A Girl Like That(42)

I waited for Abdullah to slam the receiver on his end before clicking off the phone and placing it back in its cradle. I thought back to the insults Abdullah had thrown my way over the years. Crybaby. Twit. Blabbermouth. Fool. I muffled my laughter in my pillow. Who is the fool, Abdullah? I wanted to ask him. Who is the fool now?

When I finally ventured out of my room, I found Abdullah stretched out on the living room sofa, his bare feet resting on the coffee table, the television switched on, but muted.

“What happened?” I asked. “I heard you yelling on the phone.”

He shrugged. “I broke up with this girl I was seeing.”

I sat down next to Abdullah. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked softly.

“She knew I was talking to my friends about her. That I called her … some terrible things.” His swallow was audible in the silence. “Don’t even know how she found out—she wouldn’t tell me.”

Heat rose to my cheeks at this statement, but thankfully Abdullah didn’t seem to notice.

“It doesn’t matter,” he was saying. “It’s not like I said anything behind her back that I didn’t say to her face.” Abdullah let out a bitter laugh. “I thought I’d finally found someone who was different from everyone else. A girl who didn’t need to yak the whole time, someone I thought I actually liked. But she was like every other girl I know—luring me with her body for free food and cigarettes.”

I frowned. Abdullah’s words did not surprise me. But the pain in his voice did—a pain I had last seen the day Father married Jawahir, when my brother and I were still children. I studied his glassy eyes, the straight nose, so much like our mother’s, the cleft in his chin that I used to poke as a little girl, wondering if it was the indent of someone’s finger. My heart swelled uncomfortably and I began to wonder if I had done the right thing.

Then I shook my head. It didn’t matter, I reminded myself. It didn’t matter how much Abdullah liked Zarin. Father would never have allowed Abdullah to marry a non-Muslim. In fact, it was better that they broke up now, rather than later. Who knew what Abdullah would have done if they’d grown closer, if they’d fallen in love? They might have eloped, even run away for good, leaving me alone in Jeddah—with our vacant mother in this big house, at the mercy of Father and Jawahir. My stomach clenched at the thought. As bad as my relationship with Abdullah could be at times, I knew that when it came down to it, he would never let anyone harm me or our mother. He was the only person Father talked to these days, the one who kept Jawahir’s visits to our house to a bare minimum, the one who still, somehow, held our dysfunctional family in place.

“You’re probably better off without her,” I said after a pause. “I mean, sometimes bad things happen for a good reason, right?”

Abdullah stared at me for a moment. There was a strange expression on his face—anger, mingled with sadness.

“I’m going to go take a shower,” he said abruptly. “You better check on Mother to see if she’ll come downstairs for dinner.”

As a child, a bee had once landed on my finger. In those days, I had not known enough to be scared of it. I’d studied its elliptical insect body, the black and yellow stripes on its back, its small translucent wings, and listened to the soft humming noise it made. When I’d reached out to touch it, it reacted predictably, rising into the air with an angry buzz, leaving me with a stinging boil on my hand—and a sense of confusion mingled with inexplicable loss.

That evening, when Abdullah walked away from me, I felt the same way—as if I’d come close to seeing something strange and incredible, only to have it slip away before I could fully grasp it.

*

Instead of updating BlueNiqab with the news of my brother’s epic breakup with Zarin, I went over to Mother’s room.

“Ummi?” I gently knocked on the door. “Ummi, it’s me. I know you don’t like being disturbed, but I … I need to talk.”

On the other side of the door, I could hear the faint, familiar strains of a sitar. On her good days, Mother played sarangi music by Ustad Sultan Khan. Flute compositions by Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. Even some old Bollywood semiclassical pieces by singer Lata Mangeshkar. On her bad days, though, it was always maestro Ravi Shankar. Ravi Shankar and his sitar.

My hand curled into a fist. Silence. Withdrawal. Sudden switches from relatively calm to very sad. I knew the symptoms. I’d googled them a year earlier, along with the cures for clinical depression.

I slammed my fist against the door. It rattled in the frame. The music stopped.

“I need to talk to you,” I told the door loudly. “I really need to talk to you, but you’re not here. You never are. I mean, it was one thing when Abu left us for Jawahir, but did you have to abandon us too? Do you know Abdullah and I barely talk now? That Abu and Jawahir are talking about marrying me off to the first guy they find?

“You … you make me so angry, Ummi! It’s like you’ve completely forgotten you have kids of your own. Neither Abdullah nor I exist for you anymore. And I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for it.”

That night, my mother played no more music. And it was only as I was falling asleep that I began to wonder why.





Porus

Till Zarin, I had, for the most part, known enough about what I needed to say to be considered reasonably charming around women. In the business of selling meat and cheese at the deli shop, I had to keep my wits about me. “The woman may be your customer,” my boss told me, “but you cannot let that intimidate you. You must always be in charge.”