A Girl Like That(4)

“When you see one, run in the opposite direction,” Zarin had said. “Unless, of course, you want to get stuck in a prison cell for being seen with me.”

She’d succeeded in scaring me with this comment a couple of times, until I realized that the men she was pointing to at the mall weren’t religious policemen, but civilians out and about with their families.

“You should have seen your face!” she had said, laughing. “Porus, even if he was a real muttawa, he wouldn’t start chasing us the second he saw us together!”

The religious policemen at the scene of our accident were, however, the real deal. I could see it by the careful way they were scrutinizing our families, the casual authority with which one of them finally walked up to the policeman interrogating Rusi Uncle and murmured in his ear.

Somewhere in the distance, beyond the GMC, within the flat expanse of dusty palm trees, streetlights, glass skyscrapers, and apartment buildings, lay Aziziyah, and Zarin’s school, Qala Academy, where the whole nightmare had begun.

A sheen of moisture coated the police officer’s face. He tapped a pencil against his clipboard and then, with a sigh, scribbled something down.

“Why different surname?” He pointed behind Rusi Uncle, where Khorshed Aunty and my mother were crying, their arms wrapped around each other. “You have two wife?”

Rusi Uncle went red and started swearing in a way I had never seen before, calling the policeman all sorts of names in Hindi. Names that could have him arrested and tossed into a deportation center if the policeman understood him. Khorshed Aunty screamed his name.

The police officer’s hands balled into fists. The sun shifted slightly and for a moment I thought, This is it: Rusi Uncle is done for. Then, finally: “Khallas!” The officer clipped his pencil back onto the board. “Go!” he spat out. “GO!”

I let out a breath I had not known I was holding and watched Zarin’s aunt and uncle help my mother back into their car. I watched as my mother continued to stare at me, or what remained of me: the bigger of two human-shaped stains on the tarmac.

I am so sorry, Mamma, I wanted to tell her. I did not want to leave you alone. Not like this. I did not even know how this accident had happened in the first place.

“Let it go, Porus,” Zarin said, as if sensing my thoughts. “We can’t return. We must move on.”

She took my hand, her fingers sliding into the gaps between mine, something she had never done voluntarily when we were both alive.

Something inside me unclenched. I watched the muttawa follow the policeman who had been interrogating Zarin’s uncle, both of them speaking in rapid-fire Arabic.

“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked Zarin, who knew some of the language.

She let out an irritated sigh. “I’m not listening, Porus. They’re talking too fast for me in any case, and I don’t want to know what they’re saying. I don’t want to go back there.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. She had reasons enough—reasons aplenty, really—for not wanting to return. I hesitated for a second and then squeezed her hand gently; it was surprisingly soft and smooth—or did it feel that way because I was dead?

“You have tough hands.” She sounded surprised.

So it was soft.

“Yeah. But I thought you already knew that. From my job and all.”

“I thought you worked behind the counter.”

“There are many things behind the counter. Like a loading dock and delivery trucks.”

Now I knew she was smiling even though I could not look into her face. Not directly. There was something bright around her that prevented me from seeing her clearly. But we could feel each other’s reactions. We could touch. It was strange.

We were holding hands now the way my father and I had on my sixth birthday. Palm to palm, fingers laced together like two people afraid of tipping over and falling into the Arabian Sea—me more so than Pappa, whose hand I had clung to as he guided me into a fisherman’s boat near the ferry wharf in Mumbai. “Careful, now,” he had said as the boat rocked under my feet. “Careful when you step inside.”

I gripped his hand even tighter and tried to steady myself, hoping I wouldn’t tumble overboard in my excitement. “It will be special,” Pappa had promised the day before. “A glimpse of heaven, right in the middle of the sea.”

Overhead the sky was thick with clouds. Rain, the fisherman predicted before murmuring a prayer to the goddess and pushing off.

In the daytime, we saw clouds floating over the growing slum onshore, over women washing clothes and utensils in the stagnant pools while children bathed nearby, their dark skins covered with a fine watery film. The fishermen, by then, were already at sea, their painted boats and trawlers bobbing somewhere in the middle of an undulating blue. When the fishing season was hard, they picked up passengers like Pappa and me for a bit of extra money, taking us into the middle of the sea whenever we wanted, sometimes into waters that were so black we could barely see anything except for the faint gold glimmer of the city lights on the water close to the shore.

“Mad,” Mamma had called them and Pappa. “Utterly mad.”

I recalled her words in the darkness, amid the sounds of Pappa’s breaths and the crush of the fisherman’s paddle against the water. Moments later, however, the paddling stopped. “Now we wait,” Pappa said. The fisherman lit a match and brought it close to his face, lighting a beedi that he first offered to Pappa, who refused.