A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  My anger dissipated when I watched his eyes darken, the pupils dilating ever so slightly. A smile hovered on his face before he launched himself at me, the kisses deep and rough, the way I liked them. It scared me—this sexual pull he seemed to have on me—how it grew harder and harder to deny him from doing things that I would never have allowed Abdullah or any other guy to do.

  “Stop!” I gasped out. I tugged at his fingers, removing them from where they’d been rubbing up against my underwear. “This is … It’s our second date, Farhan.”

  His eyes hardened for a split second, but it happened so fast that I thought it was my imagination. He shook his head and laughed. “Chill, Zarin. You’re like a little cat at times. So skittish and ready to pounce. You need to relax a little more.”

  Days later, there was a new rumor flying in school about him. About how he had gotten a Class IX girl pregnant several months before and how she’d had to be flown to India to get an abortion. The news had come from Mishal, who claimed to have read it on an online blog and then spread it across the classroom before the girl’s cousin, Maha Chowdhury, had any chance to do damage control. “It was a basic gallbladder operation!” she sputtered at Mishal. “You know how bad Jeddah water is! It gives you stones!”

  “It g-gives y-you s-s-stones!” Mishal had mimicked back, which made most of her friends burst out laughing. “If it was that basic, it would’ve been cheaper to have the operation done here in Jeddah. Why fly to India for it?” The rest of the girls either watched in silence or went on with eating their lunch. No one interfered. It was the way things worked at Qala Academy, or at least in our classroom, when Mishal decided to sink her claws into someone.

  “Stop it, Mishal,” I’d said when Maha burst into tears. I also told Mishal in no uncertain terms what she could do with herself and her rumors.

  It was perhaps Mishal’s good fortune and my bad one that Khan Madam entered the class at that very moment to fetch her missing spectacles and heard my last sentence. I was made to kneel outside the classroom for the rest of the day with my arms in the air for “talking like a foul-mouthed ruffian!”

  * * *

  The trouble with rumors was that they had the tendency to stick. To coat over your logic like tea stains on teeth. What was even more troublesome was that there had been times in the past when they turned out to be accurate. Like the time Mishal told everyone about Chandni Chillarwalla running away from home to avoid getting engaged to a guy her parents wanted her to marry. Chandni herself confirmed the rumor a year later in a truth or dare game during a free period. The one about the head girl’s multiple boyfriends also appeared to be true. I had seen it for myself, long before, when I was in Class IX—Nadia slipping away from the line of girls trooping in through the school gates and into a strange car. Even the story Mishal had spread about me going out with that Syrian guy way back when had been true, though I never knew where she’d gotten that info from.

  Of course, rumors often had a way of floating into the boys’ section. Here, they got screwed up to the point of ridiculousness. For instance, according to Farhan Rizvi, Chandni Chillarwalla did not run away to her friend’s house, but tried to elope with a secret boyfriend. Head girl Durrani not only had multiple boyfriends, but had also participated in a sex tape with a creepy guy from Qala Academy. As for me? I had gone out with two Syrian guys at the same time. And my cigarettes contained weed, not tobacco.

  I laughed when Rizvi told me about this on our third date—in his e-mail he’d called it a late picnic lunch, which had turned out to be a large tray of barbecued chicken and French fries inside his car at the old Hanoody warehouse near Porus’s apartment building.

  “Who told you this?” I tossed a chicken bone back into the tray. “I mean, weed? Seriously?”

  Rizvi simply shrugged in response and laughed. His lips glistened with grease from the chicken. A bit of barbecue sauce clung to the edge of his mouth. If it had been Abdullah, I would have maybe raised a finger, playfully flicked the reddish-brown speck from the spot and put it on my tongue. With Rizvi, however, I didn’t. Something in his expression warned me against it, or maybe it was the rumors again, crawling insectlike under my skin.

  To distract myself, I looked around the barren, sandy area that made up the warehouse parking lot. Cigarette butts littered the place, along with old soda cans and aluminum foil wadded up in shining wrinkled balls. Masi, who used and reused aluminum foil at home and covered her stove with it, would have cursed at the waste.

  Thoughts of my aunt led to thoughts of my uncle, who had, over the past week or so, tried to get me to confide in him.

  “He’s a nice boy, no, that Porus?” Masa had asked. “A good hard worker.”

  “Yeah, I guess he works hard.”

  “A nice, nice boy. Good. Decent. You don’t find boys like that these days.”

  I shrugged, wondering where this was leading. “Maybe.”

  He cleared his throat. “Do you have something you want to tell me, Zarin, dikra?”

  The Boyfriend Question. I knew it from the way his Adam’s apple moved in his throat, the gentle clicking sound he made with his mouth closed.

  “No, Rusi Masa.” I had looked right into his eyes as I said it. “I don’t.”

  It had been the truth. Abdullah and I were done, and as tipsy as Rizvi’s kisses may have made me, we’d only been on two dates so far. As for Porus … I shook my head. I couldn’t think of him now. I wouldn’t.

  I watched Rizvi rip into the last chicken leg in the tray, sucking at the gray bone once the meat was gone until I could see the dark marrow in its center. Something about the image stirred an old memory I had of him, making the words slip out before I could stop them.

  “I saw you here with a girl once,” I said. “She was crying.”

  His shoulders—those broad shoulders that I’d admired as a fourteen-year-old—tightened for a brief moment. He tossed the bone back on the tray. “Breakups can be tough at times,” he said. “What can you do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What can you do?”

  He smiled at me and I smiled back, but there was a slight shift in the air, a tension that had not been there before. I wondered if the girl had been the one Mishal had been telling everyone about: Maha Chowdhury’s pregnant cousin.

  My skin prickled and for a second I was tempted to ask him to drive me home. I shook my head, irritated by this sudden rush of nerves.

  “Thanks for the lunch.” I blotted the grease from my lips with a paper napkin. “It was really good, even though the chicken does feel like lead in my stomach,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  He stared at me for a moment, and that’s when I saw it again: that quick flash of ice in his eyes, the slightest narrowing of his lips before he smiled.

  “You’re welcome. Do you want a drink? I’m thirsty after eating this food.” He turned around and rummaged inside his backpack. A rustle of tins and paper before I heard the familiar hiss of a soda can being opened.

  He handed me the Vimto. “You said you liked this one, right?” He removed another can for himself and popped it open. He grinned at me and a dimple formed deep in his left cheek. “Will be a good palate cleanser. Hopefully we both don’t taste too much like chicken.”

  I glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 3 p.m. I had told Masi that I would be held up by debate practice today; I had to be back home in half an hour. “Fine,” I relented. “But one drink.”

  There were a few things I remembered clearly after that. The taste of the grape soda. Fizzy, sickly sweet, warmed by the sun. The feel of his hand, hot with grease, sliding up my salwar-clad thigh. “It’s okay, Zarin,” he whispered. “Relax.”

  * * *

  I was dreaming of the man again. Tossing me high into the air. Majhi mulgi, he said in Marathi. My girl.

  “Where did you hear this phrase?” Masa had asked when I’d asked him for the meaning one day.

  “Nowhere,” I’d said.

  As always, the man w
as a shadow, leaning over me at first, draping me in darkness until he threw me up, high, high, high, so high I could almost touch the glowing bulb overhead and the moths dancing around it. Touch it, he coaxed. Go on, touch the light.

  I reached out with a hand.

  In the background, a woman screamed. Stop it. Stop it. Was it Masi? I could not tell.

  The leather inside the car burned hot from lying too long in the Jeddah sun. My head pounded and I tried to move. But my limbs felt like four bags of wet cement. Something scraped against my knee.

  A curse and then the shadowy man turned into a boy with shining golden eyes.

  * * *

  I saw the priest at our fire temple.

  Daily prayer, he said, was not the only requirement for crossing the Chinvat Bridge successfully. Zoroastrians also had to live a life that embodied three important precepts: humata, hukta, and huvareshta.

  Humata: good thoughts. For Masi: hypocrite. For Masa: spineless. For Porus: nagging.

  Hukta: good words. For Masi: “Kindly do me a favor and buzz off.” For Masa: “Quit the concerned-parent act.” For Porus: “Find someone else to pester, Mr. High-and-Mighty.”

  Huvareshta: good deeds. I saw Masi searching for the malido in the fridge—the malido I had intentionally fed the crows by the kitchen window. I mimicked Masi’s screechy falsetto in front of Masa, watching him grow scarlet with rage. I blew cigarette smoke into Porus’s face and laughed when he coughed.

  * * *

  I saw the boy with the golden eyes again. His hand inched up my bare knee, fiddled with the loop of my underwear.

  Then light burst through: a thousand brilliant bits of glass. Air washed over my face: warm and smoky, with specks of sand.

  Shadows struggled above. When they dispersed, there was blood on the face of the golden-eyed boy. I wondered if he was a vampire, and the silly thought made me want to laugh. Laugh, laugh, and laugh until I could scream, scream, and scream.

  Cloth slid over my skin once more, followed by the sound of metal buttons clicking, up to my throat. A voice whispered in my ear, as soft as flowers: “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

  I don’t know, I wanted to say.

  But my tongue was tied and I could not whisper back.

  Porus

  I knew something was wrong the moment I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket. Call it gut instinct. Or maybe it was the knot I’d been carrying around in my stomach ever since the day Zarin had kissed me and then started dating Farhan Rizvi. Instead of ignoring the instrument the way I normally would have while working, I put down the cardboard box I was holding and picked up.

  “Hello? Porus?” A familiar voice, brusque and anxious. Zarin’s aunt. “Is Zarin there with you?”

  “No, Khorshed Aunty. I’m at work. I haven’t seen her this afternoon.” I flattened my back to the wall next to the loading dock outside the deli and pressed the phone to my ear, ignoring Ali, who was glaring at me for leaving my box in the truck. I raised a finger: one minute. Ali rolled his eyes and nudged me hard with an elbow on his way back inside.

  “She hasn’t come home. She said she had debate practice, but that should have been over an hour ago. She isn’t even picking up her phone.”

  I bit my lip. “Debate practice” had been Zarin’s excuse for sneaking out on dates with Abdullah in the past. I guessed she was using the same MO with Rizvi.

  “She wouldn’t notice if I was gone,” Zarin had said of her masi. “There have been times when I’ve come home and found her so drugged up from her pills that she barely knew I was there. She’d wake up and start asking me what I thought of the lunch she’d cooked up. Like I could even think of eating after seeing her like that.”

  “It must be the buses. Sometimes they can b-be late,” I stammered now, hoping Khorshed Aunty wouldn’t question my lie. The buses were, to my knowledge, never late. And boy or no boy, Zarin had never taken this long to get home before.

  At the other end of the line, there was a barely suppressed sob. “Could you … could you go and check on her. I’m so sorry to bother you like this, dear, but Rusi is not picking up his phone at the office … I … I didn’t know who else to call.”

  As badly as this woman had treated Zarin, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her now. I was also worried. In India, as terrible as the red tape could be at times, we could have tried calling the police, tried filing a missing person’s report. In Saudi Arabia, things were different. Neither of us knew enough Arabic to communicate with the authorities. And if the religious police got involved, there was no saying what would happen.

  Zarin liked to talk about them dismissively, telling me that nothing would go wrong, that Jeddah wasn’t as heavily regulated as the capital city, Riyadh, where the Hai’a was headquartered. But I’d heard stories at the deli about surprise raids at homes over here, based on a tip about alcohol or drugs. I’d also read articles online about young Saudi and expat couples getting arrested at coffee shops for “acting suspiciously” and being taken for interrogation to the Hai’a office in Jeddah. In extreme cases, involving adultery, the couple was imprisoned or sentenced to multiple lashings. Zarin knew a little Arabic, but not enough to explain herself in a scenario like this. What if they misunderstood her? Or what if they didn’t ask for any explanation and simply assumed the worst? As much as I despised Rizvi, there was no way I wanted to see Zarin get into trouble with the authorities for going out with him.

  “Leave everything to me, Aunty.” The words settled heavily in my gut. “I’ll find her. I promise.”

  I hung up and instantly dialed Zarin’s number. A couple of rings later, it went to voice mail.

  I swore out loud, unable to think of how else I could reach her. I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything she’d ever told me about Farhan Rizvi, everything I’d heard from the boys at the deli. My mind switched over to the first time I’d ever seen the guy. Sunglasses. Crying girl. Black car. Warehouse.

  I shot a glance at Ali, who was unloading the final box of Swiss cheese from the delivery truck. “I have to go,” I told him.

  “What?” Ali’s face was red with effort. “You can’t ditch work like that! The boss will have your hide.”

  “It’s an emergency. My mother.” The lie fell easily from my lips, eliminating the need to tell him anything else. “I really need to go. I’ll take your next shift, I promise.”

  Ali frowned and opened his mouth as if to say something.

  I didn’t wait to find out what it was.

  * * *

  On a normal day, it would have taken me twelve minutes to get to the warehouse. Today, it took nine. If I hadn’t been contemplating the various horrific scenarios I could possibly find Zarin in, I would have cheered over the fact that my car hadn’t given me an ounce of trouble the entire ride.

  Outside the car, the sun burned. If I closed my eyes, I knew it would turn red against my eyelids. I squinted in the light glinting against a shard of glass near the rusted warehouse gates and spotted a black car in the distance, amid the dusty buildings.

  I burst out, my sneakers pounding the tarmac, and paused a few feet away, taking in the scene. A shadow moved in the back seat of the black car. Rizvi. He raised his hand and brought it down, as if hitting something. Someone. I didn’t try opening the door. I didn’t even think before reaching down to pick up a rock from the debris surrounding the building and smashing it through his window.

  * * *

  What had he done to her?

  How far had he gone?

  I didn’t know. Couldn’t be sure. After breaking Rizvi’s window and then his nose, I didn’t even have the time to check Zarin for bruises. To my surprise, Rizvi didn’t try to fight back. He held on to his broken septum and whimpered.

  If it hadn’t been for the green-and-white police car I’d seen a few blocks from the warehouse—a restless shurta who seemed keen on issuing multiple parking tickets that afternoon—I knew I would have killed Rizvi.

  I pulled Zarin�
�s clothes back into place and buttoned her abaya shut before carrying her to my car. She was heavy for someone so small. Or maybe it was the effects of whatever drug he’d given her. I carefully laid her on the back seat of my car. I was close enough to smell barbecued chicken and, under that, a hint of Pond’s powder. I tried to hold on to that faint floral fragrance, to the first time I’d smelled it as a boy, and then the other time, the week before, when she’d buried her fingers in my hair and fused her lips with mine.

  “Shh,” I whispered when she made a noise. “You’re safe. You’re safe now.”

  There was no way I could take her home like this. If I’d lived alone, I could have taken her back to my apartment, but I lived with my mother and she would be there and there was no way I could explain anything to her without the news getting back to Zarin’s family. The best I could do was drive around and wait for the effects of the drug to wear off.

  At the traffic signal a few blocks from the warehouse, I saw the cop again, this time in the car right next to mine. I kept facing forward. The air was sour and rippled with heat, blurring the road and cars ahead of me. My clothes stuck to my back. Every breath felt like I was inhaling sweat. My right eye twitched—a trait Mamma attributed to nerves, Pappa to bad luck or danger. I gritted my teeth. Now wasn’t the time to think of cursed lemons or black cats. Casually, I glanced sideways. The shurta was staring at something on his cell phone. Then, as if sensing my gaze, he looked up and nodded.

  I nodded back and turned to face the traffic lights again. A drop of sweat inched down my temple and slid toward my ear.

  It took every bit of my willpower not to gun the engine when the light turned green, to look left and then right and gradually release the brakes, moving forward, merging with the traffic like I was a normal teenage guy headed back home from school or work and not carrying a drowsy girl in the back seat of my car.

  A few minutes in, Zarin began stirring in the back. “Porus?” Her voice was hoarse. “Is it you? Am I in your car?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Don’t … don’t sit up yet.” I drove around a few more blocks before finally pulling into a parking spot at a quiet apartment building. When I opened the back passenger door, she was still lying on the cloth-covered seats, her eyes closed. It was the first time she’d willingly complied with any of my instructions. Or maybe she was too tired to fight.