I felt my nails dig into the soft flesh of my palm. “I want to know everything about her,” I told Layla.
Farhan
AGE 12
They were going at it like dogs, Abba and the maid. My father, who my mother said I would look like when I got older—tall, dark, and handsome—banging the maid so hard that he banged the headboard against the wall and left a mark in the paint.
It was one of those evenings when neither Ammi nor my sister, Asma, were home. Asma had gone over to a friend’s place. Ammi was at the beauty parlor—“Gone to shave the beard off her chin,” Abba said contemptuously. Abba, who came home early that evening, then shut himself up in his room.
It could’ve almost been scripted. The noises in my parents’ bedroom. Me, crawling off the sofa, where I’d been dozing in front of the TV, padding quiet and barefoot across the carpet, noiselessly opening the bedroom door. Abba, heavy and hairy, his body heaving up and down; the maid, small and smooth, her eyes closed and mouth open, scoring his back with her nails. I watched until they switched positions, putting her on top and my dad on the bottom. His eyes opened and then locked with mine.
I fled.
Ten minutes later, the maid went into the kitchen, fully dressed, to cook dinner before my mother and sister came home.
Abba emerged, wearing a pair of striped pajamas and a dark blue robe. “Farhan.”
I looked up from the television, stood reluctantly, and walked over to where he was standing. Standing and swallowing, as if the words in his mouth were all wrong.
He smiled at me and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s no need to be afraid.”
He took my limp hand in his and pressed a note into my palm. Fifty riyals. New and crisp like the press on his shirt. Fifty falafel sandwiches from the school canteen. Half a Nintendo Game Boy. A twelve-year-old’s temporary silence.
“It will be our little secret,” he said. I looked up and saw something different in his eyes—fear, where there previously had been none. I put the note in my pocket, feeling strange about this sudden shift in the tectonic plates, the sickness in my belly mingling with a sense of power.
“Yes, Abba.”
AGE 15
DATE #9
“This is the special place you were talking about?” Nadia glared at the warehouse’s faded, hand-painted sign (Al Hanood it read now, the y long gone), the rusty gates, the cigarette butts littering the unpaved lot. “Why couldn’t we have parked at the Corniche?”
Ants were crawling up the broken wall, up my pants it felt like, when a red T-shirt flashed behind one of the concrete holes, lookout points for Abdullah and Bilal the Charsi, who I had told it would be done by today—scoring a home run with head girl Nadia Durrani, also called Double Dome Durrani because of her fantastic breasts.
“Yeah,” Abdullah had said when I told him about my plan. “Right.”
He’d given me the same reaction at the beginning of the year, when I’d scored Date #1 with Nadia, and then asked if I was on drugs. Bilal, who had once been Nadia’s neighbor and spent most of his free time stalking her when he wasn’t selling cigarettes and twenty-riyal weed joints behind the municipal garbage bin outside the academy’s boys’ section, didn’t believe me either.
“She likes Arabs, mostly. Syrians. Falasteenis. Black guys. White guys,” Bilal said with a shrug. “Most of them end up at the parking lot of the old Hanoody warehouse on Madinah Road. No offense, Farhan, my man—you may be one of my best customers, but I’ve never seen Nadia go for an Indian or Pakistani yet. And especially not a horny fifteen-year-old schoolboy.”
But not all horny fifteen-year-old Indians or Pakistanis had access to their father’s black Beamer whenever they liked, and that’s what Abdullah and Bilal had been pissed off by, even though they didn’t admit it.
Nadia had liked the look of my car, especially the black tint on its windows. “This is nice.” She had skimmed a finger lightly over the glass. “But are you even old enough to drive?”
“Officially, no. Unofficially, yes,” I had replied, forcing a bravado I did not feel. “Dad works for the Interior Ministry. He’s almost always traveling outside Jeddah on business. I’ve been chauffeuring my mom and sis around for about six months now.”
Nadia had scanned me from head to toe, her gaze lingering briefly on the bulge between the front pockets of my jeans. I felt myself go red and cursed myself for not keeping it under control. But, somehow, it worked.
“Okay,” she’d said with a slight smile. “I’ll see you this Wednesday, after school.”
It had taken nine more Wednesdays over the course of five months to get to the warehouse stage. Five months of e-mails and secret telephone calls. Two hundred and fifty-four riyals and seventy-five halalas’ worth of CDs and coffees at private five-star restaurants where we would not be seen by anyone from home or school, or by a muttawa. These dates usually ended at a deserted part of the Jeddah Corniche with a hurried lip-lock that Nadia refused to take further. “No, no, it’s too risky,” she would say, or “I see someone coming,” or “What’s the rush, big boy? We have plenty of time.”
“She’s sucking you dry,” Bilal had told me. “And not in the way she should.”
“You gotta take initiative, man,” Abdullah had said. “From the looks of it, Nadia needs a guy with a bit of aggression.”
My heartbeat accelerated now as Nadia’s head turned toward the warehouse wall.
“I know this place is gross,” I said quickly. “But this is way better than having that waiter at the Sofitel police our every move, isn’t it?”
“Whatever.” Nadia grimaced. She turned away from the wall. “It’s too late to go anywhere else now with your car nearly on empty.”
I switched off the AC, rolled down the window, and lit up. The red T-shirt had disappeared from sight. So far, so good.
“This week sucked!” Nadia grumbled. “First we got hammered at school over the Class XII boards like they’re a matter of life and death. And then yesterday my bratty sister stirred—yes, stirred—the wand of my eighty-riyal mascara in a pot of talcum powder. Like it was a prop she’d use playing house! When I told her off, she went crying to Mom, who acted like I was at fault for screaming at her seven-year-old angel. And on top of that, there’s that English exam next week. God, I’m so gonna fail that…”
Sweat beaded the back of my neck. Twenty minutes left before she had to get back home. Enough time, in Bilal’s opinion, to hit three bases, maybe even score a home run. “The hotter the girl, the fatter her attitude,” Bilal had said. “Don’t let her sit on your head and dictate terms. Be a man. Under no circumstance must you let on that you’re dying for her.”
I blew smoke out of the window. “You’re head girl,” I told Nadia. “You won’t fail a test.” Which was a lie. She’d failed the last one, I knew, and the one before.
“But I haven’t been studying for ages!”
I smashed the butt into the car ashtray. “Fine, then. I’ll take you home.”
The edge in my voice made her jump. “So soon?”
“It’s getting late.” I turned the key in the ignition, hoping she wouldn’t take the bait. “I don’t want to waste any more of your study time.”
“Farhan, wait.” She put a hand on my knee.
Blood rushed to my face. I released the steering wheel and turned to face her. “Not good enough, Nadia.”
The engine hummed in the silence. Nadia bit her plump lower lip. Cherry red stained the edges of her front teeth. Then, after one long minute, she leaned forward and put her hands on my shoulders. Slid them around my neck. Opened her mouth, maybe to say something.
I didn’t wait to hear it. I stuck in my tongue and simultaneously pushed aside the abaya and dupatta covering her chest.
She stiffened. A sound emerged from her throat—yes? no? my name?
Who cared as long as her hands remained where they were?
Cotton bra. Lace trim. There didn’t appear to be any padding, but I squeez
ed several times to make sure. I traced the lace with my thumbs and followed it to the back, where the hooks were located. She squeaked when I withdrew my tongue from her mouth and pushed down the bra. The fine hair on her skin gave it a velvety, apricot-like texture. She smelled like expensive perfume. Moments later, a siren sounded in the distance, followed by the honk of car horns.
“Get down,” I snapped. Blood rushed to my face.
“W-wha—?” Her scarf had somehow remarkably stayed in place, covering her hair completely, even though the rest of her clothing was in disarray.
I put a hand on her head and shoved it—as gently as I could—down toward her knees.
Red and blue lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Two police cars shot past the Hanoody warehouse—chasing some dude for speeding in a residential area, I guessed. To be safe, I waited five more minutes, my hand still holding Nadia’s head in place.
“You can sit again,” I said finally, releasing my grip. “They’re gone.”
She slid down to the edge of the seat. There, she fumbled with the rest of her clothes till she managed to put them back in place. Her bra, which she hadn’t managed to clasp properly, wrinkled at the peaks. Black mascara circled the skin around her watery eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
She smacked my mouth with the palm of her hand. “You maniac! I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”
“What are you talking about?” My lips were stinging. “I saved you from being lashed by the police!”
“Oh thank God, thank God for the police!” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “I thought a few kisses would appease you, but … God, if not for them, you’d have probably raped me!”
The words did not sink in at first.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you understand English?” Nadia’s lower lip curled. “In any case, I’ve made this disgusting date well worth your gasoline money.”
A muffled laugh floated to my ears from behind the broken wall. “Y-you’re kidding, r-right?” My face burned. “You were s-so … You wanted it, Nadia. You asked f-for—”
“Take me home.” She ripped a few tissues from the box in the glove compartment and wiped her mouth with slow, measured strokes. “Now.”
Abdullah had told me about such girls. NATO, he called them. No action, talk only. The ones who kissed like whores and then cried like virgins.
“I would have told her to get out of the car and driven off,” he said later. “Let her walk home by herself. But seriously, Farhan, to say ‘Y-yes, N-n-n-nadia,’ and drive her back home like she asked you to? Were you wearing bangles?”
Bilal laughed. “You looked like you’d just crapped your pants.”
Then, a month later, Abdullah forwarded me a text and a video clip on my phone.
In the text, cricket captain Ashraf Haque claimed to have set the record as the first Qala Academy boy to hit a home run with the head girl at the Hanoody warehouse a week after their very first coffee-shop date, in his secondhand Honda Civic.
No one seemed to care that the video was of poor quality or that the girl’s face was only partially visible or that her breasts weren’t as full and firm as the ones I remembered seeing on Nadia. Within a day of the clip being sent out, Haque’s reputation changed from being another perverted toilet stall masturbator to the luckiest guy in school.
It was only after Nadia left for India for further studies—still staunchly denying any involvement with “that jerk”—that Bilal revealed the secret to Haque’s success. “A single cup of coffee, my man,” he told me. “A single freaking cup. You can bet every guy she went out with wished he’d thought of the idea first.”
“He drugged her?” Abdullah looked, for the first time, disgusted and self-righteous. “That’s messed up.”
“Who cares?” My mouth still stung from the memory of Nadia’s slap. “Everyone knows what a slut Durrani is.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I draw the line at drugging a girl. It’s a whole other level of creepy.”
I paid no attention to Abdullah, who pretended to be religious and God-fearing in front of the adults, and then went on to blow hundreds of riyals on cigarettes and porn videos he bought online from one of those “secure sites” that even the Saudi censors could not censor.
Bilal’s words stuck in my head. Some nights, before I fell asleep, I pictured Nadia the way she had been that afternoon. Before the police had interrupted. Before she had intimidated and emasculated me with her violated-virgin act.
AGE 17
The first girl I used the drug on, Aliya Chowdhury, probably did not even need it. She was in love with me and would have done it anyway. But the drug calmed her down. She even cried in the car when I broke up with her a week later outside the warehouse.
“You’re such a jerk,” Abdullah told me when I called him the evening of our breakup. No hi or hello. Just that. “That girl was only fourteen.”
He’d probably heard the news from Bilal. Or they’d probably decided to spy on me again—this time without my permission—and seen everything.
“Hello to you too.” I laughed. “What’s wrong, Abdullah? Are you so whipped by the girl you’re going out with that you’ve forgotten to have fun? What’s her name again? Zarin? Shirin?”
“This has nothing to do with her.” Abdullah sounded angry now, almost as angry as he had when I’d gone up to his sister’s room two years ago. “You’ll be in big trouble someday, you know.”
I laughed again, mostly to mask my anger at his words and, under that, a fear I did not want to acknowledge. I thought of Nadia again and then of the Chowdhury girl, the glassy look in her eyes, the relaxed smile on her face.
I thought of Abba, compared my tableau to his.
“Don’t worry, ya Aboody.” I crumpled the paper with the girl’s number and e-mail into a ball and tossed it into the basket next to my bed. “I’m not like Haque. I don’t need to masturbate to videos of myself having sex with girls.”
REENCOUNTER
Zarin
According to the Dog Lady, if you ever wanted to know what a person was like, all you had to do was peek into their living room through a window or an open door. “A person’s home tells you a lot about who they are,” I’d overheard her telling Masi once. “Even if you can’t see their faces.”
In Mumbai, especially in Cama colony, where people often left doors open during the daytime, this was easy enough to do. If you peeped into the Dog Lady’s one-room flat, for instance, you’d see Fussy Old Parsi Widow written all over it—a large garlanded photo of her husband hanging on a blue wall, a Godrej fridge draped with a pink plastic cover, and flowered white curtains hanging over the windows. In a corner, right next to the kitchen, lay an iron cot with a hard mattress for the Dog Lady’s bad back, and a pair of aluminum bowls, one filled with water and one empty until she filled it with food for her rabid little Pomeranian, Jimmy.
In Jeddah, this sort of scrutiny was nearly impossible. Here, windows were translucent, barred with grilles and draped with curtains or, as with some of the buildings in the old city, with latticed wooden mashrabiya screens, shielding a home’s privacy from prying eyes. After the morning rush of school buses and vehicles pouring out onto the main roads, the city’s inner streets turned quiet. Mothers slipped back into their homes after waving good-bye to their children. Forbidden from driving, the women skulked inside their air-conditioned villas or apartments, waiting until a private car or taxi arrived to pick them up. Heat rose, thickened like soup. Even the shopkeepers didn’t move unless it was to shoo stray cats out of their shops. There were days when the silence could be as suffocating as the heat itself.
And it drove Masi mad.
In our first years here, she would sniff at doors and peer at windows, as if hoping to ascertain the kind of person who lived there by the scent of their food or the shadows that hovered behind windowpanes.
“What kind of neighbors are these, Rusi?” I often heard her complain to Masa
. “No hi, no hello. Forget about a polite smile; they don’t even look at you over here!”
Yet, as the years went on, and we slowly turned from Mumbaikars to Non-Resident Indians who no longer fit in the city, Masi began changing her tune. “People in Mumbai have no sense of privacy! Our Jeddah is our Jeddah. At least over there no one keeps asking me every little detail about myself!”
And she grew quieter and more suspicious around anyone who did. It was a dangerous, simmering sort of quiet that had me tiptoeing around her the way I was now creeping toward our apartment door.
In Jeddah, locked doors and closed windows were the norm. Anything different could mean one of two things:
(a) Your house had been burglarized, or
(b) Your house was in the process of being burglarized.
Which was why, when I found the door to our apartment open a crack one afternoon after coming home from school, I hovered outside the door for a few moments, debating between entering the house and knocking on the door of our nosy neighbor, Halima.
I chose the safe route at first and rapped several times on Halima’s door. But no one appeared to be home. I pulled out my cell phone, an old flip Nokia that wasn’t supposed to be used for anything except emergencies, and held a finger over the number nine. I could hear Abdullah mocking me in my head. What? I imagined him saying. You think the Saudi policemen are like the American ones? That they’ll come running for you the minute you dial 999?
Calling Abdullah didn’t seem like the smart thing to do either. For one, Masi would kill me if she knew I was seeing a boy. And, more important, I was pretty sure that Abdullah wouldn’t come running for me if I was in trouble. Swapping spit and the occasional cigarette with a girl for a month and a half did not make her the love of your life.
I did what I could under the circumstances: heart in throat, in silence, eased open the wooden door made heavy by the extra locks and latches Masi had installed the year before after someone broke into an apartment in the building next to ours. A small foyer led right into the living room, which consisted of a navy-blue sofa laminated with plastic (Masi was nearly as phobic of germs as she was of me marrying a gangster like my father), a bamboo armchair pushed up against the wall, a walnut coffee table, a glass showcase with a crystal bust of the prophet Zoroaster, and a nineteen-inch flat-screen TV that Masa had won in a lucky draw at the academy fair a couple of years before.
A Girl Like That Page 8