A Girl Like That

by Tanaz Bhathena

  My eyes fell on Mishal. She was leaning forward, her elbows on her desk, staring at me with her sharp eyes, almost as if she was curious about what I had to say.

  “When I was seven years old, I pretended that I was a different person,” I said, remembering our fight on the playground. “Someone who had a different sort of life. It was a silly thing to do, I know this now, but the trouble then was that I did not know where I came from. Our roots are often a source of pride for us; mine were a constant source of shame. Shame was an emotion I didn’t quite understand back then. Oh, I felt it, the way every child feels it. Some people hide, some people fight to cover up their shame. I was always the kind of person who fought. But recent events in my life have made me go into hiding and it hasn’t been easy.”

  I paused for a moment. There was silence in the room. Not a dead one, but a living one, the collective breath of the audience filling the space.

  “When people say you’re wrong so many times over so many years, when they call you a bad person, you begin to believe them. You begin to hide out of the fear that if you show your face again—to anyone—you will be judged. Sometimes, it gets so bad that you begin to wonder if life is worth living.”

  I forced myself to smile, hoping no one could see the tremor that had passed through me. “But then you realize—who are these people anyway, who make you feel ashamed of yourself? Do they even matter? Do you even care what they think or say about you behind your back? You didn’t before. My name is Zarin Wadia and I am sixteen years old. I am a student at Qala Academy and my favorite subject is English. I do not know what the future holds for me. But today, I’m going to start living in the present again. As of today, I will come out of hiding and go back to being the person you know so well and hate.”

  The silence continued for a long moment. Long after Khan Madam thanked me in a flustered voice, long after I walked back to my seat. I could feel Mishal staring at me, but I did not look at her. After the period ended and Khan Madam exited the room, a flurry of voices broke out, loud and clear, no longer concerned about whether I could hear them or not.

  “No remorse in that girl,” someone cried out. “No remorse whatsoever. Any other girl would have been reduced to tears. But she? She has no conscience.”

  “What does she think?” someone else said. “That she’ll scare us into silence with some vague mumbo jumbo? Come on. Everyone knows about her sneaking off with Rizvi earlier last month!”

  “Layla, didn’t you…”

  I did not know when I actually stood up, or how I managed to leave the classroom without running into any teacher. Moments later, I found myself locked in a stall at the very end of the girls’ bathroom, my head sinking into my hands.

  What had I been thinking? That my speech would actually change something? That being defiant and angry would win me respect when, in actuality, everyone wanted me to cower and burst into tears?

  To live in this world, you needed to follow a certain set of rules and behave in ways society deemed appropriate. My mother did not, of course. Neither did my father. I had spent most of my life seeing Masi trying to compensate for their actions by controlling her own and Masa’s, by controlling me. And now, in this stall, I finally began to understand why.

  I folded my knees to my chest, my heels resting against the edge of the closed toilet seat. It would be easy enough to stay here, I decided. To remain locked up for the rest of the day. No one would come looking for me anyway. No one cared. Except maybe Porus.

  Moments later, though, the bathroom door slammed open, followed by the harsh voice of a girl bursting into the space outside my stall: “… that awful Verghese Madam! Who does she think she is?”

  “Shhh,” another voice said. “Do you want someone to hear you?”

  “Who cares?” the first girl said. “Everyone knows how mean she is. But forget that, did you hear about Zarin Wadia? My cousin Layla told me she had another tantrum today. A couple of days ago I heard her crying in the bathroom down the—oh my God, what’s that smell?”

  My heart hammered. Her words jarred my senses, and for the first time, I registered the dank odor of the bathroom, the stench of urine rising from the stall next to mine, the sweat drenching the front of my uniform.

  I remembered the look Masa had given me outside the clinic, right after Masi had had her episode. It was the sort of look he had once reserved solely for my aunt on her bad days—a mix of fear and anger, mingled with disgust.

  I could no longer blame him for it. I was disgusted with myself. Disgusted by how quickly I’d come undone, how easily I’d let their words affect me. I was doing exactly what I’d said I wouldn’t do in my speech that morning. Going into hiding. Cowering like an animal in a stinking public lavatory because of some dumb Facebook posts and e-mails, because a bunch of girls were saying crappy things about me.

  Five minutes later, when I stepped out of the stall, the bathroom was empty. My hands were shaking so badly that I was tempted to race back and lock myself in the cubicle again.

  No, I told myself firmly. No. I would not go back into hiding.

  I opened the door and forced myself to step outside.

  Porus

  “What are you doing here?” My boss, Hamza, eyed the bruise on my jaw, my broken nose held in place with a white splint and bandage. “I thought I told you to go home and relax after the break-in.”

  His hard gaze told me otherwise. It told me that he knew the break-in at the deli was not a break-in, but a targeted attack on me. An eye for an eye. A nose for a nose. There was no point in proving that Rizvi had been the one behind the attack, even though I’d recognized his voice, even though he’d uncovered his face after kicking mine in.

  I was well aware of how precarious my position was in this country. A non-Muslim Indian boy who’d made a false birth certificate for a legal work permit. If the authorities discovered that I’d falsified my documents, I would be deported before I could say ma’salaama.

  Two new security guards now stood by the door of the deli, one with a gun in his belt. I half expected Hamza to call them over and march me to the nearest police station.

  Behind me, the other workers whispered among themselves. It was because of him, I imagined them saying. Thanks to his involvement with that girl.

  My mother had blamed Zarin as well. After calling up Zarin to yell at her, she ordered me to stay away from her. “If you go see her again, I will never talk to you,” she had said.

  If only it was that easy, I thought now. It might have been if Zarin and Rizvi truly cared for each other and if Rizvi wasn’t the biggest jerk to grace the face of the planet. If Zarin wasn’t being bullied at school.

  “I will not have you before my customers in this state.” Hamza’s face was pink under his gray beard. He motioned me closer to keep our conversation private. “Also, since you are here, we might as well have a talk. You’ve not been coming to work on time. I’ve heard you have also been skipping out early, making other people take your shift.”

  “I don’t want the money—”

  “Money?” Hamza spat out. “You talk to me about money when whatever personal feud you’ve been having outside nearly cost me my cashier? I should fire you, you know. You are lucky that you are a good worker and that Hamza Arafat does not let a few thugs stop him from keeping the people he hires.”

  The AC overhead made a clicking sound, a stray icicle rattling inside. “Shut it off!” Hamza shouted at the boy who was pretending to cut a block of salami. “How many times have I asked you to keep it shut off until the technician comes to inspect it?”

  The boy, a sixteen-year-old with a shadow of a mustache, dropped a knife in his haste to switch it off. The machine grunted a couple more times before falling silent.

  “Fine then.” Hamza’s voice sounded louder than usual in the silence. “Since you are here, you will make yourself useful. You will stay here today until the technician comes after hours. You will stay out of trouble and not go running off to see
someone the minute a phone call comes. If you do feel the need to go out again, please do not come back tomorrow. I cannot have my boys coming and going as they wish. This is your third and final warning. Are you listening to me?”

  I did not reply. I thought of Zarin, the shadows around her eyes, the things the other girls had called her when I picked her up from school. Slut. Whore.

  As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Hamza sighed and placed a hand on my shoulder. “She is not your sister. Not your wife. Why are you making a fool of yourself over her? Why are you risking your job? Your life?”

  My lips stuck together. I moistened them with my tongue. “You are right, sir. Of course you are. But I cannot do what you ask me to.”

  Hamza’s grip on my shoulder tightened. “What do you mean, ‘I cannot do what you ask me to’? Have you not been listening to me?”

  “I made a promise. To her uncle. I promised I would take care of her. She is my … she is my family now.”

  My mother was going to kill me. The thought flitted through my head and was replaced by images of Zarin’s face—smiling at me from between the pillars of an old balcony, lying in the back seat of a car, leached of color.

  “Family? She is your family now?” Hamza laughed and clapped his hands. “Look at this one! Look at him!”

  He didn’t have to tell them; they were looking anyway: Ali the cashier, who’d taken a punch on my behalf, the other boys behind the counters, a few straggling customers.

  “This is the classic case of a fool,” Hamza said. “Not only that, he thinks I am a fool too! That old Hamza, with his experience and wisdom, is giving him wrong advice. All because of some girl. In the meantime, he brings shame on us.”

  I focused on the logo on Hamza’s apron and remembered the Arabic lesson Zarin had once tried to give me. “Laam,” I could hear her saying. “Ha, meem, ba, ain, jeem, ya, noon. Repeat after me; it’s not so hard.” It was one of the few times she had been patient and steady around me, the steadiest I had seen her in all the time we’d known each other.

  Did I tell her how much she had reminded me of my father then? Pappa, with his endless confidence in me, his endless optimism. Pappa, who told me the story of the Persian poet when he was first diagnosed with leukemia four years ago.

  “Once upon a time there was a poet,” he had said. “A man who had traveled across a desert somewhere in ancient Persia with a troupe of artists, on his way to Yazd.”

  At first Pappa told me about the poet’s adventures, his rendezvous with other nomads and women with kohl-rimmed eyes. But the story quickly turned grisly. On the way, the troupe was robbed by a gang of bandits. The bandits killed everyone in the troupe except for the poet, whom they decided to torture for fun by cutting off his arms and legs and leaving him there in the scorching sand, at the mercy of the scavengers. The scavengers, great big vultures and birds of prey, attacked his dismembered arms and legs, but not the living whole of him. But the poet knew that this was not out of mercy. The scavengers were simply watching and waiting, their wings beating hot air over his face. Waiting because they knew he would die.

  Broken beyond belief, the poet spoke to the One True God, Pappa had told me. “Ahura Mazda,” the poet shouted, invoking the name a priest in his village had taught him. “Ahura Mazda, you have been unfair to me. You have taken away my arms and my legs and now you are taking away my life as well. Well, I am young. Too young to die. I will stay alive for as long as possible. I will fight the odds that I have against me. I will learn to breathe both air and dust. I will learn to crawl through the oceans of sand this desert is peaked with, its cracked salt plains. I will make my way to Yazd, where you reside in the house of fire.”

  The days and nights, however, ate away at the poet’s flesh. When he came face-to-face with the One True God after death, he looked upon his face. “Why?” the poet asked.

  And God replied: “Because a bird only learns to fly when its wings are broken.”

  Those who believed in reincarnation said that the poet was later reborn as a great Persian poet whose name was lost to history.

  “They borrowed that nameless poet’s ideas, you know,” Pappa had said, eyes widening in the way they always did when one of his stories got out of control. “Rumi, Hafiz, those great Sufis.”

  On a normal day, I would simply have laughed and called him out for making up the whole thing. That morning, though, I had accused him of treating me like a kid. “How can being diagnosed with cancer set you free?” I had demanded. “Will you stop lying to me, Pappa?”

  But now, as I remembered the story, I felt his presence again. Felt him slide into the room, past the machines, around the counter, and stand next to me, whispering his favorite Rumi quote in my ear.

  Hamza caught hold of me by the shoulders. “I hired you because I saw potential.” His voice was softer now. “Potential, ya walad. You work so hard! Leave the girl. Stop this nonsense. A few more years and you can become supervisor, even manager if you want. I promise. Three more years and I can promote you. I beg you, my boy, don’t do this. Don’t ruin your future.”

  I stared at my boss, a man who had trusted me enough to give me a job in this country, perhaps the only man who had, in his own way, tried to fill some of the void Pappa had left behind.

  “I—I’m sorry, Hamza. I can’t do what you ask of me.” It was as much as I could understand, the closest I could come to describing the band that had tightened around my heart at the thought of leaving her alone, at the mercy of her family, those wolves at her school.

  Beads of sweat stood out on Hamza’s pale skin. “Don’t be a fool, boy! You are not thinking clearly.”

  Maybe I wasn’t. But Pappa had always told me that love didn’t think. It was, I understood, the choice between the cage of a safe, unbroken life and one of freedom. If I quit, I could be forced to leave the Kingdom within a week—unless Hamza agreed to transfer my iqama to a new employer and issue a No Objection Certificate. With the savings in my bank account and the certificate, I would be able to scrape by for a couple more months and find another job. But chances of that appeared slim now.

  Maybe I was a fool like Hamza said. But at least I would be a fool by choice. I took off my apron and placed it in Hamza’s hands. The last thing I heard him yelling through the rush of blood in my ears was my name.

  LOVE

  Zarin

  “Your mother would kill you if she knew you were here with me,” I told Porus quietly.

  “Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment,” he replied.

  It had been over a week since his mother had called, since Masi’s episode in the clinic’s parking lot. After those first few texts, Porus hadn’t tried to contact me again, and I had been pretty sure he wouldn’t.

  The trouble with low expectations is that when they’re exceeded, your heart begins to tango, and mine acted no differently when Porus showed up at our apartment this afternoon in his work uniform, a bandage on his nose, a bruise on his chin.

  “What happened? Have I suddenly grown so handsome that you can’t take your eyes off me?”

  My fingers reached up to touch the bruise but curled inches short of their goal. “Who did this to you? Was it—?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  I wanted to yell at him. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t go around flirting with me, acting like everything was okay when it wasn’t. As if sensing my anger or maybe anticipating it, he reached out and squeezed my hand reassuringly. Please don’t be mad, he seemed to be saying.

  Masa, on the other hand, acted like the whole of last week and the week before had not happened. Upon seeing Porus again it was like a switch went off in him and he changed from a sullen, haggard man who blamed me for his problems into the one Porus was used to seeing in the days before Rizvi.

  “Hello, Porus, my boy,” he boomed, and I wondered if he even knew how fake he sounded. When Porus asked him for permission to take me out for a spin in his car, Masa nodded so hard I thoug
ht his head would loosen at the joints that held it to his neck and fall off.

  “It will be good for her, getting out of the house,” Masa told Porus. “With exams, she’s so busy studying these days. Bring her back in time for dinner, will you, Porus?”

  Neither Porus nor I looked at each other during this speech, but I knew he was probably wondering why Masa was even bothering to lie. Everyone knows, I wanted to tell my uncle. Everyone knows what a mess of a family we are.

  When I slipped into the passenger seat, I expected Porus to ask me about Masa’s strange behavior. He didn’t. He simply dug into his bag and produced two sandwiches—greasy chicken shawarmas with pickled cucumbers, soggy fries, and garlic sauce. “Hungry?” he asked me.

  I nodded. It wasn’t like Masa was starving me over the past week, but with everything that had been going on, my appetite had taken a nosedive. Now though, nestled once more into the slightly worn seat of Porus’s car, my mouth watered at the smell of the garlicky chicken. I tore off the wrapper and took a huge bite.

  As I ate, Porus drove us to a part of the Corniche that I’d seen once before, on a school field trip when I was younger—a strip of Jeddah coastline that extended for several kilometers in a series of sandy pillars instead of the rock and metal sculptures that dominated the Al-Hamra part of the beach. I wouldn’t have minded the longer drive, probably wouldn’t even have noticed anything, had Porus not taken us there in his sixteen-year-old green clunker—a vehicle that seemed determined to test out every bump and pothole on the road.

  The inside of the Nissan always smelled funky—like feta cheese and mutton, to be specific. And every time Porus drove the car over the speed of sixty kilometers per hour, it rattled until I got a migraine. I had already given Porus a few subtle hints about getting a new set of wheels: “What did you think of the secondhand Honda we saw at the used car lot the other day? It looked decent—only four thousand riyals!” When subtlety proved unsuccessful, I’d progressed to the not-so-subtle hints: “Get rid of it, Porus!” But the whole exercise was pointless. “It’s only the high beams and the brake lights that aren’t working, Zarin,” Porus had said, ignoring my complaints about the rattling noises. “I can get the rewiring done for less than four thousand. Give me some time; I’m waiting for my next paycheck.”