniform and cap, and flashed him a small middle finger stained yellow with nicotine. If the perfume and her walk hadn’t caught my attention already, that definitely would have.

  “This is for being a busybody and following me to Durrat Al-Arus.” She rolled her finger back into a fist. “Have you heard of the MYOB concept, Porus? It means Mind Your Own Business.”

  “Good afternoon to you too,” the deli boy said, his voice as cold as the blocks of feta in the display case.

  I recognized him now. It was the new Indian they’d hired a few weeks before, the one with the fuzzy eyebrows and the funny name, the one who had thrown Bilal out of the store on the owner’s orders.

  “And I will not mind my own business,” the boy was telling her. “Not when you go around acting like a—”

  “Like a what? A man-izer? A slut?” Her laughter possessed the qualities of a newly cut glass pane: clean, crystalline, and sharp around the edges. “He was a guy, Porus. A guy I smoked with. We didn’t do anything!”

  Her abaya, unbuttoned at the front, was nearly slipping off her shoulders. Underneath, she wore white salwar bottoms and a navy-blue kameez with a Qala Academy logo embroidered in white on the front hip pocket. The flat, starched white dupatta was pinned at her shoulders and draped in a V across her chest in the standard schoolgirl style, stopping short of covering the tips of her small, firm breasts.

  The deli boy’s pale face reddened. “Now you listen to me…”

  Pathetic. I didn’t even have to listen to the guy to figure out the impression he was making on the girl; in spite of his six-foot height and muscle, you could see that he wasn’t the one who wore the pants in this relationship, if there was one.

  The girl’s fingers were pressed to the glass covering the cheese blocks. A narrow, untanned mark bounded her wrist, the imprint of a watch she hadn’t bothered to put on that morning. I stared at the creamy strip of skin, wondering if it was the same shade or even lighter in other areas untouched by sunlight.

  “May I help you?” the deli boy asked me, his scowl at odds with his polite salesman tone.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said without taking my eyes off the girl. She flashed a glance at me. Eyes dark and acidic. A face that, when I’d managed to get my eyes off her tight little body, looked strangely familiar.

  Then it hit me. It was the girl from the bus. The pretty one I’d locked eyes with before my sister came rushing toward me with her silly debate trophy. A girl who had seemed terribly shy then, but did not seem so shy now.

  I smiled.

  She raised an eyebrow and turned back to the deli boy. “Hurry up,” she said. “You know she’ll kill me if I’m late.”

  The boy gave her a tray of finely sliced turkey wrapped in plastic.

  I was supposed to pick up something similar for Ammi—slices of roast beef with peppercorn, I think she’d said—but who cared about that now?

  I stepped behind the girl, partly blocking her way as she turned to leave, and pulled out a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of my jeans. “Want a ride back home?”

  She frowned slightly.

  “You can’t ride with him!” the deli boy snapped. “You don’t even know him!”

  Her gaze moved from the cigarettes in my hand to Abba’s silver Rolex on my wrist to the muscles on my upper arm.

  “Good-bye, Porus.” She finally looked into my eyes. “I do know him.”

  “Really? Who is he?”

  She smiled at Porus and said, “Mr. MYOB.”

  * * *

  People called me a smooth talker ever since I was a boy. I could charm a smile out of the grouchiest old bag in the room if I put my mind to it; it was a trait I’d inherited from Abba, my mother said. My mother, who I’d always thought was clueless to my father’s screwing ways until the day I found her sitting alone in the living room, watching static on the TV.

  “Where’s Abba?” I’d asked.

  “Out,” Ammi said. “As always.”

  “On business again?” I had hesitated before asking the question. I knew Abba’s business trips had been done with the week before. He should’ve been home now. Unless …

  She’d let out a laugh. High and sharp. “Oh yes. Business.”

  Abdullah, the only one who knew about the situation, shrugged. “It is what it is, man. I mean, my dad has two wives and he pretends that one of them does
n’t exist. At least your dad still comes to see your mom and spends time with you and your sister.”

  And maybe Abdullah was right—to a point. While Abdullah’s mother had turned into a zombie after her husband’s second marriage, my mother carried on with life as always, never showing how it affected her, always sleeping with Abba in the same room, in the same bed where Abba had banged other women in the past.

  Asma and I were the ones Ammi focused on, Asma more than me, thankfully, being a girl. I was her show pony, the handsome son she liked to bring out to her friends whenever they came over to our house. Sometimes it would be the aunty with the bulldog face. Sometimes the other aunty, who was shyer and prettier and easier to charm. When Ammi asked me to come out and say hi, I knew my real job was to smile the way Abba did, to say things like: “Hello there, Aunty. How are you? Looking as beautiful as ever.”

  Then they would tell Ammi: “Oh yes, he looks so much like his father.” Or “Such a charming young man.”

  The aunties’ daughters were a different story. Ammi’s friends’ daughters were untouchable, no matter how hot—as I had learned through experience, when I’d started e-mailing Bulldog Aunty’s hot daughter in Class X. The stupid girl told her mother about it and Bulldog Aunty wanted to get us engaged. It ended quickly enough though. Ammi dismissed the proposal by saying I was too young to be committed—“They’re children! It’s much too soon. Let them be friends and write to each other and—”

  “Let them write to each other?” the aunty said, and for the first time I found her looking at me with an expression other than her usual such a good boy one. “What will people say about my daughter if they find out she’s been having friendships with boys? Girls from good families don’t do such things!”