A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  There was enough room for me to slip in, to carefully raise her head and place it in my lap. I stroked her sweaty forehead. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “I … I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “I was so out of it. I am so out of it now.”

  “I need to take you back home.” I kept my voice low, gentle. “Your aunt was the one who called me about you missing. She is really worried.”

  Groaning, Zarin finally began rising up. I helped her into a sitting position. In my arms she felt birdlike. Breakable. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she always had been and I had foolishly allowed myself to be thrown off by her sharp words and bravado.

  “She’ll be furious. She’ll turn into an evil Hindi-film stepmother and tell me to take my blackened face back to the gutter where it belongs. She’ll probably be right. You should have let me die, Porus. Because if we go home, she’s going to kill me.”

  “Hush,” I said, even though her words settled uneasily in my belly. “Stop saying such things.” I belted her into the front seat. “We’re going home.”

  * * *

  Khorshed Aunty’s reaction, however, ended up being closer to what Zarin had predicted. Seconds after verifying that both of us were still standing, her sharp little eyes narrowed in on other things—Zarin’s oddly swaying gait, the rip at the hem of her abaya. Her nose wrinkled and I knew she could smell the grease from the chicken as well.

  “Where were you?” Her voice was high and thin. “Where were you, worthless girl? Who did you blacken your face with?”

  In other circumstances, I might have laughed at how accurately Zarin had predicted her masi’s reaction and her words. Unfortunately, there was nothing funny about the way I had found Rizvi hovering over her semiconscious body, nothing funny about what was happening now, in Zarin’s own house, where instead of checking her to see if she was okay, her own aunt looked like she was about to hit her.

  Outside the window, the sky was turning a reddish brown, a shade darker than the housecoat Khorshed Aunty was now wearing, a color that I knew would coat the apartment buildings, the trees, and the cars in shades of rust.

  It was the shade that colored Rusi Uncle’s shiny bald head and narrow cheeks when he entered the apartment several minutes later, filling in the craters left by smallpox, giving the illusion of smoothness. “Khorshed,” he said breathlessly. “I was in a meeting. I left as soon as—”

  “Finally,” she interrupted, and then laughed, high and strange. “Finally the lord of Lahm b’Ajin shows up at his humble abode.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Now.” She turned sideways and, for the first time, Rusi Uncle seemed to notice that he had an audience. He glanced quickly at me and then at Zarin, who was still wearing her abaya and scarf and clutching her schoolbag.

  “Now maybe you will tell the truth.” Khorshed Aunty pointed at her husband, but kept her eyes on me. “Tell him! Tell him where you’ve been this whole time!”

  Rusi Uncle fumbled with the bag in his hands before placing it on the sofa. “Khorshed, what is—”

  “Ask him!” Khorshed Aunty shouted. A vein protruded from her temple and the side of her neck. “Ask this foolish boy how long it took him to bring her here after I called! Not that you would care, would you, Rusi? Busy, busy, always busy. So busy that you don’t even care that your own niece hasn’t come back home by the time she was supposed to.”

  “Aunty, I was at work,” I pleaded. “I couldn’t leave for another half hour, forty-five minutes. When I reached the school she was waiting there with two other girls. The bus was late and—”

  “Rubbish! The buses are always idling there! If you have to lie, at least do it properly.”

  A cool draft of air breezed through my sticky shirt before the AC made a soft clicking noise and then shut off.

  My hands fisted and for the first time I felt the scrapes on them. Fresh ones, some of them still red. I did not even remember how they had come about. Did not recall the shards of glass slicing my skin open after I threw the rock through Rizvi’s window and reached in with my arm to unlock the door. I had never even felt the pain. Zarin drew a curve in the carpet with her toe. Her hands shook the way I’d seen them before when she was craving a cigarette. A lump lodged in my throat.

  “What happened to your hands?” Rusi Uncle’s gaze had moved from Zarin to me. His voice was full of suspicion.

  “Accident at work. Happens sometimes.”

  Next to me, I could feel Zarin shaking even more, even though she didn’t speak and kept her gaze lowered to the floor.

  Rusi Uncle took a step toward her. “Zarin, dikra, what’s wrong? Come on, you can tell Rusi Masa.”

  Maybe she would have if it had been just him. I’d always gotten the sense that Zarin’s relationship with her uncle would have been a lot better had it not been for the man’s wife.

  Zarin stepped back, stumbled. I wrapped an arm around her out of instinct. The air around us smelled of barbecue sauce and sweat.

  “Bathroom,” Zarin whispered. It was the first time she had spoken since we’d stepped into the house fifteen minutes before. She slipped out from under my arm and for a few seconds I continued standing there, clutching air.

  “Why are you still wearing your abaya?” Khorshed Aunty shouted. “Hang it up in the cupboard, at least! And why are you taking your bag with you?”

  Zarin looked back once and then dropped her bag in the corridor outside the bathroom with a thud. Seconds later, a strip of light peered from under the door, followed by the whir of the exhaust fan. I frowned, feeling anxiety creep in, the same sort that had congealed in my belly when her aunt first called me, but this time stronger, so strong that it felt like a stone.

  Khorshed Aunty’s nails dug into my arm. “My niece stumbled out of your car like a drug addict and you tell me that she was at debate practice! Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I did not notice the tear in her abaya?”

  I resisted the urge to throw her off. It suddenly began to make perfect sense to me why Zarin hated this woman so much. Don’t you care? I wanted to shout. Don’t you care that she’s in pain?

  “I swear to God, Aunty, she’s okay,” I said tightly. “She probably snagged it on something sharp and—”

  “Lies!” The blood drained from Khorshed Aunty’s lips. “Lies you both are telling me!”

  But then Rusi Uncle stepped up, carefully placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders, and pressed his thumbs into the flesh there. He murmured softly into her ear. Over and over, until her grip on my arm loosened. He pulled her arms back to her sides and gently rubbed. It wasn’t an unusual action; I remembered my father doing the same thing for my mother when she was angry, but the resignation on Rusi Uncle’s face told me that he had done this more times than he would have liked to.

  Finally, he looked up at me. “If anything has happened to our niece, we have the right to know. You must tell us the truth, Porus. Was Zarin at debate practice?”

  His voice was so kind that for a moment I faltered, almost telling him everything that I had seen. But then I remembered Zarin’s face and how terrified she had been.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course she was.”

  His eyes hardened at my reply and for a second I thought he would hit me. But he continued stroking his wife’s trembling hands. “Don’t lie to me. Where was she, really? With a boy? You must tell the truth now, Porus.”

  “I am telling the truth,” I insisted, wishing I was half as strong as my father when it came to convincing people. I wanted to close my eyes and seek out Pappa’s presence the way I did some mornings while praying before the altar in our apartment’s small kitchen. Pappa would know what to do, would know exactly what to say. I glanced quickly at the bathroom door. If Zarin and I had been alone, I would have knocked, hammered on it until she came out or let me in. But here, in front of her aunt and uncle, things felt different. I was no longer a friend but a stranger, intruding on a family’s private embarrassment.
I wondered if Zarin too felt this way, like a perpetual intruder between this man, this woman, and their dysfunctional relationship.

  I caught Rusi Uncle’s face, reflected in the window. When my eyes met his, he looked away.

  “You can go now,” Rusi Uncle told me in a cold voice. He made sure he didn’t look at me again. “Thank you for bringing Zarin home.”

  I hesitated. “Uncle, I—”

  “Go, Porus.” The bite in his voice made me step back. “Just go.”

  Zarin

  There was no blood. Not the way there was supposed to be if you were a virgin. I’d heard whispers at school that some girls didn’t bleed, didn’t even realize something had happened to them until they were a few weeks in, like Maha Chowdhury’s cousin.

  My period, which came a couple of days later, eventually proved that nothing had happened with Rizvi on that day, nothing at least that would have me withdrawing from school with the excuse of a swollen belly. But something had. Something that made me wake up at night, sweating and sick, vomiting the dinner I’d eaten hours before.

  “Stomach flu,” Dr. Thomas said, when Masa took me to see him. “A pretty bad one, but nothing serious. It could have been something she ate outside.”

  But it was more than a bug and both Masa and Masi knew this.

  “What happened that day?” Masi kept asking me, over and over again. “Was it a boy? Tell me!”

  “Nothing happened!” I kept telling her in response. “I was sick, okay?”

  I braced myself for her blows—a favorite tactic of hers to coax the truth out of me—but to my surprise, Masi did not raise her hand. It was almost as if she was afraid to touch me now, as if she could somehow sense the invisible stain that Rizvi had left on my skin.

  “I tried,” I heard her telling Masa over the phone. “I tried so hard, Rusi, but she won’t tell me anything.”

  When Masa came home that evening, he found me sitting on my bed, my Physics textbook on my lap.

  “Zarin.” Masa started to reach out for me, but his hand paused when I inched away from his touch. “Zarin, dikra, will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  “N-nothing,” I said, hating the way my voice shook in front of him. “I’m s-studying. I have my Physics mock exam on Wednesday.”

  “Zarin, we are worried about you … You aren’t acting like yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted. “It’s the flu.”

  Silence filled the room.

  “Maybe you will tell me later,” he said after a pause. His voice was so quiet that I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to himself or to me. “You will tell me later, won’t you?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.” I stared at the words in the book, the letters blurring together, until I finally heard his receding footsteps. My stomach churned and for a second I was afraid I would throw up again. I tossed the book aside and closed my eyes.

  What did he want me to say? That I had had a crush on a boy who later tried to rape me? That I’d ignored Porus’s warnings, the rumors, and worst, my own instincts?

  Where did he touch you? I could imagine the religious police asking. With what body part? Rizvi would deny everything, or worse, hire a lawyer who would point out that I was the one who had initiated things that first time at the deli. That everything that had happened afterward was consensual, even though I only wanted to kiss Rizvi (a thought that now made me want to hurl).

  Who do you think they will believe? a voice that sounded like Mishal Al-Abdulaziz’s taunted in my head. A good-looking all-rounder who is head boy at his school, or a female who everyone thinks is a few rungs short of juvenile delinquency?

  “You are girls,” I remembered the Physics teacher announcing one day when we were especially rowdy in class. “You can’t get away with acting like boys.”

  In the days that followed, Masa and Masi did not approach me again. They watched me from a distance, evading my gaze when I looked at them, whispering furiously whenever I exited a room: Did she tell you what happened that day? or Was she screaming in her sleep again?

  It reminded me of the time I first moved to Cama colony after my mother’s death, when I sat for days in one corner of my aunt and uncle’s apartment after the funeral. “She doesn’t remember?” Masi had sounded furious. “How can she not remember?”—and I knew that they were talking about the way my mother had died and how they found me next to her, covered in blood. They said I spoke to no one afterward and that I hadn’t even cried.

  At the Tower of Silence in Mumbai, where the funeral had been held, I could not look at my mother’s face. The pallbearers brought in a dog on a leash, a skinny beast covered with white fur and with two brown spots over its eyes. The dog sniffed my mother’s toes and then her ankles, testing for a sign, any sign that she might still be alive. But she wasn’t and that was confirmed in the prayers that the masked priests recited, loud words that were meant to stitch the skin over the wound of her earthly sins.

  Post-Rizvi, nightmares—especially those involving my mother—had become more frequent. In my dreams, my mother hummed softly the way she had on my fourth birthday, her fingers brushing the smooth marble wall of our apartment building in Jeddah. My mother, singing, deaf to my cries while I crawled naked in the stairwell after her, trying to evade the voices I could hear behind me—voices that laughed at me and called out my name.

  Almost a week after the incident, I saw Rizvi inside the girls’ school, lounging against the wall outside the ground-floor auditorium, where he’d come to pick up Asma after our Physics mock exam. His hair was neatly combed and his head boy blazer was buttoned and pressed. His nose, I noticed with some satisfaction, was still in a splint. My heart tightened at the thought of Porus doing this. Going all Farhad over me even though I didn’t deserve it.

  “Hey,” Rizvi called out to me, as if we were old friends or perhaps more. “How was your exam?”

  Bile rose to my throat. I had fully intended to duck my head and walk away as quickly as possible, but the audacity with which he addressed me left me stunned for an instant, incapable of movement.

  A few feet behind him, I noticed several girls from my class huddled together. They were staring at us and whispering among themselves, their post-exam discussions clearly forgotten. Mishal didn’t take part in the conversation. She had grown somewhat silent after Abdullah and I had broken up, completely ignoring me now that I was no longer associated with her brother. Sometimes, however, when I turned around, I would catch her watching me with a strange expression on her face. It was the way she was watching me now. Like I was a train wreck waiting to happen—a thing she couldn’t take her eyes off, even though the thought of it sickened her.

  Without taking my eyes off Mishal, I unzipped my bag and pulled them out: a pair of knitting needles that glinted silver in the afternoon light, needles that I had carried with me ever since the incident in Rizvi’s car.

  “Stay away from me,” I told him. It was as if another person had taken over me: a girl whose voice was cold and hard, one who could steadily hold something long and sharp inches away from a boy’s shocked eyes, even though everything else inside her was shaking. “If you come any closer, I’ll poke your eyes out.”

  Rizvi’s mouth hardened. He forced a laugh. He raised his hands and slowly began to back away. “Chill, baby,” he said in a voice that would make its way back to the eavesdropping girls. “I wanted to say hello.”

  “There’s no need to,” I said equally loudly. “I’ve already said good-bye.”

  I stalked off, ignoring the girls who were now gawking at me with a mix of awe and resentment. Voices broke out behind me.

  “Wha … Did she?”

  “Why was she threatening him?”

  “Wait a minute … Is she crying?”

  Someone from the crowd called out my name. I broke into a run, scattering groups of girls, racing until I reached the very end of the long corridor and threw open the door to the girls’ bathroom. Ignoring the startled glanc
e of a small Class IX girl brushing her hair in front of the mirror, I locked myself in a stall. Here, in a musty cubicle of four gray walls, surrounded by the sounds of ripping toilet paper, flushes, and running water, I finally allowed myself to convulse. To slide down the door with burning eyes, my cries muffled by the top of my backpack.

  Porus

  “I don’t know,” I heard my mother whisper over the phone in the living room. “He hasn’t told me a thing. Not one thing, Khorshed dear.”

  Not one thing, despite her constant prodding. “What happened that day?” “You must tell me what happened, Porus. I am your mother!” “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”

  What they really wanted to know was if something bad had happened. Something that would necessitate an abortion or marrying Zarin off as soon as possible.

  “It was a debate,” I lied over and over again. “I’ve already told you this.”

  But in truth, I did not know. Did not know for sure what had happened in the blank space of time between Khorshed Aunty’s panicked phone call to me at the deli and finding Zarin outside that warehouse, lying dazed in the black car, her white salwar scrunched around her ankles, Rizvi lying on top of her, his pants unzipped.

  I saw him again, a week later, when I went to pick up Zarin from school, white tape holding the bridge of his nose, his lower lip still swollen. I wondered if the police had caught him lurking around the warehouse, if they had found any trace of the drug he used on Zarin. Though maybe he got rid of the evidence and they had to let him go.

  It happened sometimes, my boss, Hamza, said. And it wasn’t always the police’s fault. “I have a friend. He’s a policeman, yeah? So many times he wants to keep a boy in jail. Alcohol—even drugs! But the boy’s father knows someone high up in the ministry and then khallas. Charges dropped! It’s about wasta, my friend. About who you know.”