A Girl Like That(39)
“But no one cared about that. In this world, no one cares if you are starving to death. No one even looks at you. They only care when you start doing things they don’t approve of—like dancing with your clothes off. Zarin doesn’t understand this. She thinks I am ungrateful. She calls me a hypocrite. She is so much like Dina in that way that it terrifies me.”
There were times when I wondered if Porus would have been better suited to living with Masa and Masi than I was—if he could have been that steady, patient child Masa always longed for.
“Love is the answer,” Porus told me, when I asked him once. “Love is always the answer when things go wrong.”
*
A day later Farhan Rizvi’s sister, Asma, used a similar phrase during the Class XI English debate at Qala Academy, before she began waxing poetic about an eye for an eye making the whole world blind—and about how women who were victims of domestic abuse should not retaliate with deadly violence against their aggressors.
“There are other things that women have to often think of,” Asma announced, her cheeks turning pink, the way they always did when she spoke in public. “Their children, for instance. What example does it set for the child if both parents are violent? Who will teach the child right from wrong? Also, who is to say that the husband isn’t capable of change?”
I watched the judges sitting at a table in front of the stage, strained expressions on their faces. There were two from the boys’ section, and two from the girls’. I recognized our headmistress in her long Pakistani-style salwar-kameez and our English teacher, Khan Madam, who was wearing her usual sari and white cardigan, her hennaed hair vivid in the bright lights of the auditorium. Her eyes met mine, the skin around them ringed brown. She gave me a slight smile and looked away.
One afternoon when I’d gone to see her in the staff room for a book, the sleeve of her sweater had slipped a bit and I’d seen a mark on her arm that looked a lot like a bruise. The mark had made something inside me tighten and for a brief moment I wanted to show her my own bruises—the scar on my knee that looked like a crater, the brown patch on my left arm from the time Masi had hit it with a hot spoon. We are alike, you and I, I wanted to say. But then Khan Madam had looked up into my eyes and asked, “Is something the matter?” and the moment passed. “No, ma’am,” I’d replied. How could she help me, this woman who could not help herself? I’d walked away, pretending I had seen nothing.
Mishal Al-Abdulaziz sat across from me, with the team arguing against the topic. Over the past month or so, I had caught her and Layla watching me from time to time and giving me dirty looks. Earlier in the week, they’d been sneering at me, at one point pausing in midconversation to burst into laughter. While it wasn’t uncommon for either Mishal or Layla to do such things, ever since my fight with Abdullah I couldn’t help wondering if they somehow knew about it, even though my mind told me I was being paranoid. Abdullah did not discuss me with his sister, I reminded myself. “If I told Mishal anything, it would spread over the whole school,” he’d told me once. “Don’t worry. I would never tell her anything about us.”
At the moment, however, Mishal wasn’t watching me. She was calmly making notes in her book, probably for the rebuttal. Or maybe it was an intimidation tactic for the opposition. Already I could see the way it was affecting the others on my team: Alisha Babu, who was calmer than any other girl I knew, was making notes like a maniac, copying down Asma’s speech word for word.
But I kept only one ear on Asma’s argument. I could already tell it wouldn’t be any good from the vague way she had begun. I allowed my mind to wander for a while. To Abdullah, first. The puzzling discomfort that always seemed to accompany any thoughts of having sex with him. The anger he displayed now—more and more frequently. I thought of Porus. How strange that a boy so burly could be hurt with a few chosen words. Then, out of the blue, I thought of Farhan Rizvi. A boy I’d seen only from a distance. A boy whose pictures I sometimes studied in my bedroom after my fights with Abdullah, wondering, imagining what it would have been like if he’d seen me smile at him two years before.
Alisha’s elbow nudged mine. “Your turn!” she said.
He vanished into the lights and a hundred faces were staring at me then—girls from classes IX, X, and XI forced out of their classes into the ground-floor auditorium used for indoor sports and exhibitions, girls shutting their eyes, scribbling notes to each other, girls bored out of their minds over a debate they’d probably expected to be more exciting considering the topic: “Is it permissible for victims of domestic abuse to retaliate with deadly violence or other illegal action?”
I hastily got to my feet, leaving the papers behind. I placed my hands on both sides of the podium and looked the audience right in the eye: “Should women who are victims of domestic abuse respond by any means possible? Even if it includes deadly violence? Is violence right or morally permissible? Is the case as simple as saying ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind’?” I paused, waiting for the silence to spread around the room, a tactic I’d seen the headmistress use when she gave her speeches.
“Is it as simple as turning the other cheek and hoping the husband will suddenly remember the love he once had for his wife—as Ms. Rizvi suggested? Or will it simply mean another visit to the hospital, as it was for Savitri Sharma in Amritsar, Punjab? A woman who was placed in intensive care for severe burns because she didn’t bring her husband’s family the car they wanted as part of her dowry? Or will the case be that of Megan Forester in Columbus, Ohio, whose husband held their daughter at gunpoint so Megan would not leave him? What if these women had reacted differently? What if they had fought back? In self-defense?”