A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  The air around me buzzed with electric warmth; I could hear the smile in his voice even though I could no longer see him.

  “When I was born, it was raining,” I said lightly. “Masi said my mother delivered me at home. Masi said she didn’t know if she was going to put me in a crib or choke me to death.”

  “Now you’re being facetious.”

  “Of course I am.”

  It was not what I’d imagined, this afterlife. Of all the things I could be doing after death—burning in hell, perhaps, or maybe doing hard labor in purgatory—I was here, hovering in some strange zone between life and death, over the scene of my own accident, talking to Porus the way I would have been at the mall or inside his car on a normal day. Since when had he become my constant—my anchor between life and death? But then, when had he not been my constant?

  I thought back to the time in the colony, his big, infectious smile, the blue Tendulkar jersey he always wore. I never knew, never imagined that I would strike up any kind of friendship with him, or that I would see him again in Jeddah. I was never a believer in destiny, but this felt a lot like it.

  “So I’m your destiny, huh?”

  I scowled. He was reading my thoughts again. “Stop that,” I said.

  But I didn’t mean it. And from the way he squeezed my hand, I could tell that he knew.

  “Have you ever been happy?” Porus asked. “I mean, really, Zarin. The way you talk, anyone would think you had the world’s worst childhood.”

  I sighed. “Fine, then. It was at school. The first time I played in the rain. I was seven. The playground had filled up with water. My feet were ankle deep in it and everyone around me was sailing paper boats. When I came back home, Masi was pouring out a bucket from the window. She was so busy doing that, she didn’t even yell at me for jumping around on the carpet and making those horrible squishing sounds.”

  He laughed and everything around me was suddenly more buoyant. My heart swelled with warmth. I felt his fingers loosen ever so slightly.

  “Pappa told me that he would be there when I died,” he told me. “Of course, when he said that he meant that I would be really old. He expected Mamma to be there with him too.”

  His pappa, who had always been there at his school functions, until the leukemia confined him to the hospital. His pappa, who had shown him that heaven was a ball of light rising from the sea. I wondered what kinds of creatures lived in those waters, if they truly were as colorful and winged as Porus’s father had said.

  Of course he would be here, Porus was thinking now. And the minute those thoughts came, panic set in. I tightened my grip on his arm.

  “Ouch!”

  “Sorry!” My fingers slid down his arm and linked with his hand once more. “I didn’t mean to grip so hard. But you were growing heavy again.”

  I could feel it around me, the weight of unspoken words and memories, anchoring us to the ground, to the wreck on the highway, which was now being cleared away by tow trucks.

  Then: “Zarin, I am going to try something, okay? Don’t be afraid.”

  His hand slid from my fingers.

  My heart dropped and so did I: a rock in the middle of a pond.

  “Porus!” I shouted, panicking. “Porus, what are you doing?” He caught hold of my wrist again and there I remained, bobbing on air, buoyed by his lightness, until he pulled me up again.

  “Good one.” I forced a laugh. “You had me there.”

  “It isn’t me, Zarin,” he said. “It’s you. You’re the one weighing us down.”

  “What do you mean, it’s me?” My heart felt as thin as a wire; any second now and I would be gasping for air. “It can’t be me. It’s you who’s doing all the thinking! Remembering those moments with your father.”

  He pulled me closer now, a gentle tug that drew me toward the warmth I’d felt when he first started talking about his father. “Which is what you must do too. You need to remember, Zarin. You need to remember everything and then let go of it. You must allow yourself to feel.”

  “What’s with the ‘letting go’ stuff? Did you turn into a Buddhist now?” My throat closed. “Besides, I don’t have many happy memories.”

  Porus closed his eyes. Even though we weren’t touching each other except with our hands, I could feel the brush of his lashes against my cheek, a moist warmth coating my eyeballs, like a pair of lids shutting over them. I closed my eyes as well. I saw his mother, sitting in her room in Jeddah, watching the cars go by on the road below, laughing when Porus clapped his hands over her eyes and said, “Guess who?” I felt the memory flow through my veins: cool and liquid, like saline through an IV.

  When I opened my eyes again, the scene beneath us seemed more distant, separated by a thin filament of cloud. The road was flowing with traffic once more, everyone we knew long gone.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?” he asked me. “Do you understand?”

  A shudder went through me. I closed my eyes. In the darkness, a shape slowly emerged. A woman sitting in the corner of a room, her bangles tinkling, singing softly: a moon-filled lullaby. A toddler brushed a tiny hand over her lips. She caught hold of it and kissed the palm.

  “Mother?” I found myself saying, and then grew embarrassed by the confusion and longing I heard in my own voice. “Was that my mother?”

  Was that me?

  Porus’s breath washed over my cheek. “Try,” he whispered. “Try again.”

  * * *

  A man with a mustache and a golden wristwatch tossed me high in the air. “Majhi mulgi,” my father called me in Marathi. My girl. Later, he raised his hand and brought it down on a dark-haired woman, cutting open her lip with the edge of his shiny gold watch. “You will not tell me to leave my job again, Dina!”

  A high priest in white robes tended to the holy fire in a fire temple, chanting verses of an old prayer, his face masked in white. The same priest, later during the day, telling Masi he could not officially induct me into the Zoroastrian faith. “Letting her come into the temple with you is one thing, Mrs. Wadia, but doing her navjote? I can’t. Not without a Parsi father.”

  A man with red lips and an orange shirt, stroking my hair. “Such pretty lips,” he told me. “Such pretty legs.” The dark-haired woman again—my mother, I realized—screaming at the man. “You may have been my husband’s best friend when he was alive, but if you touch my daughter again, I will kill you.”

  A woman dressed in a white sari, talking to an old lady with a dog in her arms. “Blood is blood, Khorshed, my dear. What is inside the blood does not change.” When I looked up from the book I was reading, they had turned away from me, their faces in shadow.

  The man with the red lips pulling out a revolver on a crowded street and pointing it at me. My mother pushing me aside. “Go, Zarin. Run.” Her gold bangle felt cool against my cheek. A gun slashed silver through the muggy air. A crack of sound. Blood burst out of her, warm and sticky on my lips.

  “What happened?” The woman who asked the question had a mole on her lip, exactly like the one on my mother’s. She stared at my blood-covered face and then looked back at the police officer. “What happened to my sister?”

  * * *

  When my mother died, our neighbor Mrs. D’Souza told me that she’d turned into a star—shining at night, I thought to myself years later, the way she always had in a Mumbai dance bar.

  I wondered now, as I hovered with Porus over the highway, if my mother too had floated over her own corpse, if she’d ever come by for a final glimpse of me.

  “Blood alone does not make someone your family,” I’d heard the Dog Lady saying to Masi once. “There are so many families out there—even in our Parsi community—looking for a child to adopt. No one would blame you, you know. No one would blame you for wanting to forget.”

  I imagined my aunt’s face. Her small, dark eyes under the large bifocals she always wore. Her face, bone thin and weary. Always so afraid.

  Maybe it would have been better for her to
forget. Better to have let go of me and started over the way the Dog Lady had suggested. To have made new memories and let the old, poisonous ones fade away.

  “I cannot,” Masi had explained to the Dog Lady. “Rusi is too fond of her. He will never let her go.”

  But there were times, even then, when I wondered if that was the complete truth. If there had been a little more than just anger in Masi’s tight grip on my wrist, in her constant watchfulness, her furious, sometimes venomous diatribes against my mother. Was it love? I wondered now. I did not know.

  I tried to peer overhead at the stars that I imagined were somewhere over the stratosphere, and felt something within me go out in a soft hush: the rustle of a hundred butterflies, the release of a long-held breath.

  A moment later, I felt the air beside me shift. “Do you remember the first time we saw each other?” Porus asked. “Not the very first time, but here. In Jeddah.”

  “You mean the second time,” I corrected him. The odd question, or perhaps the memory itself, made me smile. “You flashed your pearly whites at me and held out your hand to shake mine. I cringed and acted like you had bubonic plague.”

  “Now you’re gripping my hand so tight, it feels like you’ll never let go.”

  I said nothing. Maybe because somehow I sensed that I would eventually have to let go of him. The wistfulness in his voice told me that Porus knew this as well.

  “Do you think we’ll be reborn?” Porus asked me after a moment. “That we’ll see each other in some other lifetime?”

  The priest at our fire temple in Mumbai would have said no. Rebirth was a Hindu or Buddhist concept, not Zoroastrian. But who knew the truth? And I wasn’t fully Zoroastrian anyway.

  “Maybe we will.” The words lightened something within me, made me feel hopeful in spite of myself. I laughed. “Maybe I’ll even go out with you.”

  Actually, nix the maybes. We would come back, I decided. I would go out with him. If he still wanted me.

  I felt his warm laughter before I felt his lips. As soft as a breath. As deep as a promise. I had the oddest sensation of being in and out of my body at once, of hearing his thoughts, feeling his joy along with mine. I did not know what would happen after I let go of Porus or he of me. But for now I would not think of that. For now, I would hold on, cling to the flesh of his biceps, to the rounded curve of a kneecap, to the bits and pieces of the earthly bodies we had left behind.

  Glossary of Words and Phrases

  abaya (Arabic): black cloaklike garment worn by women in Saudi Arabia

  Ahura Mazda (Avestan): the creator of the world; God, according to Zoroastrian scriptures

  akhi (Arabic): my brother

  arrey (Gujarati/Hindi): oh dear

  as’salamu alaykum (Arabic, formal): peace be unto you

  Ashem Vohu (Avestan): Zoroastrian prayer

  attar (Arabic): perfume

  beedi (Hindi): cheap hand-rolled cigarette sold in India

  beta (Hindi): son

  bhai (Hindi): brother

  chor (Hindi): thief

  dhansak (Gujarati): Zoroastrian lentil stew

  dikra (Gujarati): child

  dupatta (Hindi): cloth used as a body or head covering; worn with the salwar-kameez

  Ey su che? (Gujarati): What is this?

  habibi (Arabic): literally translated as love or my love; used by friends or lovers or to casually address strangers of the same gender

  halala (Arabic): unit of the official currency of Saudi Arabia; one hundred halalas make up one Saudi riyal

  humata, hukta, huvareshta (Avestan): good thoughts, good words, good deeds

  inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un (Arabic): we surely belong to God, and to Him we shall return

  iqama (Arabic): Saudi Arabian residence permit or identity card

  isha (Arabic): the fifth of five daily prayers in Islam; prayed at night

  jaanu (Gujarati): an endearment meaning life

  Jummah (Arabic): Friday

  kabaadi (Hindi): person who buys used goods, usually clothes, in India

  kaka (Gujarati): paternal uncle

  kameez (Hindi): tunic

  Khallas! (Arabic): Enough!

  khatara (Hindi): broken-down vehicle

  khodai (Gujarati): God

  kusti (Gujarati): sacred woolen cord used in Zoroastrian prayers and worn around the waist, over a sudreh

  loban (Gujarati/Urdu/Arabic): frankincense rock, used in Zoroastrian prayers

  ma’salaama (Arabic): good-bye

  maghrib (Arabic): the fourth of five daily prayers in Islam; prayed at sunset

  Malayali: a person from the south Indian state of Kerala who speaks the Malayalam language

  malido (Gujarati): sweet pudding made of semolina, whole wheat flour, and nuts, used as an offering in Zoroastrian prayers

  masa (Gujarati): maternal uncle

  Masha’Allah (Arabic): an expression of joy or praise, literally translated as God has willed it

  mashrabiya (Arabic): bay window enclosed with carved wooden latticework, found in buildings in Old Jeddah and parts of the Arab world

  masi (Gujarati): maternal aunt

  masjid (Arabic): mosque

  miswak (Arabic): a teeth-cleaning twig, a traditional alternative to the modern toothbrush

  miyan (Urdu): a term of respect; could stand for sir or mister

  muezzin (Arabic): one who calls for prayers from a mosque

  Mumbaikar (Marathi): a resident of Mumbai

  muttawa (Arabic): religious policeman; plural: muttawe’en

  navjote (Gujarati): ceremony that initiates a child into the Zoroastrian faith

  niqab (Arabic): veil worn by women in the Arab world

  Parsi: a member of the Zoroastrian community in India

  qadi (Arabic): Islamic judge

  quayamat (Urdu): judgment day

  rava (Gujarati): semolina pudding

  riyal (Arabic): unit of the official currency of Saudi Arabia

  salah (Arabic): Muslim act of prayer, to be observed five times every day at prescribed times

  salwar (Hindi): pantaloons

  sayeedati (Arabic): lady

  shurta (Arabic): traffic police

  soo-soo (Hindi, slang): urine

  sudreh (Gujarati): sacred undershirt worn by Zoroastrians

  thob (Arabic): long garment worn by Saudi men and women

  walad (Arabic): boy

  wasta (Arabic): connections or influence (usually with the government)

  ya (Arabic): vocative particle, used to address a specific person; translated as “O!”

  Author’s Note

  The word Qala in Qala Academy comes from qala’t, which is Arabic for fortress or citadel. When I started writing this book, I intended to explore each room and corridor of this fictional world, and the Saudi Arabia I knew and grew up in. I did not realize how massive this undertaking would be, nor how often I would have to revisit my own past to make sense of my characters’ present.

  While all the major landmarks and districts in Jeddah are real and still exist, many of the locations mentioned in this novel are fictitious: (Jeddah: Qala Academy, Lahm b’Ajin deli, Al Hanoody Warehouse, Al-Warda Polyclinic; Mumbai: Cama Parsi Colony, Char Chaali). Any inaccuracies are entirely mine.

  My own story is different from Zarin’s and Mishal’s. Yet it does not make their stories any less true, nor does it diminish the reality of living in a world that still defines girls in various ways without letting them define themselves.

  This book is a love letter to them all.

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt gratitude to the Ontario Arts Council for funding this project.

  Thank you:

  Mom, for inspiring my love for reading and Dad for being the first to read everything I wrote.

  Bruce Geddes and Sayeeda Jaigirdar, for reading this book in its many forms over the years and being the best critique partners anyone could ask for.

  MG Vassanji, for being the first
to look at Zarin Wadia with a critical eye.

  Joe Ponepinto, for publishing Zarin’s story in The Third Reader in 2008, when it was only 5,000 words long.

  Barbara Berson, for her valuable advice on a very early draft of this book.

  Eleanor Jackson, for always championing this book and me.

  Susan Dobinick, for seeing this book’s potential.

  Janine O’Malley, for patiently answering all my questions and coming up with the best final title.

  Elizabeth Clark, for designing this book’s beautiful cover.

  Melissa Warten, Chandra Wohleber, Mandy Veloso, Kelsey Marrujo, and everyone else at FSGBYR, for their support in making A Girl Like That the best book possible.

  Brian Henry, Lauren B. Davis, Sherry Isaac, Mayank Bhatt, and Heather Brissenden, for their encouragement as I was writing this book over the years.

  And last, but not least: Jeddah, for the memories.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TANAZ BHATHENA was born in Mumbai and raised in Riyadh, Jeddah and Toronto. Her short stories have appeared in various journals, including Blackbird, Witness, and Room Magazine. A Girl Like That is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers

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  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

  Copyright © 2018 by Tanaz Bhathena

  All rights reserved

  First hardcover edition, 2018

  eBook edition, February 2018