A Girl Like That(32)
“You know”—I directed the comment to Rusi Uncle again, but kept my eyes on her—“when I saw Zarin at the shop last week I thought I was in a dream. She looks exactly like Shirin from the great love story by Nizami, you know. For a moment I thought I was staring at a painting.”
Zarin finally looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. When I first saw you, I thought I was staring at Bakasura. Without the giant mustache and the big teeth.”
I felt my face go warm.
“Stop being so rude, dear.” Rusi Uncle’s voice was pleasant, but there were tight lines around his mouth and his face had turned red. Zarin did not seem to notice. While her uncle studied the blocks of cheeses and meats in the glass display case and asked me a few questions about the products, Zarin looked around at the people in the store, the men in particular, as if she was looking for someone, or maybe even daydreaming.
Zarin’s aunt, who was small and insectlike in her movements, did not participate in any of the conversation either. She, too, watched the men, her eyes magnified to giant proportions by her bifocals, ready with a glare for anyone who seemed to reciprocate her niece’s interest. Anyone, it seemed, except for me.
Moments later, Zarin let out a sigh and turned back to me, the only male in the shop her aunt had not deemed worthy of her notice: “Do you have a car?”
*
The car was a story in itself. A ’98 Nissan station wagon in green, the muffler gone, rust blistering the left back passenger door. “Not very good,” the man I bought it from said. “But the price is superb, ya habibi! You will not get a better car than this!”
A few days after I got it, which was a few days after I’d first met Zarin, I drove up to a small four-story apartment building in Aziziyah with black-and-gold grilles over the windows. I looked at the address Rusi Uncle had scribbled down for me on a piece of paper, making sure it was the right one. “Please do come over, my boy,” he had said with a smile. “Both Khorshed and I think that it will be good for Zarin to have a Parsi friend.”
As I pulled into an empty parking space, a face peeped out from behind the curtain of a ground-floor window. Moments later Zarin emerged, a scarf carelessly wrapped around her head, her abaya unbuttoned at the front, flying open like a cape, revealing a pair of baggy blue jeans and a checkered shirt that could have been a boy’s.
Another set of eyes appeared at the window behind Zarin, the large glasses glinting in the afternoon sunlight. I straightened and waved. “Hello, Aunty, how are you?”
But Zarin’s aunt did not reply. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard me. Her gaze was trained on us both, but mostly on Zarin, and after a few seconds I lowered my hand, feeling awkward.
Zarin, on the other hand, gave no indication of seeing her aunt or my feeble attempt at common courtesy. “A bloody khatara,” she called my car. “This car is as old as I am!”
“Good. I was going to name her after you,” I said, stroking the bumper lovingly, pleased to see the alarm that flashed across Zarin’s face.
Then she laughed. “You were nicer when we were kids.”
“So were you.” It was the first time she had acknowledged that we knew each other. I couldn’t help grinning.
“Why? Because I kept my mouth shut?” She laughed again.
She had a nice laugh, I thought. It brought out the warmth in her face and a sparkle in her eyes.
“Can we go for a drive?” she asked.
I glanced at the window again. The curtain had fallen back in place, but I thought I could see a shadow behind it, waiting.
I hesitated. “But Zarin, your aunt … How can I … without…?”
“You mean, go in to ask for her permission like a good Parsi boy?” she asked sarcastically. “Don’t worry. If she wanted to interrogate you, I wouldn’t be standing here next to your car. Even she knows you’re not my type.”
I was tempted to ask Zarin what exactly her type was. Instead I simply sighed and opened the front passenger door. “Make sure you wear your seat belt.”
“Okay,” Zarin said the moment she sat down. “I think I was impaled by a spring.”
“Im-what?”
“Impaled. You know, skewered like a shish kebab?”
I frowned. I was eighteen years old, two years older than this girl, but her English was, I suspected, already at college level, certainly beyond the reach of my Gujarati-medium understanding. “Your English is too high for me. Will you please speak in Gujarati like any normal Parsi girl?”
“I’m not entirely Parsi. I’m half Hindu too. Or that’s what my aunt keeps saying. It’s a surprise they even let me into the fire temple when I go to Mumbai. I think it’s probably because the priest’s wife used to like my mother and feels sorry for me.”
“Do you always talk like this with everyone?” I asked after a pause, and then realized that she probably did. There was a recklessness about her that reminded me of acrobats in a circus I’d once seen, a trapeze artist leaping high in the air without a net.
She raised an eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to tell your dear Rusi Uncle?”
I felt my ears going red. Saying nothing, I decided to change the subject by turning on the ignition and reversing back onto the road.
Zarin reached out a hand to turn on the AC. I caught hold of her wrist. “No. It will overheat the engine. It will be better if you roll down the window. Also, the radio drains the battery.”