A Girl Like That(14)
“Zarin,” Masi called from inside the flat. “Zarin, where are you?”
“I have to go.” I turned around, grateful that I had an excuse to avoid him—this strange boy who went around smelling people to prove a point. Except for the few times I had told my cousins and their friends to shut up when they called me Snot-Nose, I’d never even talked to a boy before. He was probably making fun of me. However, unlike my cousins, whose words sometimes made me stew for hours on end, Porus’s words made me feel strangely good about myself. I replayed them in my head that night, over and over again, long after Masa and Masi fell asleep.
In the weeks to come, I saw Porus more often, though never again on my balcony. Maybe I’d scared him off. Or maybe he somehow sensed that I would get in trouble with Masi for encouraging his friendship. In the mornings, when Masi was busy praying, I sometimes sneaked out onto the balcony to watch the comings and goings of the other residents. This was where I usually saw Porus, clinging to his father’s hand as they walked to the bus stop across the road. Porus’s gaze would somehow always gravitate toward me and he would grin and wave each time. Sometimes Porus’s father would wave as well, and I would be treated to older and younger versions of the same smile.
Slowly, after a week or two of this, I began to wave back. It was the polite thing to do, I reasoned. And though I didn’t like to admit it, I almost always felt calmer on the days I saw Porus and his father walking to the bus stop. Some mornings I even walked around with a smile on my face—a fact that did not escape my uncle’s notice.
“Someone looks happy today,” Masa said. “Did something special happen?”
I shrugged, saying nothing. I kept it hidden away—this strange “waving friendship” of ours—along with the memories of my last birthday cake, my hopes for a Disney picture book, and the toothy smiles from a boy who thought I was pretty.
*
By the time I was sixteen, I’d learned a couple of things.
I learned that Thursdays were the best days for sneaking out of school with a guy—by catching the sweet spot between the last two periods (Home Science and Phys Ed) and slipping out the unmanned side gate at the south end of Qala Academy and into a waiting car. I would have an hour and a half to eat a shawarma and smoke a cigarette or two, maybe talk if the boy was chatty, before he dropped me off a block away from our apartment building moments before the school bus drove by.
I’d also learned that, when faced with the threat of being locked up forever in my room or in an unwanted marriage, I could school my features into a mask and lie to my aunt with conviction.
“Where were you?” Masi had shouted one Thursday when I had come home later than expected. “I was about to call your masa.”
“We had debate practice at the last minute and I missed the bus. My friend Noor’s father dropped me off.” I didn’t even know anyone by the name of Noor, but luckily Masi didn’t ask any more questions.
After that, however, I didn’t take any chances. Dates were cut shorter, despite the boy’s complaints, and I came home quicker. Normally debate practices took place on Mondays and ran for about two hours after school. If Masi made inquiries with my teacher or the headmistress, I would be in deep trouble. I might have learned ways to pull one over on my aunt and uncle, but I couldn’t use that excuse again.
For the other girls, Thursdays held a different sort of allure. They marked the end of the school week in Saudi Arabia, a time when most academy students threw aside their books for two days of respite from the rigorous Class XI coursework.
“Any year without board exams is a good one,” our class monitor, Alisha Babu, declared to everyone on the day school reopened after two months of summer vacation. “Too bad our teachers are such poor sports about it!”
Our teachers, who piled us up with essays and problem sets the day we returned, who scolded us for not completing our holiday homework on time, who reminded us of our dismal scores from the first term test in May. They started handing out punishments by the dozen, usually in the form of more problem sets or lines to write out.
Even Khan Madam, our mild-mannered English teacher, grew irritable. “Don’t forget—you will still have the boards next year,” she said one day when she caught Mishal Al-Abdulaziz yawning in English class. “So failing English this year will not help you much, my dear Mishal.”
It was really quite an unfair statement, a surprising and rare display of temper that had most girls diagnosing Khan Madam with early-onset menopause. I couldn’t really blame them. As much as I disliked Mishal, she was by no means a poor student. Thanks to our perpetual rivalry since Class II, she was only five marks away from the highest English score in our class—mine.
Unlike other subjects, English was easy for me—so much easier than Hindi, which needed a lot more than a rudimentary knowledge of Bollywood songs. My edge over Mishal in the subject often lay in debates; arguing with my aunt over the years had given me enough practice with snappy comebacks.
English, Masa told me once, had been Masi’s favorite subject too. “She used to read lots of books!” he had said cheerfully. “Like you, Zarin.”
My interest in reading had been a surprise to Masi as well, not that we had many books in our apartment except for a few old Famous Fives and a tattered copy of Jane Eyre. Trips to Jarir Bookstore, the only place you could get any interesting novels, were extremely rare. Jarir was expensive—even Masa said so—and who was going to spend forty-two riyals (“Six hundred and seven rupees?!” Masi exclaimed) on a book about a group of teenagers trying to kill each other on reality TV?