A Girl Like That(55)

“I am telling the truth,” I insisted, wishing I was half as strong as my father when it came to convincing people. I wanted to close my eyes and seek out Pappa’s presence the way I did some mornings while praying before the altar in our apartment’s small kitchen. Pappa would know what to do, would know exactly what to say. I glanced quickly at the bathroom door. If Zarin and I had been alone, I would have knocked, hammered on it until she came out or let me in. But here, in front of her aunt and uncle, things felt different. I was no longer a friend but a stranger, intruding on a family’s private embarrassment. I wondered if Zarin too felt this way, like a perpetual intruder between this man, this woman, and their dysfunctional relationship.

I caught Rusi Uncle’s face, reflected in the window. When my eyes met his, he looked away.

“You can go now,” Rusi Uncle told me in a cold voice. He made sure he didn’t look at me again. “Thank you for bringing Zarin home.”

I hesitated. “Uncle, I—”

“Go, Porus.” The bite in his voice made me step back. “Just go.”





Zarin

There was no blood. Not the way there was supposed to be if you were a virgin. I’d heard whispers at school that some girls didn’t bleed, didn’t even realize something had happened to them until they were a few weeks in, like Maha Chowdhury’s cousin.

My period, which came a couple of days later, eventually proved that nothing had happened with Rizvi on that day, nothing at least that would have me withdrawing from school with the excuse of a swollen belly. But something had. Something that made me wake up at night, sweating and sick, vomiting the dinner I’d eaten hours before.

“Stomach flu,” Dr. Thomas said, when Masa took me to see him. “A pretty bad one, but nothing serious. It could have been something she ate outside.”

But it was more than a bug and both Masa and Masi knew this.

“What happened that day?” Masi kept asking me, over and over again. “Was it a boy? Tell me!”

“Nothing happened!” I kept telling her in response. “I was sick, okay?”

I braced myself for her blows—a favorite tactic of hers to coax the truth out of me—but to my surprise, Masi did not raise her hand. It was almost as if she was afraid to touch me now, as if she could somehow sense the invisible stain that Rizvi had left on my skin.

“I tried,” I heard her telling Masa over the phone. “I tried so hard, Rusi, but she won’t tell me anything.”

When Masa came home that evening, he found me sitting on my bed, my Physics textbook on my lap.

“Zarin.” Masa started to reach out for me, but his hand paused when I inched away from his touch. “Zarin, dikra, will you please tell me what’s going on?”

“N-nothing,” I said, hating the way my voice shook in front of him. “I’m s-studying. I have my Physics mock exam on Wednesday.”

“Zarin, we are worried about you … You aren’t acting like yourself.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. “It’s the flu.”

Silence filled the room.

“Maybe you will tell me later,” he said after a pause. His voice was so quiet that I wasn’t sure if he was speaking to himself or to me. “You will tell me later, won’t you?”

“There’s nothing to tell.” I stared at the words in the book, the letters blurring together, until I finally heard his receding footsteps. My stomach churned and for a second I was afraid I would throw up again. I tossed the book aside and closed my eyes.

What did he want me to say? That I had had a crush on a boy who later tried to rape me? That I’d ignored Porus’s warnings, the rumors, and worst, my own instincts?

Where did he touch you? I could imagine the religious police asking. With what body part? Rizvi would deny everything, or worse, hire a lawyer who would point out that I was the one who had initiated things that first time at the deli. That everything that had happened afterward was consensual, even though I only wanted to kiss Rizvi (a thought that now made me want to hurl).

Who do you think they will believe? a voice that sounded like Mishal Al-Abdulaziz’s taunted in my head. A good-looking all-rounder who is head boy at his school, or a female who everyone thinks is a few rungs short of juvenile delinquency?

“You are girls,” I remembered the Physics teacher announcing one day when we were especially rowdy in class. “You can’t get away with acting like boys.”

In the days that followed, Masa and Masi did not approach me again. They watched me from a distance, evading my gaze when I looked at them, whispering furiously whenever I exited a room: Did she tell you what happened that day? or Was she screaming in her sleep again?

It reminded me of the time I first moved to Cama colony after my mother’s death, when I sat for days in one corner of my aunt and uncle’s apartment after the funeral. “She doesn’t remember?” Masi had sounded furious. “How can she not remember?”—and I knew that they were talking about the way my mother had died and how they found me next to her, covered in blood. They said I spoke to no one afterward and that I hadn’t even cried.

At the Tower of Silence in Mumbai, where the funeral had been held, I could not look at my mother’s face. The pallbearers brought in a dog on a leash, a skinny beast covered with white fur and with two brown spots over its eyes. The dog sniffed my mother’s toes and then her ankles, testing for a sign, any sign that she might still be alive. But she wasn’t and that was confirmed in the prayers that the masked priests recited, loud words that were meant to stitch the skin over the wound of her earthly sins.