A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  “They do not have Arabic accents,” Masi had pointed out. “They sound like they are Indian or Pakistani.” Like they were from my school, I could almost hear her hinting. As usual, Masa ignored her unspoken words.

  “Don’t reply, then! Do not engage them in conversation! How many times must I tell you this? The more you talk, the more you encourage them.”

  I, on the other hand, escaped to my bedroom the moment the phone rang, making no move to pick it up even when Masi ordered me to.

  The night I talked to Porus’s mother, I overheard Masi making a long-distance call to the Dog Lady from the master bedroom. I quietly picked up the extension in the hallway.

  “… sitting in her room every day after school doing God knows what. Rusi keeps telling me to give her space and time. But how much time can I give her?” I heard Masi saying. “Really, Persis, sometimes I think I’m going mad.”

  On the other end, I heard the Dog Lady let out a sigh. “I don’t want to say much, Khorshed, in case I’m wrong. Who knows, with young people these days? But whatever it is, she is still a girl and, more important, your girl. If anything bad happens, she can bring shame on your whole family. Remember that your names are attached to her now.”

  “What do I do, Persis?” Masi pleaded. “What can I do when no one tells me anything?”

  “Now, now, don’t worry, my dear child. There is a good and reasonable solution to this. She’s almost eighteen now, isn’t she? No? When—in two years? Well then, it’s about time you and Rusi start thinking of getting her married. What about that boy, Porus? You told me that he likes her.”

  “His mother would never approve of her,” Masi said, echoing my thoughts. “Besides, he is only eighteen and can barely support himself and his mother on his salary. How will he take on a wife?”

  There was a pause before the Dog Lady spoke again. “I wouldn’t normally suggest this, but there are quite a few men in our colony, even divorced men, who are looking for younger girls to marry.”

  Marriage. I imagined the word swirling around my aunt’s mind, sparking in corners and then settling within, warm and soothing, like the smell of butter and cumin in freshly cooked rice. After marriage, I would most likely have to go back to India. No one would mention my mother or my father again. Masa and Masi could continue to stay in Saudi if they wanted to, or even move to a different place, like Dubai.

  Neither Persis nor Masi said it, but it was understood: after marriage, I would be my husband’s problem, not Masi’s. Better if the man in question was fifteen or twenty years older and had a steady job.

  A sick feeling spread through me. I wanted it out of my skin. My cell phone vibrated in the pocket of my pajamas. I opened it to see a series of missed texts from Porus.

  i know what mamma did

  pls ignore her

  zarin r u there pls write when u get this

  My hands hovered over the keyboard, a hundred questions resting on my fingertips: What happened? Are you hurt? Who was it? Did it happen when you were at work?

  And on and on.

  But then I thought about what his mother had said to me and couldn’t help thinking she was right. No good had—or would—come to Porus from being around or engaging with the likes of me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and turned off the phone.

  * * *

  I woke up that night at around 10:30, stomach cramping, and stumbled into the bathroom to relieve myself. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I was tired. So tired.

  Voices buzzed in my brain.

  Stay away from him.

  … divorced men … looking for young girls to marry.

  He won’t even tell me what happened.

  I know this has something to do with you.

  When I rose to my feet again, white spots appeared before my eyes.

  The napkin I had used to wipe my hands was the first thing that fell to the floor. My body followed, head lurching forward, my cheek pressed against the cool bathroom tiles.

  * * *

  The colors at the Al-Warda Polyclinic in Aziziyah were sterile and functional. White walls, white tiles, white-coated doctors and nurses with white scarves marching the corridors and laughing, chatting in a mix of Malayalam, English, and Arabic.

  Their sounds drifted into Dr. Rensil Thomas’s office, where I was perched on the examination bench, which was covered with translucent white paper. My head still hurt from the fainting spell and I wondered if it was some delayed aftereffect of the drug Rizvi gave me, even though logic told me this was impossible.

  I could feel Masi’s gaze on me, so I kept mine lowered and stared at the waxed white floor. Tonight the office smelled like Dettol, cleaned minutes earlier, I guessed, by the clinic’s janitor, who now swept past the office, mop in hand.

  “Are you mad?” Masi had demanded when Masa suggested taking me to the clinic half an hour earlier. “What if that fool tells someone? His daughter goes to Zarin’s school, remember!”

  “Dr. Thomas is a professional,” Masa had said firmly. “He would never break doctor-patient confidentiality. And we have been going to him for years.”

  Dr. Thomas entered the room now and shut the door behind him. He had a round face, gray hair, and eyes that crinkled at the corners when he smiled. Masi claimed to never have liked him, but I always got the sense that her dislike stemmed from the way he had suggested counseling for her years earlier. “He thinks I’m mad!” she had raged. “He wants to have me locked up!”

  “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Wadia. How are you?” Dr. Thomas smiled at us. “Now where’s my favorite patient—ah, there you are!” I felt my shoulders relax at the sound of his voice, the South Indian accent I’d been familiar with since I was a child.

  “Let’s see here.” He studied my file. “Your uncle said you fainted in the bathroom? Has this been frequent?”

  I shook my head. “It happened tonight.”

  He went through a list of questions: “Vomiting? Nausea? Blood in the stool?”

  Then he put on his stethoscope. “What was the last thing you ate?”

  “Um. A bag of chips? At school?” After Porus’s mother called me, I’d pretty much lost my appetite. I had locked myself in my room, not bothering to step out. Masi didn’t come to fetch me for dinner either. The last thing I remembered was Masa wishing me good night through my closed bedroom door.

  “Well, your BP is normal,” Dr. Thomas said after taking my blood pressure. “You don’t have a temperature either. My guess is that you had a temporary drop in your blood sugar. This can happen when you haven’t eaten in a long time. You were probably also dehydrated, which is not uncommon in this country. Do you drink water regularly?”

  “Not as regularly as I should.”

  Dr. Thomas shook his head disapprovingly, but all I could feel was the relief flooding through my veins. It was only dehydration. And lack of food. “So I’m okay, then?”

  “You’re okay.” Dr. Thomas smiled at me, but there was a flicker of something else in his eyes—something that looked like worry. “You need to start eating again, young lady. And stay hydrated.”

  He turned to Masi. “Now, Mrs. Wadia, would you like to go and have a snack in our cafeteria with Zarin while I write out a prescription for some medication and send Mr. Wadia to the pharmacy? The Cafeteria is downstairs and to the left. Family entrance separate from the one for single men.”

  “No!” Masi snapped. “Whatever you need to say, you can say in front of me.”

  Dr. Thomas paused and glanced at Masa. He had been the one who had first observed the anxiety tapping out of Masi’s nervous laughs at her appointments, her constant state of alertness when she was around me.

  “Mr. Wadia.” The doctor hesitated. “My daughter goes to Zarin’s school, as you know. And over the past couple of weeks I’ve been … hearing things. You know kids these days, always on their phones, always reading things online.”

  I felt the blood drain from my cheeks. A face appeared in my head, watchful and quiet
, her long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Dr. Thomas’s daughter went to my school, was in my class. But I had never spoken to her. I wondered what had made her tell Dr. Thomas about me. Was it a fluke? Or was Masi right and Dr. Thomas wasn’t as professional as my uncle had claimed?

  “I would normally not suggest something like this,” Dr. Thomas went on, “but your family has been coming to see me for a long time and I was wondering if some of these stresses at school have been having an effect on Zarin’s health. If you wanted, I could refer her to someone, maybe a specialist who works with teenagers at Bugshan Hospital.”

  “Dr. Thomas, I—”

  “There is no need for that!” Masi rose to her feet. Her nails dug so hard into Masa’s arm, I was sure she would leave marks. “There is no need for anything of that sort. We will be leaving now.”

  Dr. Thomas stood and raised his hands, as if in supplication. “Please, Mrs. Wadia, I really think this is imp—”

  “You think everything is important.” Masi’s voice was rising now and her lips were slowly turning gray. She slapped away Masa’s hands from her shoulders. “No—don’t pull at me, Rusi. This man has done enough. Something happens to someone, immediately he says, ‘Oh, she is mad! Give her medicine.’ More medicine to make her more mad!”

  I felt myself freeze, hearing the faint plea of Masa’s voice through the rush of blood in my ears.

  A knock on the door and a nurse peeked in. “Doctor, is everything all right?”

  “No!” Masi shouted. “Nothing is!”

  The doctor dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief and stepped toward Masi. “It’s okay, sister, you may go. Everything is under control. Mrs. Wadia, I won’t call anyone; don’t worry. Please sit down. Please.”

  After several long moments, Masi finally sat down, her eyes darting here and there, as if looking for an escape from the eight-by-ten-foot examination room that suddenly felt ten times smaller than it was.

  Dr. Thomas sat down again and scribbled something on his prescription pad.

  “Here are some electrolytes. Mix them in water and have Zarin drink it. And please let me know if you need anything else.” He stared into my eyes as Masi finally allowed Masa to grip her hand again. “Anything.”

  * * *

  In the parking lot, the air was cool. Above us, the stars had been blotted out by clouds and city lights. The air was rich with the smell of earth, and a part of me wondered if it would rain the way it did during the winter. Hard and relentless, the water pooling on balconies, seeping into apartments, cars swimming through the streets like boats. Masa said that the reason Jeddah got flooded every time it rained was because of the poor drainage system. You could drown, I thought now, and no one would even notice.

  Outside the emergency entrance, behind the ambulance, two policemen sat in a green-and-white van, watching the paramedics load someone onto a rolling bed. A man was shouting at the medics: “Yallah! Yallah! Yallah!”

  Beside me, Masi was still breathing hard, her breath emerging in hisses. On her other side, I heard Masa, knew him by the quiet shuffle of his leather shoes on the tarmac.

  “Bloody pill pusher!” Masi let out a sudden laugh. “Look how he did soo-soo in his pants when I shouted at him. It’s like in India. You have to throw a few tantrums sometimes. Why are you looking at me like that, Rusi? I’m fine! And so is this one.”

  She glared at me. “Specialist, my foot. I am not mad and neither are you. Do you understand, Dina?”

  I heard ambulance sirens, the thocks of car doors opening and closing. One of the policemen had stepped out of the van and was watching us closely.

  “Khorshed dear, this is Zarin,” Masa whispered anxiously. I could tell that he had noticed the shurta, too. “Dina’s daughter. Dina died a long time ago, remember?”

  “She’s such a bad girl,” Masi sobbed, and I was no longer sure if she was talking about my mother or me. “I was so worried.”

  “Yes, she was very bad this week, weren’t you, Zarin?” Masa didn’t look at me. “Coming home late with Porus. Not eating her food properly. Worrying Masa-Masi for no reason.”

  When I was seven, I’d slipped on a patch of wet floor in Qala Academy, my body temporarily suspended in the air, my heart in my throat, pulsing, until I hit the hard tiles, the pain grounding me once more. That evening, I felt much the same as I stared at Masa, only this time there was nowhere to fall, not even the ground.

  “Yes.” Masa continued to speak, his voice nearly as soothing as Dr. Thomas’s as he gently ushered his wife into the car. His body was partly shadowed in the dim lighting, his face a half moon. “She was a bad girl. A bad, bad girl.”

  * * *

  It was Alisha Babu who first asked me about my absence. Her fancy blue-and-red class monitor badge was polished to a glistening sheen. “Are you okay?” she asked, approaching me in the corridor outside our classroom. “We missed you in class.”

  “Fine,” I said, unwilling to give any more information. I stared at the candle engraved in the badge’s center, the words Qala Academy circling it. “Was sick for a while.” And I would have remained sick had it not been for the oral part of my English exam, which had to take place today, an exam Masa had insisted I take.

  “I do not know what is wrong with you because you won’t tell me.” Masa’s voice had been curt, cold. “But I am not going to have you sitting around the house like this. You must go back to school. Get back into the routine of doing normal things.”

  I’d agreed because of how stressed Masa had looked. After she’d finally agreed to take the medicine Masa had given her, Masi had slept for nearly a whole day, her guttural snores breaking the silence inside the apartment. Masa, who had taken the day off work, had spent most of it in front of the television, staring at the blank screen. He did not speak to me, except to announce lunch and dinner and later in the evening to tell me that I was going back to school the next day.

  Alisha’s smile slipped off her face. “Luckily you didn’t miss much. They were revising old stuff for the last two days.”

  My fingers tightened into fists. “Good.”

  “Yeah.” There was a pause. “Zarin, I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She bit her lip and I knew then that this had been planned, that my classmates had probably recruited her to do the dirty work and ask the question no one else had bothered, or perhaps dared, to ask. “Those rumors.” Her voice was so soft that it was nearly breathless. “Are they really true?”

  Rumors scribbled on bathroom walls and social media feeds and forwarded repeatedly over e-mails. Rumors that had random boys calling me at home and sending me messages, filling up my inbox with lewd pictures and propositions. I was surprised they hadn’t discovered my cell number yet, but then I had never given the number to Rizvi and, for some reason, Abdullah had not leaked the information to his friends.

  “I don’t want to talk about this.” I tried to move around Alisha, but she held out an arm to stop me.

  “Please, Zarin. Some of us have been talking about this and we want to help you. We are really concerned about what is happening and—”

  “If you really were trying to help me, you would mind your business instead of discussing this nonsense over and over again,” I said sharply. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you gossiping with the rest of them and then going silent when I enter the classroom. You say you are concerned about me, but what you really want is fodder for your silly little debates with Layla and Mishal.”

  Alisha went pale. A shadow fell between us.

  “Leave it.” Layla put a hand on the other girl’s arm. She gave me a disgusted glance. “Leave her alone.”

  I watched them turn around and walk back into the classroom in silence. I did not feel guilty about speaking the way I had to Alisha, for piercing through her fake sympathy. At the end of the day, she was like the rest of them, digging around for a fresh piece of gossip.

  I could feel the other girls staring at me as I walked to my desk in the back.

/>   The legs of my chair scraped the floor. I was about to sit down when I heard a giggle. Instinctively I looked at the chair. Someone had made a crude drawing of a penis inches away from a girl’s mouth and taped it to the wooden seat. Hisses, muffled laughs when I ripped the picture off the chair and crumpled it into a ball, stuffing it into the deepest recesses of my bag.

  “What’s the joke?” the Math teacher roared from the front. “Behave yourself, Layla Sharif, or I will throw you out of this classroom!”

  I did not look at them. Instead, I opened my school planner and studied the words I’d scribbled last week—the topic Khan Madam had assigned us for our oral exams. It was a formal introduction that would have us speaking about ourselves for a minute or less—without the aid of a paper or cue cards—an exercise that Khan Madam said would be useful when we were older and giving job interviews. Be truthful about yourself and your accomplishments; do not make up stories, the instructions said. However, you may talk about something you wish to accomplish in your life and how you plan to go about the same.

  A simple assignment that on any other day I would have breezed through without any preparation. Now I struggled with it, writing out sentences, scratching them out, ignoring the Math teacher, who was going through the problems that had come up during the mock exams last week. By the time the bell rang for English period, I had a page full of black marks and the following words: Zarin Wadia. Age sixteen. Student. The truth, without any embellishments. The truth that I could bear to relay on paper.

  Khan Madam smiled when my turn came. “Okay, Zarin,” she said. “Time to tell the class a little bit about yourself.”

  I left the paper on the desk and slowly made my way to the front of the room. A trick to making speeches, Khan Madam had told us once, was to find your focal point. That one member in the audience who seemed to be listening—“sympathetically,” Khan Madam called it. A listener whose opinions were malleable, whose judgment could be persuaded to match yours. Today, however, the faces were blank and hostile, none of them standing out to me. Sympathy was out of the question.

  “My name is Zarin Wadia,” I said. “Who am I? Well, that’s an interesting question.”