“When you see one, run in the opposite direction,” Zarin had said. “Unless, of course, you want to get stuck in a prison cell for being seen with me.”
She’d succeeded in scaring me with this comment a couple of times, until I realized that the men she was pointing to at the mall weren’t religious policemen, but civilians out and about with their families.
“You should have seen your face!” she had said, laughing. “Porus, even if he was a real muttawa, he wouldn’t start chasing us the second he saw us together!”
The religious policemen at the scene of our accident were, however, the real deal. I could see it by the careful way they were scrutinizing our families, the casual authority with which one of them finally walked up to the policeman interrogating Rusi Uncle and murmured in his ear.
Somewhere in the distance, beyond the GMC, within the flat expanse of dusty palm trees, streetlights, glass skyscrapers, and apartment buildings, lay Aziziyah, and Zarin’s school, Qala Academy, where the whole nightmare had begun.
A sheen of moisture coated the police officer’s face. He tapped a pencil against his clipboard and then, with a sigh, scribbled something down.
“Why different surname?” He pointed behind Rusi Uncle, where Khorshed Aunty and my mother were crying, their arms wrapped around each other. “You have two wife?”
Rusi Uncle went red and started swearing in a way I had never seen before, calling the policeman all sorts of names in Hindi. Names that could have him arrested and tossed into a deportation center if the policeman understood him. Khorshed Aunty screamed his name.
The police officer’s hands balled into fists. The sun shifted slightly and for a moment I thought, This is it: Rusi Uncle is done for. Then, finally: “Khallas!” The officer clipped his pencil back onto the board. “Go!” he spat out. “GO!”
I let out a breath I had not known I was holding and watched Zarin’s aunt and uncle help my mother back into their car. I watched as my mother continued to stare at me, or what remained of me: the bigger of two human-shaped stains on the tarmac.
I am so sorry, Mamma, I wanted to tell her. I did not want to leave you alone. Not like this. I did not even know how this accident had happened in the first place.
“Let it go, Porus,” Zarin said, as if sensing my thoughts. “We can’t return. We must move on.”
She took my hand, her fingers sliding into the gaps between mine, something she had never done voluntarily when we were both alive.
Something inside me unclenched. I watched the muttawa follow the policeman who had been interrogating Zarin’s uncle, both of them speaking in rapid-fire Arabic.
“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked Zarin, who knew some of the language.
She let out an irritated sigh. “I’m not listening, Porus. They’re talking too fast for me in any case, and I don’t want to know what they’re saying. I don’t want to go back there.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. She had reasons enough—reasons aplenty, really—for not wanting to return. I hesitated for a second and then squeezed her hand gently; it was surprisingly soft and smooth—or did it feel that way because I was dead?
“You have tough hands.” She sounded surprised.
So it was soft.
“Yeah. But I thought you already knew that. From my job and all.”
“I thought you worked behind the counter.”
“There are many things behind the counter. Like a loading dock and delivery trucks.”
Now I knew she was smiling even though I could not look into her face. Not directly. There was something bright around her that prevented me from seeing her clearly. But we could feel each other’s reactions. We could touch. It was strange.
We were holding hands now the way my father and I had on my sixth birthday. Palm to palm, fingers laced together like two people afraid of tipping over and falling into the Arabian Sea—me more so than Pappa, whose hand I had clung to as he guided me into a fisherman’s boat near the ferry wharf in Mumbai. “Careful, now,” he had said as the boat rocked under my feet. “Careful when you step inside.”
I gripped his hand even tighter and tried to steady myself, hoping I wouldn’t tumble overboard in my excitement. “It will be special,” Pappa had promised the day before. “A glimpse of heaven, right in the middle of the sea.”
Overhead the sky was thick with clouds. Rain, the fisherman predicted before murmuring a prayer to the goddess and pushing off.
In the daytime, we saw clouds floating over the growing slum onshore, over women washing clothes and utensils in the stagnant pools while children bathed nearby, their dark skins covered with a fine watery film. The fishermen, by then, were already at sea, their painted boats and trawlers bobbing somewhere in the middle of an undulating blue. When the fishing season was hard, they picked up passengers like Pappa and me for a bit of extra money, taking us into the middle of the sea whenever we wanted, sometimes into waters that were so black we could barely see anything except for the faint gold glimmer of the city lights on the water close to the shore.
“Mad,” Mamma had called them and Pappa. “Utterly mad.”
I recalled her words in the darkness, amid the sounds of Pappa’s breaths and the crush of the fisherman’s paddle against the water. Moments later, however, the paddling stopped. “Now we wait,” Pappa said. The fisherman lit a match and brought it close to his face, lighting a beedi that he first offered to Pappa, who refused.
It had been another half hour before the first rays cast orange into the sky and then yellow before the sun finally rose, as round as a peach and glowing. The dark water turned pale and translucent, tiny sea creatures shimmering gold underneath. “This is what I have dreamed of, my son, what I’ve always wanted to show to your mother,” Pappa had told me. “This is what heaven will look like after we die.”
A year later, when we went out to sea again, the boat began to sink midway, forcing us to swim back ashore, a skill Pappa had had since he was a boy, but I’d never learned. Water, I discovered then, could go into your mouth and your ears. Could burn your throat like fire when it finally came out of you. Pappa had had to pull me back to shore with him. After CPR, our first stop was at the hospital to make sure I was okay. It was the closest I’d ever come to seeing heaven firsthand. My mother had been furious.
“Stop!” Zarin commanded. “You’re doing it again!”
“Doing what?”
“Weighing us down.”
And now I could see that we were closer to the ground, closer to the voices that were louder than before, to the crush of the Jeddah traffic below, vehicles snaking around my old car and the police, their hoods gleaming in the afternoon sun. If I wanted, I could get close enough to touch the shapes of the people standing below, the faint trail of moisture on my mother’s cheeks.
Zarin squeezed my hand hard and we floated up once more. “Do you want us to be stuck there forever?”
“As long as I’m with you, it doesn’t matter,” I said, and could instantly feel her roll her eyes.
“You scared me,” she said.
Not as much as she’d scared me when she went out with those assholes over the past year.
“Did you swear in your head?” she asked me suddenly.
“How did you know?”
“I don’t know. I could … I don’t know, feel your hostility, I guess. I never heard you swear before … or technically even now.”
Of course she hadn’t. After Pappa’s death I had become quite adept at hiding my anger from the people I loved. Though I had the feeling that Zarin did see, or maybe hear, me bash in that one guy until he saw the sun and the moon and a few stars. I wasn’t too sure. Our one and only conversation about it had not gone too well.
Here and now, however, the boys in her past no longer seemed to matter.
“A gentleman doesn’t swear in front of a lady,” I recited in perfect English, some line I’d heard somewhere, now popping out of me as if it had been waiting for this very moment.
She laughed and I felt myself growing lighter.
English was not my first language. I rarely spoke in English with Zarin, normally preferring to use Gujarati, the language of instruction of my old school in Mumbai—a language I was certain to have better command of when talking to Zarin, who with a single look could still sometimes leave me fumbling for words.
Below us, my mother was now praying. I could tell from the way her lips were moving. When someone died, a simple Ashem Vohu would suffice, she had told me once, though I never understood why even that was needed. “Who understands prayers anyway?” Zarin had always said, and I had agreed with her. Especially when they were spoken in a language that few priests back in India could translate.
It was Zarin who had told me the story of the three wise men from the Bible—how they were actually Zoroastrian priests, who the Christians called the magi.
“No one at school would believe me if I told them this,” she’d said with a laugh. “Except maybe Mishal. But she’d pretend ignorance to spite me.”
“How do you know this?” I’d asked her, awed.
“How do you not?” she’d teased back. “I’m not even technically Zoroastrian and I still do!”
Having a Hindu father meant that Zarin was permanently barred by the fire temples in India from being inducted into the Zoroastrian faith. Though Zarin liked to pretend indifference about this fact, I knew it bothered her. Between the two of us, it was always Zarin who knew more about Zoroastrianism, who had spent hours reading up on it during trips back to Mumbai. I, on the other hand, was no longer sure if I believed in God, especially after my father died.
“My mother wanted me to become a priest, you know,” I said now. “She came from a priestly family.”
“A priest?” Zarin sounded interested. “Well, why didn’t you?”
“Pappa was from a nonpriestly family. So I couldn’t.” I still remembered the look on my mother’s face, the disappointment she couldn’t quite hide.
Zarin squeezed my hand again, but this time in reassurance.
There were things I still wanted to tell Zarin: things we’d never had the chance to talk about, things I had told her before but she’d ignored. But we were now fading—or was the light growing brighter?—and I could no longer remember what they were.
“I’m going to hell, aren’t I?” Zarin asked me suddenly.
And then I remembered everything again, bit by bit, my memory jogged not by Zarin’s voice, but by the fear I heard behind it—an emotion she’d expressed in front of me once before, on that nightmare day when everything went wrong.
Memories, Pappa had said, can be like splinters, digging into you when you least expect them to, holding tight and sharp the way wood did when it slid under a fingernail.
I felt Zarin’s fingers tighten around my hand.
“I’m not letting you go,” I said.
Mishal
The day after she died, I called the number again.
“Hello?” The woman at the other end had a voice hoarse from crying.
I did not speak. Did not breathe. It was something I’d learned to do during those blank calls, in the early practice sessions years ago—before Caller ID became nearly as commonplace as a Happy Meal—when I would prank Father’s second wife, Jawahir, who by her very existence had turned my mother into a basket case.
The number I’d dialed now did not appear to have Caller ID. Or if it did, Zarin Wadia had never confronted me about it—never bothered asking about the blank calls I had made to her in the past. A silence that in itself seemed uncharacteristic of her. Zarin had been a loner, but she had never exactly been quiet about the things that pissed her off. I knew that firsthand.
“… trailer … accident … highway…” My left ear tuned into the words floating faintly up the stairs to my room; Abdullah was watching the news again on Channel 2.
My right ear, however, was still focused on the woman over the phone, whose breaths were growing quicker now, impatient. I could almost feel them on my skin.
“Who is this?” Her voice was louder. “What do you want?”
Deviant, they called her at school, I wanted to say. A girl who stood out the day she first came to the academy. A square peg in a round hole.
I wanted to tell the woman about that time in Class II. The time we found out about Zarin lying about having parents. How her face had turned red like a poppy when I confronted her. Shame, shame, my friends and I had chanted whenever she’d stepped out on the playground after that. Shame, shame, poppy shame.
I wanted to tell the woman about that time in Class IX, when I first smelled the cigarettes on her. When she stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry, spraying my face with her spit. “I’ll report you for this,” I told her. And I had. Though by then, she hadn’t seemed to care.
My fingers brushed the name and number scribbled on the photocopied page of the class phone list. Careless strokes, uneven in weight, some characters darker than others. She put a dash through her sevens and through the Z in her name. The same number, year after year, ever since she first showed up in Class II with her short hair and weird brown leggings, no new cell number added, even though I knew that she’d started carrying around an ancient flip phone sometime last year.
I wrapped the phone cord tight around my fingers.
It was nothing, I wanted to tell the woman. Just a bunch of girls saying crappy things, sharing crappy pictures on Facebook and Twitter. Stuff like this happened all the time at school. Zarin knew that. She had to have known that! She used to laugh at the rumors before. Pea brained, she used to call anyone who believed them. How could we have known that she would try to run away?
I opened my mouth to speak.
“Mishal?” Abdullah called up to me. “Where are you?”
I hung up instantly, heart pounding. I cursed my brother for his voice—that loud Sports Captain voice he used to bark marching orders to the Qala Academy boys during Sports Day presentations—a voice that must surely have penetrated the woman’s ear on the other end of the phone as it had mine.
“Come down here!” he shouted. “They’re showing the news about your friend.”
The same news they’d announced this morning at a special assembly held on the school grounds. The headmistress made a speech, the teachers dabbed at their eyes with the edges of their saris or dupattas, prayers were recited, and everyone observed the obligatory Two Minutes of Silence for the Dead. Seconds after the assembly was complete, however, everyone around me burst into whispers about the details.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un! Ya Allah, what a tragedy!
Tragedy, my foot. It was probably her fault, with all those cigarettes she smoked. One of them probably set the car on fire!
How can you say such things about someone who died?
What? What are you guys talking about? The headmistress said it was a crash in the assembly. Like the wheel came off the car she was in or some—
Forget about that—was she with that deli boy again?
On my Tumblr account, random anonymous tippers were going wild with even more theories, forcing me to post the following message when I got back home from school:
You have been asking a lot of questions about a certain Class XI student (you all know who she was). I understand that you have your own theories and honestly I appreciate the asks and tips you guys send me. But I am NO LONGER going to post anything else about this person on Tumblr as I don’t think it’s fair to her or her family.
POSTED 2 HOURS AGO BY BLUENIQAB, 45 NOTES
#seriously #anonymous #ily #but let’s not speak ill of the dead okay #blue’s announcements #QA gossip
On Zarin’s Facebook page (one she rarely used, from the looks of her twelve-person friend list) there was a lone status update dating back to October 13, 2010: so this is facebook? looks boring. She hadn’t even bothered putting up a profile picture. Her timeline, set to Public, had a slew of messages: some from our classmates, but most fro
m strangers, their sentiments ranging from Ding dong, the witch is dead to May your soul rest in peace. My own message, one I’d typed out and erased several times before hitting Enter, had been a short R.I.P. and nothing else.
I sat on my bed and opened my Physics textbook. My friend, Abdullah called her, as if I was the only one who’d known her, as if she was a complete stranger to him.
“Mishal?”
“I’m studying!” I shouted back. “I have a test tomorrow!”
He fell silent. The days when he and I would run into each other’s rooms without knocking and drag the other out to watch something we’d seen on TV were long gone. In those days, Father lived with us on the weekends, playing games with Abdullah and me, sometimes even coaxing Mother to join us.
Of the two of us, Abdullah resembled Mother the most, with his wide mouth, his fair skin tanned by the Jeddah sun, and the black hair that curled around his head. Mother’s hair, on the other hand, was long; in her days as a student of classical music in India, she had often left it loose. “It was the first thing people noticed about me,” she said. “My hair, which hung to my hips.”
Hair that she had, after marrying my Saudi father, to tie up in braids and cover with scarves, never to be seen again by other men. “I didn’t mind,” she said when I asked her about it. “Your father married me against the wishes of his family, you know. They didn’t want him marrying a woman who wasn’t Saudi, even if she was a Muslim. I was very lucky.”
In the room next to mine, I heard the faint hum of Mother’s old CD player: a classical song I recognized from my childhood. When she was younger, my mother had played the sarangi, a stringed boxlike instrument that she’d brought with her from Lucknow to Jeddah after marriage. An instrument that she did not relinquish even after marrying my father, much to the general disapproval of his family. “I’ve already given up far too much,” she said.
She turned to her instrument more and more after Father married Jawahir, often growing frustrated by the lack of interest Abdullah and I showed in her music, not understanding that it was an alien language we both resented, a language that, to us, had had some mysterious hand in separating our parents into two houses. “Feel it, Mishal!” she would cry out in those days, often taking my hand and placing it over my heart. “Here, Mishal. Feel the music here.”
A Girl Like That Page 2