A Girl Like That(51)

To distract myself, I looked around the barren, sandy area that made up the warehouse parking lot. Cigarette butts littered the place, along with old soda cans and aluminum foil wadded up in shining wrinkled balls. Masi, who used and reused aluminum foil at home and covered her stove with it, would have cursed at the waste.

Thoughts of my aunt led to thoughts of my uncle, who had, over the past week or so, tried to get me to confide in him.

“He’s a nice boy, no, that Porus?” Masa had asked. “A good hard worker.”

“Yeah, I guess he works hard.”

“A nice, nice boy. Good. Decent. You don’t find boys like that these days.”

I shrugged, wondering where this was leading. “Maybe.”

He cleared his throat. “Do you have something you want to tell me, Zarin, dikra?”

The Boyfriend Question. I knew it from the way his Adam’s apple moved in his throat, the gentle clicking sound he made with his mouth closed.

“No, Rusi Masa.” I had looked right into his eyes as I said it. “I don’t.”

It had been the truth. Abdullah and I were done, and as tipsy as Rizvi’s kisses may have made me, we’d only been on two dates so far. As for Porus … I shook my head. I couldn’t think of him now. I wouldn’t.

I watched Rizvi rip into the last chicken leg in the tray, sucking at the gray bone once the meat was gone until I could see the dark marrow in its center. Something about the image stirred an old memory I had of him, making the words slip out before I could stop them.

“I saw you here with a girl once,” I said. “She was crying.”

His shoulders—those broad shoulders that I’d admired as a fourteen-year-old—tightened for a brief moment. He tossed the bone back on the tray. “Breakups can be tough at times,” he said. “What can you do?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What can you do?”

He smiled at me and I smiled back, but there was a slight shift in the air, a tension that had not been there before. I wondered if the girl had been the one Mishal had been telling everyone about: Maha Chowdhury’s pregnant cousin.

My skin prickled and for a second I was tempted to ask him to drive me home. I shook my head, irritated by this sudden rush of nerves.

“Thanks for the lunch.” I blotted the grease from my lips with a paper napkin. “It was really good, even though the chicken does feel like lead in my stomach,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

He stared at me for a moment, and that’s when I saw it again: that quick flash of ice in his eyes, the slightest narrowing of his lips before he smiled.

“You’re welcome. Do you want a drink? I’m thirsty after eating this food.” He turned around and rummaged inside his backpack. A rustle of tins and paper before I heard the familiar hiss of a soda can being opened.

He handed me the Vimto. “You said you liked this one, right?” He removed another can for himself and popped it open. He grinned at me and a dimple formed deep in his left cheek. “Will be a good palate cleanser. Hopefully we both don’t taste too much like chicken.”

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 3 p.m. I had told Masi that I would be held up by debate practice today; I had to be back home in half an hour. “Fine,” I relented. “But one drink.”

There were a few things I remembered clearly after that. The taste of the grape soda. Fizzy, sickly sweet, warmed by the sun. The feel of his hand, hot with grease, sliding up my salwar-clad thigh. “It’s okay, Zarin,” he whispered. “Relax.”

*

I was dreaming of the man again. Tossing me high into the air. Majhi mulgi, he said in Marathi. My girl.

“Where did you hear this phrase?” Masa had asked when I’d asked him for the meaning one day.

“Nowhere,” I’d said.

As always, the man was a shadow, leaning over me at first, draping me in darkness until he threw me up, high, high, high, so high I could almost touch the glowing bulb overhead and the moths dancing around it. Touch it, he coaxed. Go on, touch the light.

I reached out with a hand.

In the background, a woman screamed. Stop it. Stop it. Was it Masi? I could not tell.

The leather inside the car burned hot from lying too long in the Jeddah sun. My head pounded and I tried to move. But my limbs felt like four bags of wet cement. Something scraped against my knee.

A curse and then the shadowy man turned into a boy with shining golden eyes.

*

I saw the priest at our fire temple.

Daily prayer, he said, was not the only requirement for crossing the Chinvat Bridge successfully. Zoroastrians also had to live a life that embodied three important precepts: humata, hukta, and huvareshta.

Humata: good thoughts. For Masi: hypocrite. For Masa: spineless. For Porus: nagging.

Hukta: good words. For Masi: “Kindly do me a favor and buzz off.” For Masa: “Quit the concerned-parent act.” For Porus: “Find someone else to pester, Mr. High-and-Mighty.”

Huvareshta: good deeds. I saw Masi searching for the malido in the fridge—the malido I had intentionally fed the crows by the kitchen window. I mimicked Masi’s screechy falsetto in front of Masa, watching him grow scarlet with rage. I blew cigarette smoke into Porus’s face and laughed when he coughed.

*

I saw the boy with the golden eyes again. His hand inched up my bare knee, fiddled with the loop of my underwear.