A Girl Like That(49)

BLOOD





Zarin

“Zarin, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Porus said a couple of days after our fight at the deli. It was the sort of thing he usually did when we had a disagreement or a blowup—asking random questions or making small talk to ease the tension simmering between us.

“Okay,” I said warily. “What did you want to know?”

“I am wondering if you are—wait, no,” he began, suddenly switching to English. “I am wondering if there was something you’ve wanted desperately. Something you’ve waited for your whole life.”

I could tell that he was still flustered. For some reason, Porus always started speaking in English around me when he was nervous, a quirk that, if I was being honest with myself, I found quite adorable.

“Growing up and moving out of Masi’s house,” I said.

“I know that. I am meaning … apart from that.”

To be happy. The answer that came to my mind was simple. Raw. Too raw to relate to another person, let alone someone as attuned to my emotions as Porus.

“What else is there to look forward to?” I replied.

Which pretty much ended that conversation.

Maybe I should have been kinder. Maybe I should have just told him he had onion breath and changed the entire topic of conversation to Tic Tacs and Juicy Fruit. But I’d just received an e-mail from Farhan Rizvi that morning and hadn’t been thinking too clearly.

And it would have been a lie anyway. Porus’s breath wasn’t bad. I’d never found myself shrinking away from him for that particular reason, even though his uniform (and his car) did occasionally smell of meat and feta cheese. Porus wasn’t that bad looking for a guy. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his deep voice often making him sound older than he really was. I’d seen a few female customers staring at him in the deli from time to time, blushing when he smiled at them, though he seemed fairly oblivious to their interest. Even his shaggy eyebrows added to his appeal.

The reality was that Porus was nice. Too nice for the likes of me. Porus may have claimed to like me more than any other girl he’d known, but if his mother asked him to stop dating me (which, considering the things Masi had told her about me, was extremely likely), he would, like the good Parsi boy that he was. This wouldn’t be unusual. I’d seen it happen several times in Mumbai, to other girls in Cama colony, and had sworn I wouldn’t be one of them.

As for the kiss? Simple. It was an anomaly. A heat-of-the-moment thing. It didn’t matter how soft his lips had felt or how perfectly they had fit against mine, I told myself firmly. It would have been foolish to think otherwise.

Abdullah once told me that Saudi society didn’t permit guys and girls to meet up alone because it was impossible for the relationship to remain platonic. “Think about it,” he’d said. “Our bodies are engineered for it. It’s like putting a key and a lock next to each other and not expecting someone to try and see how they fit.”

At times like this I wished I had a girl for a friend instead of boys trying to jump my bones or Porus with his puppy-eyed devotion. Sometimes I even thought about my mother and wished she could be here to give me advice, even though thinking about her cramped up my insides. There were nights when I would see the flash of something silver in my dreams, shadows around me, long and thin like the legs of a stork, the feel of something warm and sticky trickling over my lips. Without even understanding why, I knew the dreams had to do with my mother. Not a knife, I would tell myself, whenever I woke up from these dreams, my clothes sticking to my back, my body twisted at that angle I’d always associated with nightmares. Maybe it was the flash of a stainless-steel plate from which she may have fed me as a small girl. And maybe the liquid wasn’t blood, but warm milk that I’d shut my mouth to. To this day, I could not and would not drink milk, despite Masi’s rages and beatings.

The only other person I’d probably have asked any boy-related questions was Asfiya, the girl I used to sit with when I smoked on the water tank, even though we had never really talked much when we were up there. I’d overheard the teachers saying that Asfiya got engaged after graduation. Right at the age of seventeen to a guy she had seen once, over Skype. “Everything happens with technology these days, but that is the way arranged marriages still work,” Khan Madam had told our Physics teacher. “Marriage comes first. Love, if any, grows later and increases with time.”

I wondered if the opposite was true for love marriages. If the love in those cases simply decreased instead of growing. Or was it marriage that created the problem, that made love lose its luster, the way it seemed to have for my aunt and uncle, who called each other darling or jaanu or sweetheart, but always with caution, sometimes even with a trace of venom?

With Farhan Rizvi, however, things were different. For one: I wasn’t in love with him, even though he was the first guy I’d ever had a real crush on. A guy whose kiss temporarily sent every other guy I’d known flying out of my head. Except for the very first time in his car, when I unwittingly compared the kiss to the one I’d shared with Porus. It had confused me so much that I pulled away from him after a few seconds. I didn’t know what was going on with me. I could have resolved everything by telling Porus: Yes, it’s Rizvi. He’s the one I was waiting for.

But it would have been a lie. And Porus wouldn’t have understood anyway. “You don’t really know what you’re doing,” he told me in a rare fit of temper the day after I first went out with Rizvi. “You think you’re so smart. That you know everything. But you don’t, Zarin. You can’t always be in control. I’ve seen guys like your head boy Rizvi. I know what they’re like. They go out with different girls every week. He’ll use you and toss you out like everyone else.”