A Girl Like That(26)
“Yeah, maybe. But I draw the line at drugging a girl. It’s a whole other level of creepy.”
I paid no attention to Abdullah, who pretended to be religious and God-fearing in front of the adults, and then went on to blow hundreds of riyals on cigarettes and porn videos he bought online from one of those “secure sites” that even the Saudi censors could not censor.
Bilal’s words stuck in my head. Some nights, before I fell asleep, I pictured Nadia the way she had been that afternoon. Before the police had interrupted. Before she had intimidated and emasculated me with her violated-virgin act.
AGE 17
The first girl I used the drug on, Aliya Chowdhury, probably did not even need it. She was in love with me and would have done it anyway. But the drug calmed her down. She even cried in the car when I broke up with her a week later outside the warehouse.
“You’re such a jerk,” Abdullah told me when I called him the evening of our breakup. No hi or hello. Just that. “That girl was only fourteen.”
He’d probably heard the news from Bilal. Or they’d probably decided to spy on me again—this time without my permission—and seen everything.
“Hello to you too.” I laughed. “What’s wrong, Abdullah? Are you so whipped by the girl you’re going out with that you’ve forgotten to have fun? What’s her name again? Zarin? Shirin?”
“This has nothing to do with her.” Abdullah sounded angry now, almost as angry as he had when I’d gone up to his sister’s room two years ago. “You’ll be in big trouble someday, you know.”
I laughed again, mostly to mask my anger at his words and, under that, a fear I did not want to acknowledge. I thought of Nadia again and then of the Chowdhury girl, the glassy look in her eyes, the relaxed smile on her face.
I thought of Abba, compared my tableau to his.
“Don’t worry, ya Aboody.” I crumpled the paper with the girl’s number and e-mail into a ball and tossed it into the basket next to my bed. “I’m not like Haque. I don’t need to masturbate to videos of myself having sex with girls.”
REENCOUNTER
Zarin
According to the Dog Lady, if you ever wanted to know what a person was like, all you had to do was peek into their living room through a window or an open door. “A person’s home tells you a lot about who they are,” I’d overheard her telling Masi once. “Even if you can’t see their faces.”
In Mumbai, especially in Cama colony, where people often left doors open during the daytime, this was easy enough to do. If you peeped into the Dog Lady’s one-room flat, for instance, you’d see Fussy Old Parsi Widow written all over it—a large garlanded photo of her husband hanging on a blue wall, a Godrej fridge draped with a pink plastic cover, and flowered white curtains hanging over the windows. In a corner, right next to the kitchen, lay an iron cot with a hard mattress for the Dog Lady’s bad back, and a pair of aluminum bowls, one filled with water and one empty until she filled it with food for her rabid little Pomeranian, Jimmy.
In Jeddah, this sort of scrutiny was nearly impossible. Here, windows were translucent, barred with grilles and draped with curtains or, as with some of the buildings in the old city, with latticed wooden mashrabiya screens, shielding a home’s privacy from prying eyes. After the morning rush of school buses and vehicles pouring out onto the main roads, the city’s inner streets turned quiet. Mothers slipped back into their homes after waving good-bye to their children. Forbidden from driving, the women skulked inside their air-conditioned villas or apartments, waiting until a private car or taxi arrived to pick them up. Heat rose, thickened like soup. Even the shopkeepers didn’t move unless it was to shoo stray cats out of their shops. There were days when the silence could be as suffocating as the heat itself.
And it drove Masi mad.
In our first years here, she would sniff at doors and peer at windows, as if hoping to ascertain the kind of person who lived there by the scent of their food or the shadows that hovered behind windowpanes.
“What kind of neighbors are these, Rusi?” I often heard her complain to Masa. “No hi, no hello. Forget about a polite smile; they don’t even look at you over here!”
Yet, as the years went on, and we slowly turned from Mumbaikars to Non-Resident Indians who no longer fit in the city, Masi began changing her tune. “People in Mumbai have no sense of privacy! Our Jeddah is our Jeddah. At least over there no one keeps asking me every little detail about myself!”
And she grew quieter and more suspicious around anyone who did. It was a dangerous, simmering sort of quiet that had me tiptoeing around her the way I was now creeping toward our apartment door.
In Jeddah, locked doors and closed windows were the norm. Anything different could mean one of two things:
(a) Your house had been burglarized, or
(b) Your house was in the process of being burglarized.
Which was why, when I found the door to our apartment open a crack one afternoon after coming home from school, I hovered outside the door for a few moments, debating between entering the house and knocking on the door of our nosy neighbor, Halima.
I chose the safe route at first and rapped several times on Halima’s door. But no one appeared to be home. I pulled out my cell phone, an old flip Nokia that wasn’t supposed to be used for anything except emergencies, and held a finger over the number nine. I could hear Abdullah mocking me in my head. What? I imagined him saying. You think the Saudi policemen are like the American ones? That they’ll come running for you the minute you dial 999?