A Girl Like That(36)

It was here that I took Zarin now, parking next to the boardwalk, with a clear view of the mosque. I rolled down my window and sucked in a deep breath of the sea air: clean, hot, tinged with salt. In the distance a municipal dredger lay flat and black against the water, leaving behind a stream of white foam.

There were days in Jeddah when the smell of the sea was much stronger, so strong that it stuck to the clothes my mother hung to dry on our small balcony, a stiff, fishy smell that never seemed to go away no matter how much deodorant I used. “It was never like this in Mumbai,” Mamma would grumble, pressing the iron hard onto my shirt, as if she expected to burn the smell out of the cloth.

Zarin stared out at the water now, crushed like the fabric of a woman’s sari, a dull steel blue that caught glints of red and yellow from the setting sun.

“We used to come here,” she said, speaking for the first time after our silent car ride. “Masa, Masi, and I. When I was six. Masa used to take my hand and walk with me along the shore. Masi would walk on his other side. People used to think we were a family.”

“You are a family.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I would be if I knew what I was joking about.”

She finally turned around to face me, but didn’t really look me in the eye. “It was ridiculous. The reason for our fight. She was complaining about how much she hated certain things about Jeddah. ‘Our India is our India.’” Zarin mimicked her aunt as she spoke the last few words. “And stuff like that. But when she goes to India, she praises Jeddah to the skies and complains about how dirty Mumbai is. She was being a hypocrite. I called her out on it. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

I cleared my throat. “Does she hit you a lot?”

She shrugged. “Not as much as she used to.”

“But Rusi Uncle—”

“Does nothing. Well, to be fair, he does tell her off sometimes. But he also keeps saying that I shouldn’t shoot my mouth off at her. He always takes her side. Even when I’m right.” She finally focused her gaze on mine. “I was so angry. I wanted to get out of there.”

“And I was the first person you thought of? I didn’t know you thought of this as your getaway car,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

She smirked. “I guess I could have picked better, huh?”

“Like your boyfriend,” I said pointedly. “You do have one, don’t you? Or did you lie about that as well?”

“Yeah, sure. Call my boyfriend, whose existence neither Masa nor Masi knows about, and get into even more trouble. That would have been classic. Why don’t I ask them to ship me off to Mumbai and marry me to some good Parsi boy over there?”

“What’s wrong with Parsi boys?” I couldn’t help feeling offended. “And you’re too young to get married anyway.”

She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Hey!” she shouted when I plucked it out of her hands. “Give that back!”

“You’re not smoking those things in my car. Besides, do you know how much they can damage your lungs?”

“Come on,” Zarin insisted. “No one cares.”

“Well, maybe they should,” I said.

Something flickered in her eyes. She held out her hand again. “Will you give it back to me if I promise I won’t smoke?”

Yeah, right. I pocketed the pack.

“Fine, keep it,” she said irritably. “There was only one left anyway.”

“A small but important victory.”

“It has suddenly become clear to me why you don’t have a girlfriend.”

“I didn’t know furnaces could be girlfriends.”

Her eyes widened for a brief moment. The way her mouth twitched should have tipped me off before the laugh bubbled out of her. Belly-deep. Real. “Okay, wise guy,” she said, once she’d caught her breath. “You got me. This time.”

I should have known I was in trouble from that moment. Because, though she didn’t know it, she’d gotten me as well. Just when I’d been about to write her off, she laughed that laugh and I fell for her again.

*

That first phone call set the tone for a ritual of sorts. Zarin would call—mostly moments before she wanted to go somewhere—and ask if I wanted to “go out.” When we met, she would make it a point to say we were “friends only.” I would tease her about this—“Why are you being so specific? Are you afraid of falling for me?”

It wasn’t easy reconciling the image of Zarin I had in my head with the girl I found in Jeddah. In Mumbai, I had always thought of Zarin as clever but quiet—a girl who preferred sitting by herself and who observed more than she spoke. Ten years later, while I found some of these things to be true, I also had to account for her quick wit, her biting sense of humor, and her general moodiness on the days when she didn’t get a proper nicotine fix.

Though she didn’t show it very often, Zarin had a softer side as well. When I talked about Pappa or my old life in Mumbai, she listened, sometimes even contributing an anecdote of her own. On my bad days, she made me laugh. It was odd, I thought, how she seemed to sense the change in my moods almost instantly. The only other person who could see through my poker face was my mother. When I mentioned this to her, Zarin said: “You can never lie to another liar.”