A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  The only time I heard Abdullah speak up was when Bilal and Rizvi said something about getting even with Zarin’s new boyfriend.

  “Do you want to go to jail?” My brother’s angry voice made me stiffen next to the door behind which I was eavesdropping. “There’s only so much your daddy’s wasta can do to keep you out of it, Farhan.”

  “Since when did you start wearing your mommy’s bangles, Abdullah?” Rizvi sneered back.

  Over the next week or so, stories began emerging about fights breaking out near the Hanoody warehouse on the edge of Aziziyah. Cars honking at each other, racing on the narrow street, heedless of the traffic coming in the opposite direction. Though Rizvi’s name was never mentioned, I had a strong feeling it had something to do with him—a tactic maybe to intimidate Porus, who supposedly lived nearby.

  “I could hear the tires screeching on the road and I live on the fourth floor!” a girl from XI B said. “Horrible noises. They wouldn’t even stop for the police!”

  A week after she and Porus became an item, Zarin was absent again.

  “Another sick day?” Layla asked me during break. She pointed toward Zarin’s empty desk.

  “Hunt for another boyfriend?” someone guessed.

  “Why? Is the deli boy dead?”

  In the row ahead of ours, Alisha turned in her seat to glare at Layla, but otherwise said nothing.

  “Look!” Layla nudged me. I turned. Zarin had entered the classroom, schoolbag on her shoulders, a pink late slip crumpled in her hand.

  “Hi,” Alisha said. “We didn’t see you yesterday. What happened?”

  “I was sick,” she said. “Had to see a doctor.”

  “A gynecologist?” someone behind me muttered. Giggles erupted.

  I bit my lip.

  Zarin, to her credit, completely ignored us. She dropped her bag on the empty seat by the door and began removing her books and pencil case.

  “Should we ask her about her boyfriend?” Layla’s voice was quiet with suppressed laughter. “Maybe if we—”

  “Maybe if you what?”

  I turned around to see Zarin standing behind Layla, her hands clenched into fists, her lips white.

  “Nothing to do with you.” Layla leaned back a little, her voice brusque, nervous.

  “Oh really?”

  The girls in the row in front of us were watching now, spectators to an unexpected catfight.

  “How about I pull your precious hair out of your precious little scarf?” Zarin pushed Layla so hard that she nearly toppled into me, along with her chair.

  “Zarin.” Alisha rose from her chair. “Zarin, please calm down.”

  “Why?” Zarin shouted. “So you can continue your gossip fest?”

  “It’s not like we’re saying anything wrong!” Layla’s cheeks were two large splotches of red. “You’re the one messing around with these guys. What do you expect people to say about you?”

  It was then that I noticed the lack of talk and laughter around us, the breath humming in the silent classroom along with the AC. Outside the door, noises buzzed: the chatter of girls and the clatter of their lunch boxes, the squeak of their sneakers across the tiles in the corridor, the thump of balls on tarmac, clanging hard against the backboards of the old basketball hoops on the grounds outside our classroom. My heart strummed.

  Zarin stared at us for a few seconds, her eyes finally falling on me. Mixed in with the anger on her face was desperation. It was a look that, for one awful moment, reminded me of Mother, six years before, when she’d begged Father not to take a second wife.

  “Forget it,” she said quietly.

  She stalked out of the room, leaving behind her bag and books, not returning again until the end of the last period, when it was time to go home.

  Farhan

  The men Bilal had recommended for the job did not tell me their names. “Safer that way.” Bilal gave me his sly, too-high smile. “What use will you have for their names anyway? All you should care about is that they’re willing to do this for you and that they know how to keep their mouths shut.”

  I stared at them now, one tall and gangly, the other shorter and stockier, both eyeing the bandage on my nose before examining the hundred-riyal notes I gave them for the advance. I’d had to filch from Abba’s pockets this time around, but as luck would have it, my father never noticed the missing money.

  The Tall One licked his dry lips and pulled out a ski mask. “Here. Wear this.” His tone was clipped, held no room for excuses. I put it on, wrinkling my nose against the slightly musty smell of the cloth.

  “You have to go with them,” Bilal had told me soothingly. “To identify the target. You don’t have to do anything else.”

  He must have thought I was as high as he was if he ever expected me to believe that theory. I knew I was there as insurance. In case the police showed up and we got caught. It would be easier for them to hand me in to the cops—“He was involved as well”—instead of taking the entire rap themselves.

  But luckily for them, it didn’t matter. I wanted to go. I wanted to look at the deli boy when they beat him to a pulp. I brushed a finger over my nose, which would never be straight again. I wanted my revenge.

  It had been easier with Zarin. A few rumors, a bunch of anonymous tips to that girlie gossip blog and her whole reputation, not that much to begin with, had been in shreds. From what I’d heard Asma telling her friends—telling anyone who would listen, really—Zarin had turned into a wreck and had once been heard crying in a bathroom.

  There were times when I wondered if it was true—if she really was crying—when something that felt a lot like guilt twisted inside me. Does revenge matter anymore? The voice in my head sounded a lot like Abdullah’s. It wasn’t like my reputation was affected. The deli boy hadn’t even said anything. I opened my mouth, ready to call the whole thing off. But then the car jerked to a stop and I realized we were already a block away from the Lahm b’Ajin shop in Aziziyah.

  “Are you ready?” the Tall One asked us before slipping brass knuckles onto his left hand.

  “These guys, they’re good at what they do,” I remembered Bilal telling me. “You don’t want to make them angry.”

  I swallowed hard. It was too late to back out now.

  A man wearing the white deli hat and uniform and a stained apron emerged from the front with a large package, which he delivered to a waiting car.

  “That one?” A hard nudge to my side from the Short One, who was sitting next to me in the back. He nodded toward the employee who was now heading back inside.

  I shook my head. No. The boy who had beat me up was taller, broader. I examined the Short One’s much smaller frame and wondered if he or the Tall One would really be able to take on Zarin’s new boyfriend. But then, as if sensing my doubts, the Short One’s eyes squinted as if he was grinning behind his ski mask, and he pulled out something from his bag. The cricket bat looked old, but sturdy. Enough to turn spinners into sixers and bash in hard Parsi-boy heads.

  Adrenaline coursed through me and I didn’t even care that I was wearing the stuffy ski mask. The cashier looked up at us when we entered—three masked men, the Short One with his cricket bat, the Tall One with a hockey stick. I had been annoyed when Bilal had warned me not to take any weapons for myself. “Safer that way,” Bilal had said. “You be their lookout and stay away from the actual fighting. If you get any more bruises, your daddy-ji will begin to ask questions, and we don’t want that, do we?”

  But now, faced with the sole employee at the deli at that time in the afternoon, I was a little relieved that I didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t even look at me, his eyes trained on the hockey stick the Tall One casually waved in his face. He raised his hands in the air. “I will give you the—”

  “Porus,” the Tall One interrupted. “Indian boy. We are looking for him.”

  The man, who was also an Indian, frowned slightly. His mouth tightened before he replied, “No one of that name works here.”

&nbs
p; The Tall One glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. A mistake? I shook my head.

  He turned back to the cashier. “Look here. Tell us where Porus is and no one else gets hurt. You understand me?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.” The man refused to budge, refused to tell us where Porus was.

  “Ali, huh?” The Tall One traced a finger over the man’s name stitched on the apron. His hand arched up, making contact with the man’s chin and then his nose. Two quick jabs that had the latter clutching his face, eyes watering. “Or maybe your name is Porus and you are lying to me.”

  Behind me, the Short One casually picked up the company’s funny little figurine near the display case—a grinning cow holding the green-and-yellow Lahm b’Ajin flag—and threw it against the window, cracking the pane.

  “No!” the cashier shouted. “Help!”

  But there would be no help forthcoming. The deli was housed at the bottom of an old apartment building that had once belonged to the owner’s grandfather. There were no other shops in the vicinity, and at this time in the afternoon, the roads were silent.

  Bilal had been careful to wait until the deli’s owner had a day off. “You never know with that old man,” Bilal had said. “He used to be in the military at some point.”

  But today, apart from the cashier and our target, there were no other employees inside.

  It was ridiculous how easily the cashier crumpled under the Tall One’s blows, how he began babbling details he’d tried so hard to keep from us before: “Loading dock … back entrance … next to the toilet.”

  Maybe it was easier that Porus’s back was turned when we crept out and that his arms were loaded with a large crate of salami.

  The Tall One did not flinch the way I would have or hesitate when Porus turned around. The flat of the hockey stick smacked Porus’s shoulder first, barely giving the boy any time to express his shock before cracking over his skull. Again and again.

  The crate crashed onto the tarmac. When Porus finally managed to grab the stick with his hands, a thin trail of blood was already running down one side of his face. That’s when the Short One came in with his cricket bat. But by then, Porus was ready, throwing off the Tall One and leaping to his feet to block the Short One’s swings.

  It wasn’t an easy fight. This much I knew from the sweat beading their foreheads. At one point, I even sensed anxiety, the Tall One glancing quickly at the Short One, before they both launched themselves at Porus.

  Porus might have known how to fight. But he hadn’t grown up on the streets, fighting in the gutters. United, Bilal’s men overpowered him with a slam of the cricket bat over his head and the slap of the hockey stick against his jaw, and he collapsed to the ground in a mess of sweat and blood and spittle.

  The Tall One looked at me and nodded. Their job was done. I finally made my way over to the body lying sideways on the ground and leaned over so I could speak in his ear. “An eye for an eye. A nose for a nose,” I said before I kicked him in the face.

  Zarin

  Days passed like liquid tar spreading over the ground. Thick and glutinous, a blackness clinging to them as Masa and Masi continued to go about their lives, pretending as if nothing had happened, until I found one or the other staring at me, as if expecting me to detonate at any second.

  To fill the silence, Masi left the television on in the living room while she worked in the kitchen, sometimes pausing to watch a segment on cooking, or an American talk show where people came to cry over their past lives and traumas. “Airing dirty laundry in public,” Masi said disgustedly, even though she was the only one who wanted to watch the show.

  Sometimes she used the television as a cover to mask the phone calls she made to Porus’s mother from the telephone next to the kitchen. “I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” I heard Masi saying. “I will talk to him if I see him today—make sure he listens to you. Thanks for trying.”

  So now they were trying to turn Porus against me as well. I stood still for a while, watching her put down the phone and then straighten her spine, as if sensing my presence in the corner. I slipped away before she could see me.

  I resisted the urge to pick up my phone and call Porus. I’d taken to calling him these days, late at night, when I jerked awake after nightmares about my mother or Rizvi, a scream choked in my throat. Porus was the one who insisted on me making the phone calls.

  “You need to talk to someone. You can’t keep things bottled up. Besides, I’m pretty much an insomniac these days,” he told me. “When night falls, I think of Pappa and I keep listening for his voice outside my room, talking to a friend on the phone or joking with Mamma. It’s like there is this giant hole in my chest that I can’t fill up no matter what I do. You do a good job of distracting me.”

  He did a good job of distracting me, as well, with silly jokes and outlandish Persian myths. Sometimes we didn’t even talk, but simply listened to each other breathing over the other end of the phone until we fell asleep.

  Once, on a weekday, I surprised him with a phone call when he was taking a break at work. The happiness in his voice made me glad I had, even though I hung up after a short conversation. I didn’t want to get him into any more trouble with his boss, which I knew he had in the past, thanks to his mother telling Masi about it.

  It had been a couple of days since we’d last spoken, mostly because the meds I’d taken for the flu had completely knocked me out of commission, earning me a single night of dreamless sleep.

  I thought of the argument I had had at school with Layla Sharif that morning and shook my head. I shouldn’t have reacted. I should have ignored her. That’s what Porus would have done.

  Only today, when I called to tell him about this, he didn’t pick up.

  * * *

  Hours later, when my cell phone rang, a familiar number flashing on the display, my heart skipped a beat, a slight smile grazing my lips. I shut the textbook I was unsuccessfully trying to study from and picked up the phone. “Hey, Porus, I was—”

  “Stay away from him!” A woman’s voice.

  “Arnavaz Aunty?” I asked, shocked. In the time I had known Porus’s mother, she had rarely spoken to me, and never with such venom in her voice. “What happened? Is Porus okay?”

  “No thanks to you, he is,” his mother spat out. “Ever since he met you he has been ignoring everything around him. His work, his family. Do you know where I spent most of my afternoon? At the hospital where my son was brought in, beaten up and bloody. He won’t even tell me what happened or who he fought with. But I’m no fool. I know this has something to do with you.”

  I tasted metal in my mouth. When I licked my lip, it stung. Somewhere in the background there was a lull in the sound of the television. I sensed another presence in the room, a shadow hovering at the edge of my left eye. Masi.

  “Aunty.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. “Aunty, please, I didn’t know—”

  “Of course you didn’t know.” I could hear from the tone of her voice that she didn’t believe me. “Well, remember this, Zarin Wadia, I have only one son. God might have taken my husband, but I won’t let the likes of you take away my Porus from me.”

  From the other end of the line, I heard a groggy male voice. “Mamma? Mamma, who are you talking to?”

  I hung up, my stomach swirling the way it did when I’d eaten something bad.

  “Who was it?” For the first time, Masi sounded quiet, almost subdued.

  I shook my head. Porus hurt—no, seriously injured, because of me. I couldn’t bear to say it out loud. I knew that Masi would blame me for it. Though this time she would be fully justified in doing so.

  For a moment I wondered if Rizvi was behind the attack. But even if he was, how could anyone prove it?

  To my surprise, Masi did not prod me for information the way I expected her to. Instead I felt her watching me the way she had ever since I’d come back home after the incident with Rizvi, examining my flowered pajama pants, my red-and-black
flannel shirt. A year before, she’d bought a dozen such shirts for me to wear outside the apartment with my baggy jeans, even though Masa had protested that the clothes made me look like a stick wearing a sack. “You can barely even see her!”

  But now I got the sense that Masi was the one who wanted to see, who wanted to peel away my clothes to check for bruises or other signs of damage. Like an over-inquisitive parent, she had begun asking random questions about everything from “Did you brush your teeth?” to “What did you do at school today?” to the most important: “Did you get your period yet?”

  My replies, usually monosyllabic, infuriated her. So most days I simply shrugged, saying nothing. There were days when, from the corner of my eye, I would see her hands rise and pause in midair, as if she was remembering something and then slowly backing away. It was easier to stay in my room, pretending to do homework with my textbooks than to sit at the computer in the living room under Masi’s beacon-eyed glare. Not that I had anything to look at on the computer these days.

  The times I did come out of my room, I sat next to Masa on the sofa in front of the TV while he watched the world news on BBC. Normally, except for a stiff nod, he did nothing to acknowledge my presence, chatting with Masi about dinner and work at the office during commercial breaks.

  The only time I saw him show any kind of emotion was during the prank phone calls—anything ranging from I want to make friendship with you to Mine’s bigger than the head boy’s.

  “Wrong number!” he shouted each time, slamming down the phone.

  “Rusi, we need to do something about this,” I had overheard Masi tell him once.

  “What is there to do?” he asked her sharply. “They are probably bored boys who work at the Saudi PTT.” Boys who initially began dialing random numbers with the hopes of hearing female voices, boys who then grew bold enough to speak and attempt to make girlfriends in their own misguided way.