A Girl Like That(5)

It had been another half hour before the first rays cast orange into the sky and then yellow before the sun finally rose, as round as a peach and glowing. The dark water turned pale and translucent, tiny sea creatures shimmering gold underneath. “This is what I have dreamed of, my son, what I’ve always wanted to show to your mother,” Pappa had told me. “This is what heaven will look like after we die.”

A year later, when we went out to sea again, the boat began to sink midway, forcing us to swim back ashore, a skill Pappa had had since he was a boy, but I’d never learned. Water, I discovered then, could go into your mouth and your ears. Could burn your throat like fire when it finally came out of you. Pappa had had to pull me back to shore with him. After CPR, our first stop was at the hospital to make sure I was okay. It was the closest I’d ever come to seeing heaven firsthand. My mother had been furious.

“Stop!” Zarin commanded. “You’re doing it again!”

“Doing what?”

“Weighing us down.”

And now I could see that we were closer to the ground, closer to the voices that were louder than before, to the crush of the Jeddah traffic below, vehicles snaking around my old car and the police, their hoods gleaming in the afternoon sun. If I wanted, I could get close enough to touch the shapes of the people standing below, the faint trail of moisture on my mother’s cheeks.

Zarin squeezed my hand hard and we floated up once more. “Do you want us to be stuck there forever?”

“As long as I’m with you, it doesn’t matter,” I said, and could instantly feel her roll her eyes.

“You scared me,” she said.

Not as much as she’d scared me when she went out with those assholes over the past year.

“Did you swear in your head?” she asked me suddenly.

“How did you know?”

“I don’t know. I could … I don’t know, feel your hostility, I guess. I never heard you swear before … or technically even now.”

Of course she hadn’t. After Pappa’s death I had become quite adept at hiding my anger from the people I loved. Though I had the feeling that Zarin did see, or maybe hear, me bash in that one guy until he saw the sun and the moon and a few stars. I wasn’t too sure. Our one and only conversation about it had not gone too well.

Here and now, however, the boys in her past no longer seemed to matter.

“A gentleman doesn’t swear in front of a lady,” I recited in perfect English, some line I’d heard somewhere, now popping out of me as if it had been waiting for this very moment.

She laughed and I felt myself growing lighter.

English was not my first language. I rarely spoke in English with Zarin, normally preferring to use Gujarati, the language of instruction of my old school in Mumbai—a language I was certain to have better command of when talking to Zarin, who with a single look could still sometimes leave me fumbling for words.

Below us, my mother was now praying. I could tell from the way her lips were moving. When someone died, a simple Ashem Vohu would suffice, she had told me once, though I never understood why even that was needed. “Who understands prayers anyway?” Zarin had always said, and I had agreed with her. Especially when they were spoken in a language that few priests back in India could translate.

It was Zarin who had told me the story of the three wise men from the Bible—how they were actually Zoroastrian priests, who the Christians called the magi.

“No one at school would believe me if I told them this,” she’d said with a laugh. “Except maybe Mishal. But she’d pretend ignorance to spite me.”

“How do you know this?” I’d asked her, awed.

“How do you not?” she’d teased back. “I’m not even technically Zoroastrian and I still do!”

Having a Hindu father meant that Zarin was permanently barred by the fire temples in India from being inducted into the Zoroastrian faith. Though Zarin liked to pretend indifference about this fact, I knew it bothered her. Between the two of us, it was always Zarin who knew more about Zoroastrianism, who had spent hours reading up on it during trips back to Mumbai. I, on the other hand, was no longer sure if I believed in God, especially after my father died.

“My mother wanted me to become a priest, you know,” I said now. “She came from a priestly family.”

“A priest?” Zarin sounded interested. “Well, why didn’t you?”

“Pappa was from a nonpriestly family. So I couldn’t.” I still remembered the look on my mother’s face, the disappointment she couldn’t quite hide.

Zarin squeezed my hand again, but this time in reassurance.

There were things I still wanted to tell Zarin: things we’d never had the chance to talk about, things I had told her before but she’d ignored. But we were now fading—or was the light growing brighter?—and I could no longer remember what they were.

“I’m going to hell, aren’t I?” Zarin asked me suddenly.

And then I remembered everything again, bit by bit, my memory jogged not by Zarin’s voice, but by the fear I heard behind it—an emotion she’d expressed in front of me once before, on that nightmare day when everything went wrong.

Memories, Pappa had said, can be like splinters, digging into you when you least expect them to, holding tight and sharp the way wood did when it slid under a fingernail.