A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  My gut told me that the bad stuff had already happened, even though a week later Zarin told me she didn’t think anything had.

  “What do you mean you don’t think anything happened?”

  “Nothing that matters, okay?” she snarled. Her eyes were red and there were smudges under them. “I’m not exactly experienced in these matters, but I do believe there is supposed to be blood if something did. And there wasn’t.” Her hands shook in the split second before she fisted them. “No blood, no bruising. So you’re not saying a word. Not to anyone!”

  “You can’t let him get away with this,” I said, forcing myself to keep my voice low. “You need to tell someone.”

  “Tell who? Masi, who will probably kill me? Or the courts over here, who most definitely will? Who do you think they’ll believe when an expensive defense lawyer is involved?”

  She was right, of course. Reporting the assault here in Saudi Arabia was out of the question. Even in India, society did not look kindly upon girls who made such reports. I had read about the cases in the newspapers, watched them play out on TV. Your daughter is intact, no? the police would ask the father. Then I suggest you don’t press charges, sir. It will bring your daughter unnecessary publicity and can even ruin the boy’s future.

  A plate of Britannia’s hard, rectangular glucose biscuits lay before us along with two steaming cups of tea. I felt Khorshed Aunty pause behind us for a second, then retreat toward the kitchen.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” I said after a pause. It would be trademark Zarin to avoid seeking help and try to handle everything on her own. “You know I wouldn’t judge you, right?”

  She stared at me, the faintest trace of her old sarcastic smile crossing her lips. “You are usually the one person I find it very difficult to lie to. Strangely enough. Maybe it’s because you never tell anything to anyone. You didn’t even tell them who I was with, right? You wouldn’t even tell your mother. But you don’t really believe me.”

  “I never said that.” My voice didn’t sound convincing, even to me. I took a bite of the biscuit; it felt like sandpaper in my mouth.

  Zarin dunked her own biscuit into a cup of tea, over and over, until the tough crumb weakened, hanging limp, brown and mushy.

  “I dream of my mother at night. Sometimes a man. Sometimes there’s blood and my mother is lying in a pool of it and I’m lying with her and the man stands over us, laughing. I see faces swimming over me. Faces around the man. Masa. Masi. You. I call your names and reach out for your faces. They disappear. I wake up screaming. Well, not always screaming. But it happened yesterday. Masa said I used to do that when I was a small girl. He says I need to see a doctor.” She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a gasp. “I bet he means a gynecologist.”

  The lump of biscuit fell into the tea and dispersed.

  “Don’t you think you should go see a doctor after what hap—”

  “I’ve told you time and again, nothing happened. Nothing, okay?” She was livid, hysterical. “You can tell everyone else that too!”

  I said nothing. I examined the knuckles on my left hand, fisting it so they grew pale, the skin on a couple peeled off, exposing the flesh, the scars on them barely healed.

  It was luck, I wanted to tell her. Dumb luck that I’d thought of the warehouse—that I’d even known about it—when her aunt called me. Luck that I’d seen her with Rizvi a week earlier. Luck that she was here, sitting next to me, instead of lying broken in a ditch somewhere.

  Her aunt came rushing out of the kitchen. “What is it? What happened?”

  Zarin didn’t look at either of us. She took a deep breath and suddenly the anger went out of me. She dipped the rest of her biscuit into the mushy tea and let it fall. “Nothing. Just catching up over tea.”

  Her aunt’s lips trembled and then she opened her mouth as if to say something. Then her mouth closed once more. “Drink it then,” she said abruptly. “It will get cold. And Porus, I want you leaving at six sharp. She has studies to do.”

  “Yes, Khorshed Aunty.”

  “She treats me like an untouchable.” Zarin spoke again once her aunt had retreated, this time careful to keep her voice soft. “Places a tray of food six feet away from where I am. She doesn’t force me to sit with them at the dining table anymore either. If I do, they don’t talk. It’s sickening. I feel like those girls segregated in a separate corner of the house when they’re on their period. It’s like I’m perpetually bleeding.”

  I shifted on the sofa. “Maybe I should get going and let you study.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. No one even asked you to chauffeur me around either, you know.”

  “Your uncle did. When he has important stuff at work. You know this, Zarin.”

  The call had come unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. “I don’t have a choice in this,” Rusi Uncle had said in a voice that sounded years older. “They are being difficult at the office. You know what they’re like, Porus, these Arabs. And I don’t trust anyone else. Please, dikra. Please help us out.”

  “You didn’t have to say yes, did you?” Zarin asked now, almost as if she had read my mind.

  No, I thought. I didn’t have to say yes. Part of me longed to get up and leave the way I’d said I would. But somehow I couldn’t.

  “At school, girls call me so many things,” Zarin said after a pause, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to herself. “They think I’m not listening, but I am. All the time.”

  I placed my half-eaten biscuit back in the saucer. “It doesn’t matter what they say.”

  “Oh no, of course it doesn’t. I’m supposed to be used to it by now, isn’t that it?” She laughed that strange laugh once more.

  “I am not meaning it that way.”

  “‘I am not meaning it that way,’” she mimicked, exaggerating my Gujarati accent, her every word a bite.

  We both grew silent after that, not speaking for several minutes. The clock in the living room struck six. I sipped my barely touched tea. Cold.

  “I need to get going now. I have work.” I spoke in Gujarati this time, not trusting myself to speak in English.

  “Fine. Go, then.”

  When I glanced back one last time, she was breaking biscuits into pieces, smaller and smaller, crushing so hard that the crumb finally turned to powder and slid through her fingers like sand.

  SHAME

  Mishal

  The story came out in bits and pieces, first over the phone, during a conversation between Abdullah and some guy named Bilal.

  “Really.” Abdullah sounded fascinated. “He told me he did her. Not once, but thrice. Nice and tight, she was, he said.”

  “Nah. We got drunk last night and the truth came out. He couldn’t even get it up. Then his bad luck turned real bad. That girl’s Romeo came along and started screaming and beat the crap out of him.”

  “What? What Romeo?”

  “That deli boy. You know, the one with the junkyard of a car?”

  “So that’s how Farhan got his nose broken.” Abdullah laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world. “He told me he fell in the shower.”

  “Yeah. A shame really, for Farhan miyan. A thousand riyals down the drain.”

  At school, other rumors were afloat, most of them bearing the headline “Zarin Wadia’s Historical Breakup with Farhan Rizvi.”

  “Did those cigarettes fry her brain cells?” Chandni Chillarwalla shook her head. “Farhan Rizvi. God, if he so much as looked at me, I would die of happiness. To have him and then dump him?”

  “Good from far, far from good,” Alisha Babu retorted. “I thought it was brilliant. I mean, what’s the big deal about Rizvi anyway? Sure he’s athletic and everything, but there are better-looking guys out there. And his eyes are so creepy, almost yellow like a cat’s!”

  The dumping rumors didn’t really sit well with me, especially since Zarin did nothing to confirm or refute them. After t
hat dramatic confrontation with Rizvi outside the auditorium, she had grown silent. For days, she sat in her corner seat in the back row of the classroom, saying nothing, looking pale. It was only when someone asked her a question that her old arrogance returned—the “Mind your own business” response that made everyone believe that yes, it was quite likely that Zarin Wadia was the only girl in Qala Academy capable of hooking and then breaking the heart of the school heartthrob.

  “You should have seen it,” Layla said, repeating the story of the confrontation to those who did not know. “He was waiting outside the exam hall for Asma after our mocks. When Zarin came out, he tried talking to her. Said, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ She got this disgusted look on her face. Like he was a statue some bird had pooped on in the garden. Then she suddenly dug into her bag and pulled out a pair of knitting needles. I thought she was going to poke his eyes out or something, she looked so furious!”

  “Do you think they did it?”

  Which was really the question most hotly debated among the girls in our batch. The segment who called Zarin a delinquent thought it was quite likely she was no longer a virgin. Another segment, led by Alisha, who had turned into a Zarin Wadia fan girl ever since Zarin had won the Best Speaker award at the debate, called their arguments illogical and antifeminist. “You do realize,” she told me, “that if Zarin was a boy, no one would be questioning her purity or lack of it. How does one determine virginity anyway? Hymens can break in other ways too.”

  “Now that sounds gross!”

  “This is a sign of qayamat. We are going to burn in hell.”

  “Stop being silly,” Alisha said. “I’m sure the Lord has better things to do than condemn a group of girls discussing their own bodies to hellfire.”

  “But think about it,” someone else argued. “We are young now and most of us have committed sins that may be small, but as the days go on, our sins pile up, don’t they? When you face God on judgment day, what are you going to tell Him? How will you account for your misdeeds?”

  I glanced at Zarin’s empty desk. Marked absent from school for the second time that week for unexplained reasons.

  “What do you think?” Layla asked me. “About her and head boy Rizvi?”

  “You mean if they did it? Who knows?” I shrugged. “With her reputation, anything is possible.”

  I didn’t tell them that BlueNiqab’s Tumblr inbox was inundated with asks and fan mail, different details, sent in by different people:

  did u kno abt da warehouse on madinah rd? I bet dats where he tuk her.

  A source told me they were doing drugs, Blue! Rizvi was at a house party the night before … at a Saudi prince’s house. Things got pretty wild, if you get my drift.

  A lot of it was nonsense, of course. I was pretty sure Rizvi didn’t know anyone in the Saudi royal family, even though his dad did have a good job at the Interior Ministry. Someone (probably a guy) sent in a terribly photoshopped image of Zarin’s and Rizvi’s faces pasted onto the naked bodies of a man and woman having sex. After examining the disgusting image closely, I deleted it and blocked the sender. I might not have liked Zarin or Rizvi, but even I had my limits.

  Traffic on my blog was heavier than it had been during the days of the Nadia Durrani fight, the gossip about Zarin and Rizvi being repeated at school through different sources.

  “You know there was this other girl in the twelfth two years ago,” Layla said a few days later. “She began complaining of stomach cramps. They hurt her so bad that the teacher had to make her lie down on a row of chairs at the back. Then she was absent for a long, long time. No one knew what happened. Then last year, I found out that she had an abortion in India. She was absent like Zarin. One day, two days a week. No one thought much of it initially.”

  At some point, the teachers got wind of the tale—at least some version of it. That much was evident from the sudden lectures our Math teacher would launch into in the middle of Algebra, discussing the ills of girls who could not keep their eyes lowered when they passed a group of boys.

  “A good girl? A good girl, my children, will look straight ahead and keep walking. A bad girl, on the other hand…” He walked the length of the classroom and then turned, though never looking at any girl in particular, not even at Zarin, whose face was studiously bent over her textbook. “She will look back.”

  Our Physics teacher started out by giving Zarin the cold shoulder at first, completely ignoring her requests to go to the bathroom, and then picking her to answer every possible question she could think of from our textbook.

  “Fool!” she would shout when Zarin gave a wrong answer. “This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to your studies!”

  Beside me, Layla and a few other girls hid smiles behind their hands.

  It was only during English and Phys Ed that Zarin found any kind of relief. Khan Madam practiced her usual brand of favoritism by behaving as if nothing was out of the ordinary, even though she had scolded Layla and me many times in the past for inattention in the classroom.

  The Phys Ed teacher barely noticed Zarin except to give her permission to sit out the games when Zarin made an excuse about being on her period one week and having stomach flu the next. The teacher went around in her usual salwar-kameez and sneakers, blowing her whistle at the rest of us, while Zarin simply sat on the stairs and watched.

  * * *

  Zarin did not take the school bus anymore. Instead, her uncle drove her to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon. Sometimes, a new boy came in his stead; the girls had grown used to seeing his battered green station wagon waiting at the pickup/drop-off point behind some of the better cars there, including Farhan Rizvi’s BMW.

  “Who’s the guy?” Alisha asked Zarin once, about the boy.

  “His name is Porus.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  For a second I thought Zarin’s eyes appeared watery, but then she blinked and I realized it was a reflection of the fluorescent light overhead. She tilted her head sideways and smiled. “Who do you think he is?”

  The rumors, if there had been any hope of them dying out before, continued, evolving again to include this new character in the equation. Zarin and Porus, Porus and Zarin.

  Someone sent me a grainy shot of them sitting in Porus’s car with the caption Latest Gossip, which was a little silly, because neither of them was hiding their relationship. He picked her up from school, for God’s sake. In front of everyone.

  “He’s hot, isn’t he?” I heard some of my classmates giggling. “Very macho.”

  Apparently, several others thought the same. I often saw a group of seniors standing by his car, openly appraising him, sometimes even shooting him wide, flirty smiles. Though Porus wasn’t traditionally handsome, I could see why he would be appealing to these girls. The stocky build. The scowling eyebrows. The way his face softened when he looked at Zarin, like he had eyes only for her.

  “I would love to have someone look at me like that.” I could see the hearts forming over Alisha’s head. “It makes me feel warm and giddy inside.”

  “Ugh!” Layla made a face. “Seriously, get a grip on yourself. Did you get a look at his eyebrows?”

  I tuned out the argument. It wouldn’t be the first one I had heard when it came to the topic of Zarin and her new boyfriend. Every other day different voices rose. Fingers stabbed the air. No one seemed to notice or care about the circles around Zarin’s eyes. No one commented on the way Porus watched her when he dropped her off and picked her up; how he sat, straight-backed and stiff; how he always seemed to park as far away from Rizvi’s car as he could.

  Mother always said that of her two children, I was the one with the instincts, the one who knew when something was off, the one who sensed danger.

  Abdullah may have made fun of me wanting to be a psychologist, but he didn’t know that I noticed everything: from the tapping of his fingers when he was nervous to the inward movement of his Adam’s apple when something shocke
d him. He did both when I told him the rumors about Zarin and Porus.

  “Wow.” A muscle in his cheek twitched. He turned up the television again and leaned back against the sofa. “She sure moves fast, doesn’t she? Then again, why am I not surprised?”

  It was the first time he’d even spoken about her since their breakup, the only hint he gave of knowing her in any way. After the rumors about her dumping Rizvi broke out, he mostly stayed confined in his room, huddled in front of the computer typing project reports or e-mails, chatting late into the night with “a friend” on Skype, he told me. To my surprise, he also began to grow a beard. As religious as Abdullah had always pretended to be in front of our father, this was a new step for him. A serious step, I realized, when he occasionally began to invite some of the boys from his Qur’an Studies class to our house.

  On the surface, he seemed indifferent—almost bored—with the things that were happening to his ex-girlfriend, except for the time when he’d openly scorned Rizvi’s erectile dysfunction in front of Bilal.

  But I knew this was not entirely true. While his friends constantly rehashed the incident when they came over to our house, Abdullah remained silent, rarely adding to the conversation, sometimes even growing impatient—“Do you guys have nothing better to talk about?”

  I posted tips, answered asks, even made a few jokes about Zarin and Rizvi and Porus on my blog. But there were times when I wondered why I didn’t enjoy the gossip this time around, why, instead of settling inside me with a warm sense of contentment, it simply made me feel uneasy. Though Abdullah never gave any input about Zarin and refused to participate in anything related to Rizvi’s attempts to get back at her—“I have better things to do”—I couldn’t help wondering if he had known or maybe guessed that something like this would happen if Zarin and Rizvi ever went out. If his lack of involvement in the matter was simply a way of taking revenge on her for breaking up with him.