A Girl Like That(13)
A week later, she called the kabaadi to the colony and sold my frocks to him at a bargain price.
“They were getting old,” she lied when Masa asked her why. “She’ll grow out of them anyway.”
“But what about her hair?” Masa looked perplexed and, for some reason, a little angry. “She had such pretty hair, Khorshi. Did you have to cut it off?”
“Do you want her to have lice, then?”
Crawling gray things that would eat away at my head, Masi had explained moments before she had made me lower my head into the bathroom sink, dousing my curly, shoulder-length hair with a shock of cold water before slowly, methodically snipping it off with a pair of scissors.
Masa frowned. “She looks like a boy now.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Masi let out a strange, bitter-sounding laugh and then pressed down the iron on the secondhand pair of corduroy pants she’d bought for me at the thrift store across the street. Steam rose from the cloth, partly shielding her face. “She’s my sister’s daughter. She won’t look like a boy forever.”
It didn’t take long for the kids at the colony to notice the change in my appearance or remark on it—especially Merzi Kaka’s sons, who instantly began calling me by a boy’s name.
“Is that Zarin?” my oldest cousin asked, pretending to be astonished. “Why, she looks exactly like Snot-Nose, doesn’t she? That little brat from school? All she needs is phlegm running down her mouth and an open fly.”
A few days after this, I often had boys from the colony, mostly my cousin and his friends, shouting at me from different directions and then bursting into laughter when I threw a rock at them in frustration.
The teasing grew worse when a new milkman started delivering bottles to the colony. “Ey boy, need any milk today?” he would call out whenever he saw me. Or, “Is Mummy-Pappa at home, boy?” I never knew if he was doing it on purpose or was simply myopic. None of the other deliverymen called me a boy; but then again, they had probably seen me when I still wore dresses and had longer hair.
I saw the boy from the cricket pitch from time to time, usually going out with his parents during the evenings or cycling with the other boys in the compound. He was one of the few kids at Cama colony who didn’t call me names. There were times when he would glance up at the balcony where he’d seen me before, almost as if he could sense my presence there, as I peered at him through a gap between Masi’s curtains. I always ducked when this happened, remaining hidden until I was certain he was gone.
My heart leaped to my throat when I saw him one evening on the second-floor balcony of our building—my balcony, as I’d begun to think of it. He was wearing the blue jersey again and his lips were curved up slightly. Had he noticed me spying on him? Was he going to complain to Masi? I hoped he wouldn’t. It had taken me two months to work up the courage to come out here again during the evenings. Two months of being holed up inside, on my cot, staring out the window while Masi and the Dog Lady jawed about boring things like rava recipes and vacuum cleaners or the people they worked with at Zoroastrian community organizations like the Parsi Panchayat.
“Hi,” he said after staring at me for a few moments. “How are you?” His voice was raspy and a little shy.
I glanced back quickly and edged along the balcony, closer to the boy, out of Masi’s line of vision.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I told him sternly, careful to keep my voice quiet. “My masi doesn’t want me talking to boys. And if you’re here to make fun of me, I will kick you.”
I didn’t like the way he frowned. It made his lips turn down and the space between his eyebrows wrinkle. I much preferred his goofy, gap-toothed smile. But obviously I couldn’t say that to him.
“Ey su che? I won’t make fun of you. I want to be friends with you.” Unlike my cousins, who flaunted their convent education by speaking in English whenever they could, this boy spoke in the smooth, flowing Gujarati common to the kids who went to the vernacular school run by the Parsi Charitable Trust in Mumbai.
“I can’t be friends with you. I don’t even know you.” I felt bad the moment I said the words, mostly because the boy looked hurt. But I didn’t take them back. Masa had promised to get me a book next year for my fifth birthday. One of those big Disney picture books with perfect sketches of ragged street urchins, bookish French girls, and dancing lions on the African savanna. I was desperately looking forward to those pretty pictures that would take me away, far away, from the life I lived here, if only for a few hours. If I made Masi angry by talking to this boy, I wouldn’t even get that.
After a moment, the boy nodded, a strange, determined look on his face. “My name is Porus. What’s yours?”
“Zarin,” I said, too puzzled to think hard about this line of questioning.
“Okay, so now you know me.” He grinned when I scowled. “And your name is as pretty as you are.”
“Don’t lie to me. I know I look like a boy. Everyone says so.”
“Those people are lying, then,” Porus told me seriously. “You’re too pretty to be a boy.” Then, to my astonishment, he leaned forward and sniffed my shoulder. I pushed him away.
“What are you doing?”
“See? I was right. You don’t even smell like a boy,” he said. “You smell like Pond’s Magic Powder and flowers. Boys don’t smell like that.”