A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

“Take me there,” she commanded.

  “It’s abandoned!”

  “Fine.” She shrugged. “Then I’m going to go to that convenience store and get a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Wha—wait!” I called out when she began opening the door. “What do you think you’re doing? No one’s going to sell you cigarettes!”

  “Why? Because I’m too young?” She smirked in a way that told me this hadn’t stopped her before. “Of course, if you’re so worried, we could always go to the warehouse.”

  A pair of bespectacled eyes floated across my face. Zarin’s aunt, furious at finding out Zarin had been smoking. Even more so when she found out that I was the one who’d taken Zarin to the store where she bought the cigarettes. She might not let you see Zarin again, I told myself. Though in reality I was more worried about Zarin not wanting to see me if I didn’t take her to the warehouse.

  I turned on the engine once more. “We aren’t stopping there,” I said firmly. “I’ve seen police cars around that area. If they see us together, they will ask questions.”

  Zarin said nothing. She simply sighed and looked out the window again. Sand feathered the road leading to the warehouse. The buildings in this area were few and far between, their paint yellowing and veined with cracks, the backs of old air conditioners protruding from their walls. Even though the windows were dark, I had the strangest sense of being watched, a feeling I partly attributed to how quiet it was here compared to the bustling center of the city.

  I approached the warehouse with caution, keeping an eye out for police cars, pleased to see that there were none around. “There,” I said. “Happy now?”

  “Rizvi’s car,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “Rizvi. Our head boy.”

  A black car was parked several feet away from the warehouse, an M3, from the looks of it, dust lightly coating the back wheels and the trunk. In the front sat a guy around my age, maybe a little younger, sunglasses on his handsome face. Next to him sat a girl who appeared to be crying.

  “Interesting,” Zarin said, but her eyes, I could tell, were on Rizvi and not the girl.

  “Is that his girlfriend?”

  She shrugged and turned away. “Was his girlfriend, probably. He’s a bit of a heartthrob around school. Half of the girls in my class have his yearbook picture saved on their phones. Even the teachers drool over him.”

  I heard the words she wasn’t saying and felt the inside of my chest tighten. Instead of making a U-turn and heading back in the direction of my building, I kept going straight, ending up in an area I did not know that well, resulting in a much longer drive than I’d originally intended. I had not wanted to pass the black car again. I had not wanted Rizvi to turn around and see us—see her. But it did not seem to matter. Seeing the boy had sent Zarin back into a daydream. One that made lines appear on her forehead and turned her mouth soft and contemplative. The sun was now setting, and the sky was awash with different shades of red.

  “You look beautiful,” I said, hoping to distract her from her thoughts.

  It worked. She stared at me and for a moment she looked bewildered. Then a car behind me honked. I glanced at the speedometer: I was driving at least ten kilometers below the limit. No wonder my car wasn’t rattling.

  Zarin covered her mouth with a hand, shoulders shaking. I tore my eyes away from her and sped up again, focusing on the road once more.

  It isn’t the first time a girl has laughed at you, I told myself. I was fifteen the first time I’d liked a girl at my old school in Mumbai. I still remembered her twinkling brown eyes and neatly plaited hair. The one time I’d tried to approach her in the school corridor, I’d slipped on the freshly mopped floor and fallen flat on my face. Everyone had called me Bozo for weeks afterward because of the way my face looked—pale like a clown’s with the exception of my nose, which had a nice big red bruise on it, and my burning cheeks. She and her friends had never been able to look at me again without giggling.

  Thankfully, Zarin wasn’t like that. After a few seconds she stopped laughing, her face calm and controlled once more, even though her eyes were still bright. I decided to keep my mouth shut and keep driving. We didn’t speak until I was parked once more outside her apartment building.

  “Thanks.” Zarin turned in her seat; her belt, I saw then, had never been buckled. “That was a nice drive.”

  “Really?” Somewhere inside me, hope bubbled.

  She stared at me for a few seconds and then sighed. “Look, Porus. You’re a good guy and maybe we can be friends. But don’t get any ideas about me, okay? Meaning I’m not going to be your girlfriend. Ever.”

  “What do you mean?” I blushed. “Maybe I want to be friends with you.”

  She laughed. “You’re joking, right? The whole Shirin story at the deli, talking up my masa and masi, calling me beautiful … yeah, right, you want to be just friends.”

  “You haven’t even given me a chance yet,” I protested, not knowing where my sudden boldness came from. I took a deep breath. “I may look like Bakasura to you, but you don’t know me that well. I may surprise you, you know.”

  “Okay, you need to stop taking my words so seriously. You don’t really look like Bakasura. I said that because you annoyed me.” She frowned then and stared at my face for a few seconds, almost as if she was seeing it for the first time. She shook her head. “But that isn’t even the point. I’m seeing someone, okay? I have a boyfriend.”

  A boyfriend. It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that someone like her should have one, but I felt the sting anyway. “If you have a boyfriend, why are you here with me?” I challenged.

  “You have a car and I needed to get away from Masi and her muttering.” She shrugged. “What else?”

  “My boss, Hamza, has a car too,” I pointed out. “So does that pervert cashier, Ali. I don’t see you out with either of them.”

  She scowled at me in response, but the corners of her mouth twitched. It was that slight movement that gave me hope, that hint of amusement on her lips that propelled me to go on and say: “You know what? I think you will go out with me again. Maybe as a friend or whatever you call it. But even then, it will have more to do with my charm and conversation skills than this rusty old car.”

  “Yeah.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay.”

  “Great, so that’s settled, then,” I said cheerfully. “I’ll come see you again next weekend. Maybe one day I can win you over and you will leave that boyfriend of yours for me.”

  She stared at me for a second and then burst out laughing—a real laugh this time, not a sarcastic one. “You, my friend, have clearly lost your mind.”

  * * *

  A week later, an unknown number flashed on my phone.

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s Zarin. Come get me, will you? Text me on this number when you get here.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, but she had already hung up by then. A part of me was irritated. Who did this girl think she was? But another, larger part was deeply curious. I knew a little about Zarin’s parents from the bits and pieces of information floating around Cama colony when I lived there.

  Women had shared stories about Zarin’s mother, Dina, the colony beauty who could have married any man she wanted, but instead started working at a cabaret bar once Zarin’s great-grandfather died.

  “My brother offered to help her, you know,” Persis, the Dog Lady, told anyone who would listen. “He said he would marry her, give her a home. But she refused! Said she didn’t want to marry someone like him! As if there was something wrong with my brother! Then she went off with that thug and had a baby with him. Mad, I tell you!”

  Though Dina eventually moved out of the colony to a fancy apartment in downtown Mumbai, she sometimes showed up to visit her sister—especially after she’d had an argument or a fight with her lover.

  The day Zarin’s father came over to the colony was one few had ever forgotten. Once, over drinks, a group of men described to my father how
the man rode in through the gates on his Harley, calmly marched up the stairs to Building 4, and put a gun to Dina’s head.

  “You have to give our Dina credit, though,” one of the men had said. “She stood her ground, didn’t reveal an ounce of fear. Said she wouldn’t go home with him if he threatened her like that. Little Zarin is just like her, you know. The way she pummeled her cousin the other day! Would have never imagined such a temper on such a small girl. Maybe she gets that from her father.”

  Everyone, including Pappa, had laughed at the casual joke. Yet no one ever mentioned or even joked about Dina and Zarin’s father in front of the Wadias—not even the gossipy old Dog Lady. I might have been eight years old back then, but even I could see how the atmosphere shifted when either one of Zarin’s guardians walked in on a gossip session, how quickly voices faded and subjects changed.

  Zarin was waiting by the door to her apartment building when I pulled up, her face paler than the last time I’d seen her, clutching a small backpack to her chest.

  “You came,” she said, her voice flat. But she was speaking in Gujarati for once and I could feel my annoyance melting away.

  “Yeah, I did. You sounded strange. I got worried.”

  She sighed and then slipped into the passenger seat. “I didn’t mean to call you like that. I didn’t mean to call anyone. But my masa…” Her head snapped up to the window, where I saw two shadows. A man and a woman, holding each other.

  “Could we get out of here first?” she asked irritably.

  I frowned. I might have had a crush on this girl, but even I had my limits. I opened my mouth, fully intending to tell her that she couldn’t order me around like that. But then she raised a hand to tuck a stray lock of hair into her scarf. The loose sleeve of her abaya fell to the elbow, revealing a crescent of red and blue circles smudged over her skin.

  Seeing the direction of my gaze, she hastily pushed down the sleeve. “What are you looking at?” she snapped.

  I gently caught hold of her wrist and pulled the sleeve up again. I would have let her go if she’d struggled, but to my surprise she didn’t really resist my grip. Maybe she simply assumed that I was too strong for her. But when I looked up into her eyes, I realized she was tired.

  “How did you get these?” I asked, brushing a thumb over an older bruise, which was now turning yellow.

  “Masi’s fingers.”

  I looked back up at the window. The shadows were gone. I didn’t even bother asking Zarin if they knew I was with her. I released her hand and shifted the gear into Drive. “Where do you want to go?”

  * * *

  Jeddah’s Corniche was the only part of the city that sometimes reminded me of Mumbai. One weekend, I had finally taken my mother out to the central Corniche, a lively patch of coastline bustling with families in the evenings. Arab boys of my age and younger rode beach buggies in the sand and sometimes on the boardwalk. A half hour before sunset, the Jeddah Fountain opened to the public, propelling over a thousand feet of water into the air from the middle of the Red Sea.

  We bought corn on the cob from a chatty Malayali who stood behind a bright yellow Mazola Cooking Oil stand and steamed full husks in water before brushing them with butter and sprinkling on salt. He often complained of other hawkers at the southern end of the beach, men who wheeled in corns in barrows and roasted them over open fires, the way they did in India.

  “My corn is better,” the Malayali insisted. “Sweeter. And you do not taste charcoal in your mouth. Right, no?”

  “Right,” I said. I did not tell him that the charcoal taste was associated with some of my happiest memories of my father and of Mumbai.

  On bad days, when the pain of missing Pappa grew too much and Mamma sat praying next to the altar in our kitchen for hours on end, I drove to the north end of the Corniche to be by myself, to stare at the waves until my body was fooled into thinking that it too was floating with the foam, past the little white Island Mosque with the pink domes, across the Red Sea. I walked along the shore and stood by the rocks near the mosque, a few feet away from the families spread out on mats with bags of sandwiches, packs of Pepsi, and aluminum containers of AlBaik chicken. Children splashed nearby, laughing hysterically in the shallows. Their voices didn’t matter much after a while; the waves that crashed against the craggy rocks often drowned out most noises, allowing the thoughts in my head to turn liquid, to slosh lazily around in my brain and lap at its sides.

  It was here that I took Zarin now, parking next to the boardwalk, with a clear view of the mosque. I rolled down my window and sucked in a deep breath of the sea air: clean, hot, tinged with salt. In the distance a municipal dredger lay flat and black against the water, leaving behind a stream of white foam.

  There were days in Jeddah when the smell of the sea was much stronger, so strong that it stuck to the clothes my mother hung to dry on our small balcony, a stiff, fishy smell that never seemed to go away no matter how much deodorant I used. “It was never like this in Mumbai,” Mamma would grumble, pressing the iron hard onto my shirt, as if she expected to burn the smell out of the cloth.

  Zarin stared out at the water now, crushed like the fabric of a woman’s sari, a dull steel blue that caught glints of red and yellow from the setting sun.

  “We used to come here,” she said, speaking for the first time after our silent car ride. “Masa, Masi, and I. When I was six. Masa used to take my hand and walk with me along the shore. Masi would walk on his other side. People used to think we were a family.”

  “You are a family.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I would be if I knew what I was joking about.”

  She finally turned around to face me, but didn’t really look me in the eye. “It was ridiculous. The reason for our fight. She was complaining about how much she hated certain things about Jeddah. ‘Our India is our India.’” Zarin mimicked her aunt as she spoke the last few words. “And stuff like that. But when she goes to India, she praises Jeddah to the skies and complains about how dirty Mumbai is. She was being a hypocrite. I called her out on it. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  I cleared my throat. “Does she hit you a lot?”

  She shrugged. “Not as much as she used to.”

  “But Rusi Uncle—”

  “Does nothing. Well, to be fair, he does tell her off sometimes. But he also keeps saying that I shouldn’t shoot my mouth off at her. He always takes her side. Even when I’m right.” She finally focused her gaze on mine. “I was so angry. I wanted to get out of there.”

  “And I was the first person you thought of? I didn’t know you thought of this as your getaway car,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

  She smirked. “I guess I could have picked better, huh?”

  “Like your boyfriend,” I said pointedly. “You do have one, don’t you? Or did you lie about that as well?”

  “Yeah, sure. Call my boyfriend, whose existence neither Masa nor Masi knows about, and get into even more trouble. That would have been classic. Why don’t I ask them to ship me off to Mumbai and marry me to some good Parsi boy over there?”

  “What’s wrong with Parsi boys?” I couldn’t help feeling offended. “And you’re too young to get married anyway.”

  She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Hey!” she shouted when I plucked it out of her hands. “Give that back!”

  “You’re not smoking those things in my car. Besides, do you know how much they can damage your lungs?”

  “Come on,” Zarin insisted. “No one cares.”

  “Well, maybe they should,” I said.

  Something flickered in her eyes. She held out her hand again. “Will you give it back to me if I promise I won’t smoke?”

  Yeah, right. I pocketed the pack.

  “Fine, keep it,” she said irritably. “There was only one left anyway.”

  “A small but important victory.”

  “It has suddenly become clear to me why you d
on’t have a girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t know furnaces could be girlfriends.”

  Her eyes widened for a brief moment. The way her mouth twitched should have tipped me off before the laugh bubbled out of her. Belly-deep. Real. “Okay, wise guy,” she said, once she’d caught her breath. “You got me. This time.”

  I should have known I was in trouble from that moment. Because, though she didn’t know it, she’d gotten me as well. Just when I’d been about to write her off, she laughed that laugh and I fell for her again.

  * * *

  That first phone call set the tone for a ritual of sorts. Zarin would call—mostly moments before she wanted to go somewhere—and ask if I wanted to “go out.” When we met, she would make it a point to say we were “friends only.” I would tease her about this—“Why are you being so specific? Are you afraid of falling for me?”

  It wasn’t easy reconciling the image of Zarin I had in my head with the girl I found in Jeddah. In Mumbai, I had always thought of Zarin as clever but quiet—a girl who preferred sitting by herself and who observed more than she spoke. Ten years later, while I found some of these things to be true, I also had to account for her quick wit, her biting sense of humor, and her general moodiness on the days when she didn’t get a proper nicotine fix.

  Though she didn’t show it very often, Zarin had a softer side as well. When I talked about Pappa or my old life in Mumbai, she listened, sometimes even contributing an anecdote of her own. On my bad days, she made me laugh. It was odd, I thought, how she seemed to sense the change in my moods almost instantly. The only other person who could see through my poker face was my mother. When I mentioned this to her, Zarin said: “You can never lie to another liar.”

  Having Zarin in my life broke the monotony of working at the deli and lightened the crushing grief that had come with my father’s death, a feeling that could go away for days on end and then suddenly return the moment I saw a man with salt-and-pepper hair or smelled the pages of an old book.

  My mother, who had spoken to Khorshed Aunty a few times after I introduced them, didn’t approve of my friendship with Zarin.