A Girl Like That(38)
“Our people are our people,” I would often hear her tell Persis. “If there were some nice Parsi families—some nice Parsi boys—around here, I would not feel so anxious about her.”
As hypocritical as I found them both over this idea, I couldn’t really complain about it. Being with Porus was one of the few ways I could leave the house without having to sneak out, and sometimes he even acted as a cover for my dates with Abdullah, though he didn’t like that.
Porus had penetrated some of my barriers too. Unlike Abdullah, Porus was easy to talk to about Mumbai and being Parsi. I didn’t have to think twice before switching from English to Gujarati when I spoke with Porus; didn’t have to figure out ways to explain a joke about Masi humming during prayers or the eccentricities of the Dog Lady at Cama colony. I didn’t even mind it when Porus texted me a cheesy picture and quote that said Keep Calm and Love a Parsi. (Even though, for the sake of appearances, I texted back, “You wish.”)
There was wonder in Porus’s eyes about everything Jeddah. And, if I was honest, everything me. He asked me questions ranging from what book I’d take with me if I was stranded on a desert island to what I thought about women not being allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. I’d never talked like this with a boy before. Not even Abdullah.
Though I had initially enjoyed the lack of personal conversation on my dates with Abdullah, nowadays it left me feeling a little bored, as it left us very little to do except eat, smoke, or kiss. There were times when we would drive past the familiar palm tree engraving and WELCOME TO JEDDAH sign near the arch on Madinah Road and I would remember Porus and his comment about how he’d never seen so many date palms in one place. Abdullah would ask why I was smiling and I’d say “No reason,” which made me feel incredibly guilty.
But Abdullah never seemed to notice how distracted I was, often brushing aside any attempts at conversation with a hard kiss on my mouth. Slowly but surely, he tried to take things further than kissing, inching his hand up my thigh or my torso, always getting pissed off when I stopped him from unbuttoning the hooks on the back of my kameez or pulling down the elastic of my salwar.
The Thursday before, we’d had our biggest fight about the subject.
“Since when did you turn into a prude?” he’d asked me. “Boyfriends and girlfriends do these things. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Maybe—if you’re in America,” I pointed out. “I told you I’m not ready yet, Abdullah. I mean, we’ve only been dating for a couple of months.”
Abdullah snorted. “Give me a break, Zarin. It’s that deli boy, isn’t it? You have the hots for him now.”
“Porus is my friend. He knows I’m with you.”
“Yeah, well, if that’s the case, I really don’t know what your problem is.”
I didn’t know either. As much as I liked kissing Abdullah, the idea of having sex with him made me uneasy, felt wrong on some level. It was something I could barely explain to myself, let alone to a boy who worked off his sexual frustration by calling me a tease and then giving me the silent treatment for the entire twenty-minute drive back to my apartment building.
With Porus, everything was different. For one: he was my friend, not my boyfriend. Two: despite his annoying comments about how he was going to win me over, I knew he would never really pressure me into doing anything. There was something about Porus, a kindness in his eyes, maybe, or that goofy smile of his that made me instinctively feel safe around him. His curiosity was endless, his questions moving randomly from one subject to another, making me talk and talk and talk until I blurted out things I had never meant to in the first place.
“Do you want me to talk to Rusi Uncle?” Porus had asked one day, and pointed toward a new bruise on my arm. “Maybe if I told him, he would stop it.”
I’d vehemently shaken my head. Masi’s “anxiety issues,” as Masa called them, often took precedence over whatever she did to me, though I didn’t tell this to Porus.
“Please, dikra,” Masa would plead whenever I told him. “Please try to be patient with her.”
Masa, who would lose his own patience whenever I said that Masi simply used her illness as a shield for her mean behavior. Who had never seen the calculating look in her eyes when she’d smacked her head the day Fali died.
“It’s nothing,” I had snapped at Porus. “People beat their kids all the time. Even our teachers beat us at school.” The week before, I’d seen our Physics teacher twisting some hapless Class VI girl’s ear for wearing the wrong-colored shoes to the school assembly. “It isn’t anything new. I’m not a weakling, Porus. I can handle it.”
“You’re not weak if you talk to someone about your abuse. Beating children is wrong. My father always said so. He never beat me, and neither did my mother.”
“It’s more complicated than that.” I’d forced myself to look away from his penetrating stare. “I’m not like you, you know. I’m not a nice person.”
Even Porus’s mother knew this. I’d overheard Masi talking to her plenty of times about my bad behavior when she visited our apartment. “What to do, Arnavaz? Children these days! They never listen.”
Once, I overheard the two of them discussing my mother: “I don’t even want to talk about the things they called her,” Masi told Arnavaz Aunty. “The things they said behind her back. When our grandfather died, Dina didn’t want anyone’s help. She got up one day, went off to the cabaret bar near the chawl, and got a job there. She said that it was for me. For her little sister.