A Girl Like That(53)

I burst out, my sneakers pounding the tarmac, and paused a few feet away, taking in the scene. A shadow moved in the back seat of the black car. Rizvi. He raised his hand and brought it down, as if hitting something. Someone. I didn’t try opening the door. I didn’t even think before reaching down to pick up a rock from the debris surrounding the building and smashing it through his window.

*

What had he done to her?

How far had he gone?

I didn’t know. Couldn’t be sure. After breaking Rizvi’s window and then his nose, I didn’t even have the time to check Zarin for bruises. To my surprise, Rizvi didn’t try to fight back. He held on to his broken septum and whimpered.

If it hadn’t been for the green-and-white police car I’d seen a few blocks from the warehouse—a restless shurta who seemed keen on issuing multiple parking tickets that afternoon—I knew I would have killed Rizvi.

I pulled Zarin’s clothes back into place and buttoned her abaya shut before carrying her to my car. She was heavy for someone so small. Or maybe it was the effects of whatever drug he’d given her. I carefully laid her on the back seat of my car. I was close enough to smell barbecued chicken and, under that, a hint of Pond’s powder. I tried to hold on to that faint floral fragrance, to the first time I’d smelled it as a boy, and then the other time, the week before, when she’d buried her fingers in my hair and fused her lips with mine.

“Shh,” I whispered when she made a noise. “You’re safe. You’re safe now.”

There was no way I could take her home like this. If I’d lived alone, I could have taken her back to my apartment, but I lived with my mother and she would be there and there was no way I could explain anything to her without the news getting back to Zarin’s family. The best I could do was drive around and wait for the effects of the drug to wear off.

At the traffic signal a few blocks from the warehouse, I saw the cop again, this time in the car right next to mine. I kept facing forward. The air was sour and rippled with heat, blurring the road and cars ahead of me. My clothes stuck to my back. Every breath felt like I was inhaling sweat. My right eye twitched—a trait Mamma attributed to nerves, Pappa to bad luck or danger. I gritted my teeth. Now wasn’t the time to think of cursed lemons or black cats. Casually, I glanced sideways. The shurta was staring at something on his cell phone. Then, as if sensing my gaze, he looked up and nodded.

I nodded back and turned to face the traffic lights again. A drop of sweat inched down my temple and slid toward my ear.

It took every bit of my willpower not to gun the engine when the light turned green, to look left and then right and gradually release the brakes, moving forward, merging with the traffic like I was a normal teenage guy headed back home from school or work and not carrying a drowsy girl in the back seat of my car.

A few minutes in, Zarin began stirring in the back. “Porus?” Her voice was hoarse. “Is it you? Am I in your car?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Don’t … don’t sit up yet.” I drove around a few more blocks before finally pulling into a parking spot at a quiet apartment building. When I opened the back passenger door, she was still lying on the cloth-covered seats, her eyes closed. It was the first time she’d willingly complied with any of my instructions. Or maybe she was too tired to fight.

There was enough room for me to slip in, to carefully raise her head and place it in my lap. I stroked her sweaty forehead. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“I … I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “I was so out of it. I am so out of it now.”

“I need to take you back home.” I kept my voice low, gentle. “Your aunt was the one who called me about you missing. She is really worried.”

Groaning, Zarin finally began rising up. I helped her into a sitting position. In my arms she felt birdlike. Breakable. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she always had been and I had foolishly allowed myself to be thrown off by her sharp words and bravado.

“She’ll be furious. She’ll turn into an evil Hindi-film stepmother and tell me to take my blackened face back to the gutter where it belongs. She’ll probably be right. You should have let me die, Porus. Because if we go home, she’s going to kill me.”

“Hush,” I said, even though her words settled uneasily in my belly. “Stop saying such things.” I belted her into the front seat. “We’re going home.”

*

Khorshed Aunty’s reaction, however, ended up being closer to what Zarin had predicted. Seconds after verifying that both of us were still standing, her sharp little eyes narrowed in on other things—Zarin’s oddly swaying gait, the rip at the hem of her abaya. Her nose wrinkled and I knew she could smell the grease from the chicken as well.

“Where were you?” Her voice was high and thin. “Where were you, worthless girl? Who did you blacken your face with?”

In other circumstances, I might have laughed at how accurately Zarin had predicted her masi’s reaction and her words. Unfortunately, there was nothing funny about the way I had found Rizvi hovering over her semiconscious body, nothing funny about what was happening now, in Zarin’s own house, where instead of checking her to see if she was okay, her own aunt looked like she was about to hit her.

Outside the window, the sky was turning a reddish brown, a shade darker than the housecoat Khorshed Aunty was now wearing, a color that I knew would coat the apartment buildings, the trees, and the cars in shades of rust.