A Girl Like That(28)

I shook my head. Calling Masa would infuriate my aunt, if she wasn’t already angry over Halima finding her like this. Masi never liked appearing out of control to anyone. Masa once told me it was because of the life she’d led in Mumbai before I was born, a life that I’d heard her blame my mother for, many times.

“Thank you, Halima,” I said. “I’ll take care of things from here.”

“You sure, little Zarin?” She hesitated, watching Masi, who had not moved from the floor, her eyes still closed.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

After checking that the door was locked this time around, I tiptoed back to the living room and stood next to my aunt, watching the rise and fall of her chest, listening to her raspy, shallow breaths.

She whispered something—a name I couldn’t quite catch—and then gnashed her teeth.

“Masi?” I called out hesitantly. “Masi?”

“My sister,” she muttered in Gujarati. “Get away from my sister.”

Always her sister—my mother—haunting a part of her mind I couldn’t see. Whenever Masi forgot (or more likely spat out) her meds, my mother always paid her a visit in her head.

Another time, she told me that she’d considered suffocating me the day I was born. “It was the monsoons. The streets were flooded. The doctor was late and your mother had fallen asleep after the labor. It would have been easy,” she had told me. “So easy to get rid of you and, through you, him.”

Him meaning my father, of course, the other part of the equation that almost always resulted in a Masi episode.

“She didn’t mean it, Zarin,” Masa had told me repeatedly when I was ten, in the days after my kitten, Fali, died. “She didn’t know Fali would get into trouble if she put it outside. Can’t you simply accept that? It was a cat, not a human being!”

It. Like Fali was a thing and not a living creature.

I picked up the glass of water Halima had left on the coffee table and sipped, watching Masi twitch on the floor for a few more moments. Then, slowly and carefully, I poured the rest of it over her face, watching her sputter back to consciousness before taking the glass to the kitchen and placing it in the sink.

*

In the weeks following Fali’s death, I had started slowly. Small pranks like stealing a toothbrush. Muddying the corridor carpet with shoe prints. Dropping a face towel on the wet bathroom floor. Sneaking into the bathroom after Masa went to bed and putting the toilet seat back up, so I could hear them argue about it in the morning.

The small pranks eventually became bigger ones. A newly lit oil lamp blown out the moment Masi left the kitchen after a prayer. Crows flocking to the ledge of the kitchen window, pecking at scattered lumps of golden-brown semolina and whole wheat pudding—the special malido Masi had made the night before for my mother’s and great-grandfather’s annual death-day prayers, littering the orange kitchen tiles with black and gray feathers.

“What did you do?” The long vein at the side of Masi’s neck stood out in sharp green relief under her pale skin. The hands at her sides shook. “No beating,” I heard her mutter under her breath. No beating, no beating, no beating—a mantra she managed to abide by until I started laughing at her and stuck out my tongue.

To my surprise, Masa defended me for once that day, yelling at Masi when he saw the bruise on my cheek. “Why would you do that?” he demanded. “Don’t you see how hard she’s becoming? How she will become if this continues?”

“So what do you expect me to do, Rusi? Do you want me to beg her to behave? Should I sit around doing nothing—saying ‘Please, dikra, don’t do this!’—while she continues to taunt and disrespect me?”

“She’s going through a phase. She will grow out of it. She will find other things to do.”

And I did.

Boys entered the picture shortly after I began pranking Masi, the first showing up when I was eleven years old, at the DVD store next to our apartment building in Aziziyah, between the racks of pirated discs, their cases shaded black with Magic Marker, covering every bit of the actresses’ exposed skin, and in some instances even their faces.

The boy was around fourteen or fifteen years old, with fair skin and a skullcap over his golden-brown curls. His gaze met mine nearly the instant he entered the store. It wasn’t a real surprise. Ever since I’d hit puberty, a lot more boys had begun noticing me. It was in the boobs, I wanted to tell them mockingly. Two fleshy bumps that had sprouted on my chest seemingly overnight, and declared that I was no longer a girl who looked like a boy.

Had this particular fact not annoyed Masi so much, I might have been embarrassed, even made uncomfortable by the attention I was getting. But I had to admit that I was also curious back then about what made her so annoyed. What, I wondered, could happen between a boy and a girl who had hit puberty that could make an already angry aunt angrier?

As if sensing my curiosity, the boy picked up one of the DVDs from the back—an older one released a few years before. A man and woman flanked the sides of the cover, the woman wearing a black dress split up to the thigh, a gun tucked into her garter belt. Someone, probably the DVD store guy, had colored in her legs and arms with green magic marker, giving the effect of an oddly designed salwar-kameez.

The boy placed his index finger in his mouth and then, with a glistening tip, traced the arch of the woman’s heel, her ankle, her calf, her thigh. The marker probably wasn’t permanent because his finger came up green, revealing the bare skin underneath. He curled the finger inward and gestured that I approach. His dark eyes were fixed on my face.