A Girl Like That(12)
She didn’t mean it, Masi kept telling Masa. Pleading with him as if Fali had belonged to him and not me. She didn’t mean for the cat to die. She was sorry. So sorry.
I had never believed her.
“I hate you,” I’d said. “You’re nothing but a mean old witch.”
Neither Masa’s pleas nor his threats made me take back my words.
Asfiya remained silent for a long time after I told her the story. Then, with a sigh, she nudged me with a cigarette. “Come on. Let’s see if you can smoke without coughing today.”
When she graduated the following year, I found a half-used pack tucked into a crevice behind the ladder, likely forgotten—a surprise because Asfiya usually hoarded her cigarettes with great care. It was not until I was smoking my second cigarette that afternoon that it struck me that she may not have forgotten them. That she may have intentionally left them there for me.
*
Over the years, I learned to deal with my nightmares by focusing on my surroundings. The good things in my life, as I began to think of them. The bedside lamp Masa had gotten me from the souk in Balad, its shade made of green-glass leaves glowing like a fairy bush in the dark. The crunch of the Lion bars that I kept hidden in my drawers, followed by the sweetness of chocolate and caramel melting on my tongue. The call for prayer from the mosque across our apartment: loud, nasal, soothing.
Some nights I allowed myself to remember Porus Dumasia—the closest I’d come to having a friend in the two years I’d stayed at Cama colony.
I first saw Porus a couple of months after my mother’s death. By then I had discovered that evenings were the only time I would get some semblance of peace from Masi’s constant scrutiny, when the Dog Lady would come over for tea, to gossip with Masi about everyone else in the colony.
Masa often escaped as well, usually on the pretext of talking to his brother, Merzi Kaka, who lived in the building across from ours, where I watched them growing red and smiley each evening as they downed peg after peg of whiskey on the balcony. One of Merzi Kaka’s sons would sit cross-legged on the floor behind them, wearing headphones, his eyes focused on the flat gray remote control–like object he held in his hands. Merzi Kaka kept saying the kid needed to get out more and play something other than video games, but right now even Merzi Kaka didn’t seem to care where he was. Not like Masi, whose eyes seemed to follow me wherever I went.
That evening, I glanced back to make sure that Masi and the Dog Lady were still talking and then stepped out onto the common balcony shared by the second-floor residents. Cama colony was a cluster of six buildings facing one another with a large, unpaved courtyard in the middle. Outside the colony, autos, buses, and cars blared horns. Inside, music from radios and CD players clashed: the high voice of Freddie Mercury combating with a popular Hindi song from an Aamir Khan movie about cricket. Here and there, smells emerged. Mothers frying fish and stewing dal in their kitchens, peering out windows from time to time to watch their children playing below.
On my balcony, however, there was no one. When I sat down, I spread out my skirt like a cloud, feeling the tiles, cool against my bare skin. I then moved forward inch by inch, using my hands and shoulders. I got closer and closer, until I could wrap my arms and legs around the wooden banister and watch the children playing below—girls of my age skipping rope, the older ones racing bikes; boys from the colony’s junior cricket club racing up and down a long, well-worn strip of dirt. One of them, a boy in a pale blue Tendulkar jersey, squinted when he looked up at me, his eyebrows knitting together. I squinted back. He gave me a wide, gap-toothed smile that nearly split his face in two. Though he looked like he was a couple of years older than me—maybe six or seven—he didn’t look as old as the other boys, who were nine or ten years old. It was probably why they bossed him around, making him field the whole time, chase the worn ball around the colony on his stubby legs. After someone hit a ball that zoomed right out of the gate (“SIX! SIX!” the other boys chanted), he plopped onto the dusty ground, panting, and looked toward my balcony again. Pleased to see that I was still there, he gave me that goofy grin again and waved. This time, I smiled and waved back. The older boys were laughing. “Looks like Porus has found himself a girlfriend,” one of them said, making the boy in the blue jersey blush.
I did not hear the voices behind me cease conversation; in fact I noticed nothing until a pair of skeletal, long-fingered hands curled around my arms, yanking me upright.
“What are you doing?” Masi shook me by the shoulders. “Spreading your legs and sitting like a boy! Do you have no sense?”
“I-I’m s-sorry…” I pressed my knees together. I did not know what exactly I’d done wrong, but I knew that I didn’t want her to see me shaking. She marched me back into the flat and slammed the door shut.
Even the Dog Lady looked startled. She cleared her throat. “Khorshed, she is a child.”
“I don’t care.” Streaks of red colored Masi’s cheekbones. “She may be young, but not everyone around her is. I saw those boys. The way some of them were gawking. In this day and age, you can never be too sure.”
She walked to the cupboard where my clothes were kept, next to a framed photo of my mother on the wall, now garlanded with sandalwood flowers to signify her death. Masi pulled out a neatly folded pajama set and handed it to me, two hours before bedtime. “Here. Put these on.”