A Girl Like That(30)



“Make yourself of use for once,” Masi had said one afternoon after I came back from school, and handed me a fifty-riyal note. “And bring back the change.”

And so it began. Each time she sent me off, I kept my face neutral, biting the inside of my cheek so I didn’t reveal my excitement. I wasn’t foolish enough to think Masi would send me on these errands if she ever thought they made me happy.

Seven weeks into dating Abdullah, Masi sent me on another one of these errands. I was in line at the deli counter, which was even slower than usual, and contemplated texting him from my cell phone. It was a risk—my phone was pay-as-you-go and Masa had the habit of going over the bills at the apartment and shouting out discrepancies so that Masi could hear about them: “Zarin, dikra, whose number is this?” or “Zarin, dikra, are you still getting those spam texts?”

Had I been any other girl, I would have resented this intrusion into my privacy. I had classmates who threw fits if their phones didn’t load their texts on time, who smacked their mothers during parent-teacher conferences. I, on the other hand, barely used the Internet except for research—Yes, even my computer time is monitored, I wanted to tell those spoiled girls—and knew better than to question the scraps of privilege my guardians threw my way.

A draft of air from the central AC cooled my hot skin. I slipped the phone back into the pocket of my kameez. No boy was worth this freedom, I decided. Not even Abdullah.

It was then that I sensed someone watching me, the fine hairs at the back of my neck rising. When I turned around, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was a boy standing a few feet away—tall, broad-shouldered, with features that struck me as Persian or, even more specifically, as Parsi, from India: dark, deep-set brown eyes, thick black eyebrows, and a hooked nose.

A new worker, by the looks of his pristine white uniform and cap and unstained Lahm b’Ajin deli apron, a cardboard box of assorted cheeses held closely to his chest. His sturdy hands had multiple cuts on them, probably occupational injuries. But it was the expression on his face that struck me the most.

One of recognition, not lust.

A slight smile hovered over his lips. He stepped forward, opening his mouth to speak.

I never found out what he intended to say to me then because he slipped on a patch of tile, knocking over the yellow wet-floor sign, and fell to the floor with a painful grunt.

Though a part of me wanted to laugh, another part felt a little bad for the boy. I was inching forward to make sure that he was okay when a voice shouted in the background: “Porus! What happened to you, boy?”

Porus.

In India, this wasn’t an uncommon name. In India, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Even here, I might have managed to push it aside had the boy not smiled at the other man: the slight gap between his front teeth sent me reeling back into a past of colony cricket matches and tentative waves.

“S-sorry, sir.” His voice had deepened over the years, but he still spoke with the same lilt to his voice, with the same soft Gujarati accent. “I … fell down.”

I don’t know why instead of saying hello, I turned around and fled, ignoring the man at the counter who called for me—“Hey, miss! Don’t you want your turkey anymore?”

I barely even registered Masi’s reprimand when I reached home—“Why did you stay so long if there was such a long line?”

In my room that night I was the one doing the scolding. Zarin Wadia did not run away from boys, I reminded myself. Zarin Wadia didn’t act like a silly, lovestruck Bollywood damsel, hearing cheesy love songs playing in the background when she saw a boy staring at her.

I snorted. Okay, the last bit definitely hadn’t happened. As for running away—that was silly in itself, but maybe it was from the shock of seeing Porus Dumasia again after so long, I reasoned. The Dumasias had changed residences shortly after we left Mumbai for Jeddah, after Porus’s father got a better-paying job. I remembered feeling terribly disappointed upon hearing the news. I had been having a hard time at my new school in Jeddah and was hoping to see a friendly face when I visited Mumbai again, even if I didn’t really intend to speak to Porus.

It had been an effective lesson in the ways of the world. People came into our lives, people left. Sometimes for good, like my mother and father. Sometimes they returned, like Masa’s old school friend who showed up one night for dinner in Jeddah after nearly fifteen years of no contact, and then was never seen again.

There was no reason to give special meaning to a reencounter, I told myself. Even if it was after ten years, and the first boy who had ever called me pretty. I had yet to meet a boy who could flip my world entirely on its head and turn every answer I knew into a question.





Porus

Stories, my father used to say, would always change the course of our lives, the greatest ones being retold over and over again not to simply convey morals or life lessons, but to bring people together. “That is the reason a storyteller tells stories,” he declared even during his last days, while lying in the hospital bed. “So he can connect to another human being!”

Pappa was smart in that way even though he didn’t go to school for long. He was one of the top salesmen in the life insurance department at the New India Assurance Company until the leukemia began eating away at him, forcing him to quit his job twenty years before retirement, and forcing us to cash in on his own policy the year I turned seventeen.

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