A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  This evening when I looked out, no one was there. I was leaning out even farther, testing the limits of my balance, when a knock sounded on the door. My fingers tightened on the sill and as I fumbled back inside, I grazed my arm on a sharp metal edge. I winced—a cut had appeared on my skin, a thin line interspersed with dark, blooming beads of red.

  “What?” I wanted to yell. It was probably Mother or Abdullah wanting something or another. But for some reason, my mind warned me to keep my mouth shut, and my mouth obeyed. I slipped out of the pink sequined slippers I usually wore indoors and quietly made my way to the door.

  Another knock, this time louder. “Hell-lloo? Anyone home?”

  A male voice, low and deep. One of my brother’s friends. The voice made me uncomfortable. I moved closer and, without really thinking, clicked the lock in place. Beyond the door, a laugh and then more—there could have been three, maybe four of them there.

  “Come on, little girl,” the boy said again, and I suddenly knew it was him. The boy who owned the black car. “We’re all friends here.”

  He hammered the door now; it shook within the frame. I caught hold of the badminton racket lying on the floor next to me and held it close. My left eye twitched. Blood pulsed at the bases of my ears.

  “Rizvi!” a sharp voice said. My brother’s.

  I let out the breath I had been holding.

  “I’m fooling around, ya Aboody.” The boy used the nickname Father used for Abdullah, his voice clearer now, less deep. “We meant no harm.”

  “I told you not to come up here.” Abdullah’s voice tightened my insides more than Rizvi’s had. “I told you that my mom is sick and that my sister is studying for exams.”

  “Come on, man, you’re acting like—”

  “GO!” Abdullah shouted.

  There was a pause for a moment and then Rizvi laughed again. “Okay, man. Your house, your sister, your rules!”

  I slid down to the floor and pressed my ear against the door, listening to the squeak of a sneaker on the tiled corridor outside and then footfalls on the carpeted stairs, retreating to the living room once more.

  Another knock on the door, hesitant this time. “Mishal?” Abdullah said. “Mishal, are you okay? They were kidding—they didn’t mean anything, okay? It was—I’m sorry, Mishal. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  It didn’t.

  Though a week later, Abdullah was gone from home again, returning at five in the morning, a couple of hours before I had to get ready for school.

  “How can you stay friends with such guys?” I demanded, rising from the sofa the moment he entered. “You know what they’re like, how they harassed me.”

  “What do you mean? You know I was at a friend’s house after the Qur’an Club meeting. I spent the night there.”

  “What friend?” I demanded, but Abdullah didn’t answer. “I’m not a fool, Abdullah. You were out with those guys again.”

  Abdullah stared at me for a moment and then sighed. “Look … Mishal, I’m really tired right now, okay? Can we talk about this later?”

  “But I—”

  “They’re my friends, okay!” Abdullah snapped. “My real friends. Besides, you should’ve listened when I told you to stay in your room.”

  “What do you mean? I was in my—”

  “Rizvi saw you, he said. He saw you when you leaned out the window—in your nightgown, your hair uncovered. What do you think he was going to do?” Abdullah’s eyes made a harsh, unforgiving perusal of my floor-length housecoat and lingered on the scarf draped over my breasts. “Have you learned nothing about men and the necessity of a proper hijab? Or did you want his attention?”

  My face burned. “No!”

  As sick as Abdullah’s words made me, he wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t heard before from teachers at school or from my Qur’an Studies tutor at home. They had told us about women who forgot their place, who sought out a man’s attention by intentionally wearing abayas that revealed the curves of their bodies, by accentuating their eyes with makeup even while wearing a niqab. I remembered the way I had leaned out my window. Had my posture revealed the shape of my body in a way that was alluring to the boy in the black car? Wanton, even? Had he seen in it a form of invitation?

  Abdullah raised a finger and quietly wiped a tear from my cheek. I slapped it away, disgusted with him and myself.

  “Please, Mishal.” His voice was soft now, almost consoling. “Please try to understand. A woman’s honor is like a tightly wrapped sweet. If you unwrap a sweet and leave it lying around, you expose it to everything out there. If, by accident, it falls into the dirt—tell me, Mishal, will anyone want to eat it?”

  “Stop it,” I whispered.

  But he persisted: “Don’t you remember what happened to Reem?”

  Of course I did. Everyone knew what had happened to our cousin. Sweet, innocent Reem, with her big brown eyes and shy smile. Who seemed to have the perfect arranged marriage when she fell in love with the man she was engaged to—until she slept with her fiancé a week before the wedding ceremony. It wasn’t her fault, the fiancé claimed when he broke off the wedding. But many who knew the truth had blamed Reem for it. He had been surprised, I’d overheard our aunts whispering over a family gathering. Suspicious that she had enjoyed the experience instead of suffering through it like a proper virgin.

  “That was wrong, what happened with Reem,” I said. “It shouldn’t have happened that way!”

  “It would not have happened if she had remembered her place like a proper Muslim girl,” Abdullah said. “You’re not a child anymore, Mishal. One day, it will be your turn to get married. I won’t always be there to protect you.”

  If that’s the case, you probably shouldn’t protect me, I thought angrily. Unlike Reem or most of my other cousins, for me marriage had never been enticing. It was one of those “realities of life” I chose to ignore—mostly because I knew that my prospects were limited to creepy grooms nearly twice or thrice my age. Dark-skinned half-Saudi girls weren’t prize commodities on the marriage market, Jawahir reminded me every time I saw her at a family gathering. “At least you still have your youth on your side,” she always said. Even Mother seemed to agree, sometimes emerging from her little musical bubble to ask me if I had used the skin-whitening creams she’d ordered for me from India, creams that I’d dumped in the trash after they’d either made me break out or had no effect on my pigmentation.

  “Why are you blaming me for this?” I asked Abdullah. “Isn’t your friend—as a boy—responsible for lowering his gaze if he ever comes across a girl in an immodest state of dress? Have you both forgotten that part of the Qur’an?”

  Abdullah’s face turned pink, a sure sign he was losing his temper. “I don’t have time for this nonsense,” he said before leaving the room.

  Though the black car continued appearing in our driveway now and then, its owner never ventured up to my room again. From time to time, I heard stories of it parked in other driveways, outside other apartment buildings, but mostly I saw it parked in the shade of the eucalyptus trees outside the Qala Academy’s girls’-section compound.

  I saw the boy who had spoken to me from behind my bedroom door—his navy-blue Academy blazer tossed over a shoulder, a hand tucked into the pocket of the jeans he would swap for the navy pants of the school uniform when classes began at the boys’ section, miles away in the district of Sharafiyah.

  There were moments when, on seeing the car, I would pull the top of my scarf forward so that nothing of my face showed when I passed it. But Farhan Rizvi never seemed to notice me. Often, he simply sat in his car, head leaned back, his shades reflecting the green of the leaves overhead, until a girl slyly detached herself from the crowds of abaya-clad girls pouring out of the school buses and, instead of following them into the gates, casually walked toward the eucalyptus trees, to the passenger seat of the black car.

  After the incident at my house, I made it a point to keep track of the girls
who went to sit in that car, though I did not always see them. My blog on Tumblr grew incredibly useful in this regard.

  Created on a boring Friday afternoon after Jummah prayers, the blog was something I initially used as a space to anonymously rant about school stuff—mostly complaints about the Class IX finals at Qala Academy, which I likened to the head crushers used in the Spanish Inquisition, and passive-aggressive Internet memes complaining about English teachers who wanted to know the symbolism behind blue curtains in a book.

  Later I began posting gossip as well. Not much. Just tidbits that I heard around school.

  PRINCIPAL AND BIO TEACHER IN CLINCH IN GIRLS’ SECTION!

  Okay. So maybe they were only hugging, but you know what hugging eventually leads to, right?

  The reason behind the hug? The Bio teacher was crying because a few girls were making fun of her and Princi was being your typical knight in shining armor.

  Note to teachers: Your students are not mean. Really we aren’t. But if you try to walk like a runway model in a school corridor AND have a butt like a certain Kardashian, you are asking to be mocked.

  POSTED 4 MINUTES AGO BY BLUENIQAB, 2 NOTES

  #sorry not sorry #but shouldn’t our teachers set better examples? #QA gossip

  No one was more surprised than I was when my little blog began to get followers. My first inbox message had come from our very own head girl, Nadia Durrani, who demanded I delete the gossip I’d posted about her and some guy she’d hooked up with over the summer (the fourth one over the course of two months). She made a number of ridiculous and hilarious threats, claiming to have wasta with someone high up at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, who would, in her words: Shut down ur stupid blog, track ur IP, and put u in jail.

  Why? I wrote back, making sure her question and my response were visible to every blog follower. Did you hook up with him as well?

  I added a GIF file to the post—the image of a cartoon cat rolling on the floor laughing its furry behind off. Underneath I wrote: I’m scared, Nadia. Really scared. Maybe you should tell your contact about that. Maybe he can do you a favor and ban Tumblr and every other blogging platform for you as well.

  The fight finally ended with Nadia deleting her Tumblr account and me gaining another fifty followers, many of whom wrote to congratulate me:

  Way to go, blue! That’s telling her!

  rofl this made my day thanks

  nadia is such a hypocrite. pretending to be a good and honorable head girl when she’s screwed most of the senior boys in QA. good on you for calling her out, blueniqab.

  And on and on.

  It was easily the most fun I’d ever had online.

  No one—not even Layla—knew who BlueNiqab was. Anonymity was key to running a blog that blabbed other people’s secrets, and I trusted no one with mine. If a teacher found out I was behind the whole thing, I would be in big trouble.

  I knew that things were going well for the blog when even the nerds of our class began talking about the gossip I’d posted there instead of the next Math test, and a steady stream of tips, asks, fan mail, and hate mail began trickling into my inbox.

  By Class XI—the blog’s third year running—most of the gossip usually came to me hours, sometimes even minutes, after the incident happened. Most of my tippers were girls, and it made sense that they would seek and disseminate information about boys like Farhan Rizvi.

  Stories began circulating about girls going off with Rizvi to an abandoned warehouse near Madinah Road, stories that I often verified by snooping through the texts on my brother’s cell phone.

  On the rare occasion that my brother called his friends over to our house, I would sneak out of my room and hide behind the wall near the staircase to eavesdrop, often picking up things that most girls at school would, under normal circumstances, have learned about only weeks or months after the incident.

  To my surprise, no one mentioned Zarin Wadia, who by then was acquiring quite a reputation. Insubordination in the classroom, smoking cigarettes, skipping classes for hours on end to see a boy, only to return in the afternoon in time to board the school bus back home. Our English teacher’s little pet. A girl who seemed to have no concept of boundaries.

  * * *

  Which was why when in Class XI, instead of hearing more rumors about Rizvi as I expected, I was shocked to hear rumors about my brother.

  Abdullah and Zarin. Zarin and Abdullah. Seen by Layla’s brother at the Corniche in a maroon GMC two weeks ago, laughing and smoking.

  “Hey, Mishal,” Layla teased during break. “If you’re not careful, you and Zarin may become relatives soon.”

  “Yeah.” I slammed my lunch box on our shared desk. “Right.”

  “Whoa, relax.” Layla raised her eyebrows. “You know I’m pulling your leg. In any case, I think they may have already broken up. She hasn’t skipped a class since my brother last saw them.”

  “I…” I forced myself to lower my voice. “I can’t believe Abdullah would go out with someone like that.”

  “I know, right?” Layla rolled her eyes. “But let’s be reasonable. Abdullah doesn’t go to school with her or know her as well as we do. Maybe he even likes her for some reason.”

  Of course he liked her. Zarin Wadia with her perfect body, with that fair skin prized by every matriarch I’d ever come across at Jawahir’s parties. Though Abdullah hadn’t told me that he was dating Zarin (he never told me anything about the girls he went out with), I had seen him smiling to himself when he thought no one was looking, the way his face lit up each time the phone rang on a Wednesday night, how it fell when he found out it wasn’t her, but one of his friends.

  “You didn’t tell anyone else about this, did you?” I asked her sharply. Layla may have been my best friend, but she had the tendency to blab.

  “Of course I didn’t!” She sounded irritated, which was a good sign. An offended Layla was an honest Layla. If she was lying she would have tried soothing me with gentleness and clever words. “Do you think I’m going to send something like this to bloody BlueNiqab?”

  I forced myself to remain impassive.

  “He’s your brother, Mishal,” Layla told me. “You need to cut him some slack. Even good guys like Abdullah can make mistakes.”

  I let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, like he would cut me slack if I went out with some guy and then said it was a mistake.”

  Layla’s eyes widened. She turned around to make sure the other girls were still busy talking or eating their lunches. “What are you talking about?” she whispered. “Do you want to go out with a guy?”

  “Of course not,” I said impatiently, “but—”

  “Seriously, Mishal.” Layla frowned. “I don’t know why you’re talking like this. You know—we both know—that these rules for segregation have been made to protect us.”

  “But don’t the rules apply to boys as well?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “Then why always blame the girl if things go wrong?” I demanded. “Why aren’t boys held responsible?”

  Layla sighed. “Mishal, you’ve seen my brother. You know how shy he is around girls. Neither he nor his friends date. My parents have always treated both of us equally in that way. But let’s be realistic. This world does not always operate on theory. I mean, would you go out alone at night in a deserted area, anywhere?”

  “No,” I said reluctantly.

  “Exactly! Why go looking for trouble where you know it exists? Especially when you’re a girl?”

  “But—”

  “Girls like Zarin are different,” Layla interrupted. “They don’t care about the rules or the future. See how dangerous that is? First she tempted Abdullah with her wanton ways, and now she’s confusing you with her deviance.”

  Images clashed in my head: Abdullah swinging me in the garden next to our house as a child; the naked blondes in his magazine; my brother violently pinning me to the wall; boys hammering on my door, laughing; my brother shouting
, driving them away.

  I held my head between my hands. “I don’t know, Layla.”

  “Please.” Layla placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let her turn you against your own brother.”

  * * *

  That evening, I switched on my cell and dialed Zarin’s number several times, my first three calls unsuccessful—hanging up on Zarin’s aunt twice and her uncle once. Then, on the fourth try, Zarin herself picked up the phone.

  The sharp “Hello” startled me and almost made me hang up. “Who is this?”

  I said nothing and fell once more into the routine of being silent, letting my breaths pass through the phone to let her know there was someone at the other end.

  After a moment of silence, she spoke again, her voice softer, more encouraging, almost as if she was expecting me to be a boy who had called, a boy far too nervous to speak. “Hello?” A hesitation. “Abdullah, is this you?”

  Witch, I wanted to say. Slut. But my voice choked in my throat. I disconnected the line. In the days that followed, I kept a close eye on her. The times she went out during break, the times she skipped school. The times she talked to my brother over the landline—though those conversations were short and to the point. “Same time, same place,” Abdullah would say. “Bring cigarettes,” she would reply.

  “What are you doing?” Layla whispered one day. “Always watching her like some obsessed boy. Are you trying to catch her smoking red-handed this time?”

  I shook my head. I did not know what I was looking for, but I knew it would not be to report her for smoking again. I’d overheard enough conversations between Abdullah and his friends now to know that he and Zarin were still dating. “Hot and not a hypocrite,” he’d described her over the phone. “She never freaks out if we joke about sex the way some other girls would.”

  Googling Zarin Wadia didn’t bring up much information—at least not on the Zarin Wadia I wanted. She wasn’t on Twitter or Tumblr or Snapchat or Instagram. Her Facebook was barely used. It made sense somehow that she wouldn’t use social media. Like me, Zarin had her own need for secrecy.