A Girl Like That(2)
It was also the day a neighbor escorted me from my mother’s quiet two-room flat in downtown Mumbai to the north of the city, to the one-room flat owned by my maternal aunt and uncle in Cama Parsi Colony. Masa liked the idea of having me around, since Masi couldn’t have kids. She, on the other hand, was furious.
“Watch the chalk!” she snapped the moment we entered the flat. “Khodai, look at what this girl has done.”
I looked down at where she was pointing—at the chalk designs she’d made on the tiles by the flat’s threshold. White fish with delicate scales and red eyes surrounding a banner that now said G … ck—Good Luck, as I discovered later on. Good Luck with my shoe printed in its center, powdery pink creases blurring out most of the Good and the Luck.
“All these years I’ve lived my life in shame because of my sister,” she told Masa that night when she thought I was asleep. “At least marrying you took me away from that and shut up those horrible gossips at the Parsi Panchayat.”
I didn’t have much status in the world—bastard orphans usually did not—and everyone in Cama colony was quick to remind me about that, even after Masa adopted me and gave me a surname to fill in the blank left by my father.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, child,” said Masi’s neighbor, also known to the colony kids as the Dog Lady, a woman who always smelled of 4711 Original Eau de Cologne and Pomeranian sweat. “So many children in your state usually end up on the streets! Or worse.”
A month after I moved into Masa and Masi’s flat, my father’s lawyer managed to track me down. It was through the lawyer that Masi found out about my father’s will and bank account.
“How much is in the account?” The lawyer had repeated Masi’s question. “Around fifteen lakh rupees, madam. The girl’s guardians are in charge of this account till she turns twenty-one.”
“Thank goodness she’s here with us,” Masi told Masa when the lawyer left. “Who knows what would have happened to that money if she’d fallen into the wrong hands?”
Two years later, Masa accepted a new job—assistant plant manager for a meatpacking factory in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He said we needed a fresh start.
And, for a time, we had it. In Jeddah, with its shimmery coastline, giant roundabouts, and brightly lit malls. Where the air was hot and dense and somehow always smelled of the sea.
During our first week here, Masa had taken us to Balad, the city’s historic center, on a friend’s recommendation. “It will be like traveling back in time,” the friend had said. And it was. If the glittering lights and skyscrapers of the Red Sea coast were the city’s ornaments, then Balad was Jeddah’s ancient, beating heart, its narrow streets linked to the main shopping square like arteries. The smell of roasted coffee and salt lingered in the air like perfume: at the souk, where men chewed miswak and hawked everything from ropes of gold jewelry to leather sandals; between alleys of abandoned old Hijazi homes, where veiled women with hennaed fingernails peddled potato chips, candy, and toys. We returned home at night, carrying bits of the old city back with us in plastic bags filled with roasted almonds and Turkish delight, in the green-glass bottle of jasmine attar Masa had bought for Masi from a local perfumery. The next day, however, Masi had complained about the smell of the perfume giving her a headache and tossed the bottle into the trash. It was the sort of happy day that had never happened again.
Now, my life having ended, I watched the police officer continue to interrogate Masa, while Masi watched him from a few feet away, her face pinched with worry. The look on her face reminded me of that Syrian boy from the Red Sea Mall. The one with the curly black hair, the hooked nose, and the scar over his left eyebrow. He was the first guy I’d ever gone out with after he’d thrown me his number, scribbled on a crumpled bit of notebook paper, from behind one of those fake, overly tall palm trees inside the mall. He was also the first guy I’d skipped school for, even though I never really had a crush on him. We’d spent most of the date driving in his car, nervously looking around for the religious police. There had hardly been any conversation; his English was bad, my Arabic even worse. We’d kept smiling at each other, until even smiling became awkward. I still remembered the end of the date: the way he whipped his head around to make sure the coast was clear, the slight furrow in his forehead, the quick, nervous kiss on my cheek. I was fourteen at the time.
Next to me, Porus let out a sigh. He was getting depressed and heavy. I could feel myself being pulled down with him. I had a very bad feeling that if we floated back down, we would be shackled to the scene of the accident forever.
“Let it go, Porus,” I said. “We can’t return. We must move on.”
I took hold of his hand.
When I was nine, a high priest at the fire temple next to Cama colony in Mumbai made us write a description of what we thought happened after we died. Even though I knew that the exercise was pointless (no one in our summer theology class at the fire temple ever had the right answers to the priest’s questions), I found myself writing out two pages. It was a fun change from the endless finger snapping to ward off satanic spirits and the droning monotone of prayer that formed the background noise of most of my vacations to India.
I wrote of souls the way I imagined them, featherlight and invisible, floating upward through a layer of clouds that looked like flat white cotton, but felt cool, misty, and very wet. By the time the souls would get through the cloud covering, their earthly clothes would be soaked with moisture. Then they would pass through a sunny, heated zone that smelled like toast, and then another cold, wet layer. Hot and cold, cold and hot, until the air thinned and the sky darkened from light blue to navy to black.