A Girl Like That(43)

In charge, like some of the men I worked with—men like Hamza himself, who unloaded twenty-kilo bags of meat and cheese off the truck with the green-and-yellow Lahm b’Ajin logo without gritting their teeth or squinting their eyes. Men who could curse at each other and then smile and charm at the counter, selling our customers (mainly women) sliced beef and turkey, blocks of jibneh, akkawi, and shanklish cheese rings covered with zaatar and pine nuts. “Peppered salami with that, sayeedati?” “Smoked turkey? Of course.” “You are French, no?”

“You cannot be charming with everyone though,” my boss had cautioned. “Some women do not like you smiling at them. Some women want you to be polite and courteous and not look into their faces directly, even if they are covered with a niqab.”

I practiced that same courtesy on Zarin the week after she won that debate of hers—though not exactly for the same reasons: never looking at her in the face directly, while she smoked four Marlboros in my car within half an hour. I knew that if I did look at her directly, she would simply bat her eyelashes and I would foolishly end up giving her whatever she wanted—in this case, more cigarettes.

“No,” I said when she held out her hand for the fifth one. “You’ve had enough.”

“Another!”

“I said no, na?”

“‘I said no, na?’” she mimicked, her voice high and whiny. “Stop being a muttawa, Porus. You know I’m stressed.”

Stress that may have been caused by anything, from something her masi may have done at home to something that may have happened at her school. I knew she would not tell me about it right away, and by now I knew better than to ask her about it directly. Distraction, I had learned, was one way to get Zarin to start talking about herself—even a little bit—and so that’s what I began to do.

I began telling her about the great love story between Khusrow, Shirin, and Farhad—a tale that Pappa had told me so often when he was alive that it stayed in my mind, word for word, long after he died. The story, Pappa had told me, represented love in its many forms. Khusrow’s jealousy, Farhad’s passion, and Shirin’s confusion in choosing between the Sassanian king she was destined to marry, and the poor stonecutter who devoted his life to tunneling an entire passageway for her through an impenetrable mountain.

Zarin, as expected, did not seem that impressed. She called Khusrow a Peeping Tom: “What else do you call a man who stares at a woman from behind the bushes while she’s bathing?”

Farhad, on the other hand, was a fool. “So some old lady tells him that Shirin is dead and he kills himself because of it?” Zarin said.

“He loved her,” I said, willing her to see Farhad the way I saw him. “He spent years tunneling through the great mountain of Beysitoun so that two rivers joined and became one. He accepted Khusrow’s challenge and fulfilled it. He had even begun to win over Shirin’s heart with his devotion. Imagine what it must have made him feel like to hear that his love, his very reason for living, was gone?”

“Psh. I’m sure there were less tiring women out there. He should have spent his energy on them instead of some princess.”

“I don’t think it mattered to him that she was a princess. And maybe he wasn’t doing it for her. Maybe he was doing it to show Khusrow that even an ordinary man could do great things. That he could win over the heart of an unreachable woman by showing her his love and devotion and expecting nothing in return. Why else would Khusrow grow so jealous that he would send over that old woman to plant false rumors about Shirin’s death in Farhad’s ears? For Farhad, even an accidental glance from Shirin had been enough—a joy, a miracle. He proved how selfless love could be.”

She shook her head and laughed. “You are so cheesy.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know it sounds cheesy or whatever, but you are undervaluing the strength of emotions. Farhad’s emotions gave him strength; he channeled them into great art.”

“What was the point, though? His main goal was to get the girl, right? And he didn’t. He believed a howling old lady that Shirin was dead and cracked open his skull with a rock.” She waved her hand in the air and her mouth curved down. “What a waste of art.”

“Love isn’t wasted, Zarin!”

But I didn’t think she understood. To her, Romeo and Juliet, Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Farhad were myths—“people who did ridiculous things long ago and then died over it. In the name of love, of course.”

I told her the story of my own parents—of how my father first met my mother and impressed her by racing after a pickpocket who had snatched her purse on Balaram Street. How Mamma spent day after day next to Pappa in the hospital when he was diagnosed with leukemia, how they prayed together every Friday to ease their troubles.

“Oh, aren’t you lucky?” Zarin had responded, and then held out her hand again. “Cigarette, Porus. Please! I can feel the nicotine draining out of me as we speak.”

The trouble with girls was that they never told you what they were thinking. In Zarin’s case, the truth often came out in roundabout ways, eked out in little statements and opinions, usually after she’d smoked a good number of cigarettes.

Even then, when it came to her childhood, Zarin was pretty closed off. “My parents died and I came to live with my aunt and uncle. What else is there to tell?” she had remarked once. However, over the weeks, I learned to tell how angry Zarin was by the number of cigarettes she smoked. One meant Normal Zarin. Slightly calm, slightly grumpy. Two meant Annoyed. Three or more meant Really Annoyed or Going-to-Kill-You Annoyed and most times I didn’t even know which.