A Girl Like That(57)

“You can’t let him get away with this,” I said, forcing myself to keep my voice low. “You need to tell someone.”

“Tell who? Masi, who will probably kill me? Or the courts over here, who most definitely will? Who do you think they’ll believe when an expensive defense lawyer is involved?”

She was right, of course. Reporting the assault here in Saudi Arabia was out of the question. Even in India, society did not look kindly upon girls who made such reports. I had read about the cases in the newspapers, watched them play out on TV. Your daughter is intact, no? the police would ask the father. Then I suggest you don’t press charges, sir. It will bring your daughter unnecessary publicity and can even ruin the boy’s future.

A plate of Britannia’s hard, rectangular glucose biscuits lay before us along with two steaming cups of tea. I felt Khorshed Aunty pause behind us for a second, then retreat toward the kitchen.

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?” I said after a pause. It would be trademark Zarin to avoid seeking help and try to handle everything on her own. “You know I wouldn’t judge you, right?”

She stared at me, the faintest trace of her old sarcastic smile crossing her lips. “You are usually the one person I find it very difficult to lie to. Strangely enough. Maybe it’s because you never tell anything to anyone. You didn’t even tell them who I was with, right? You wouldn’t even tell your mother. But you don’t really believe me.”

“I never said that.” My voice didn’t sound convincing, even to me. I took a bite of the biscuit; it felt like sandpaper in my mouth.

Zarin dunked her own biscuit into a cup of tea, over and over, until the tough crumb weakened, hanging limp, brown and mushy.

“I dream of my mother at night. Sometimes a man. Sometimes there’s blood and my mother is lying in a pool of it and I’m lying with her and the man stands over us, laughing. I see faces swimming over me. Faces around the man. Masa. Masi. You. I call your names and reach out for your faces. They disappear. I wake up screaming. Well, not always screaming. But it happened yesterday. Masa said I used to do that when I was a small girl. He says I need to see a doctor.” She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a gasp. “I bet he means a gynecologist.”

The lump of biscuit fell into the tea and dispersed.

“Don’t you think you should go see a doctor after what hap—”

“I’ve told you time and again, nothing happened. Nothing, okay?” She was livid, hysterical. “You can tell everyone else that too!”

I said nothing. I examined the knuckles on my left hand, fisting it so they grew pale, the skin on a couple peeled off, exposing the flesh, the scars on them barely healed.

It was luck, I wanted to tell her. Dumb luck that I’d thought of the warehouse—that I’d even known about it—when her aunt called me. Luck that I’d seen her with Rizvi a week earlier. Luck that she was here, sitting next to me, instead of lying broken in a ditch somewhere.

Her aunt came rushing out of the kitchen. “What is it? What happened?”

Zarin didn’t look at either of us. She took a deep breath and suddenly the anger went out of me. She dipped the rest of her biscuit into the mushy tea and let it fall. “Nothing. Just catching up over tea.”

Her aunt’s lips trembled and then she opened her mouth as if to say something. Then her mouth closed once more. “Drink it then,” she said abruptly. “It will get cold. And Porus, I want you leaving at six sharp. She has studies to do.”

“Yes, Khorshed Aunty.”

“She treats me like an untouchable.” Zarin spoke again once her aunt had retreated, this time careful to keep her voice soft. “Places a tray of food six feet away from where I am. She doesn’t force me to sit with them at the dining table anymore either. If I do, they don’t talk. It’s sickening. I feel like those girls segregated in a separate corner of the house when they’re on their period. It’s like I’m perpetually bleeding.”

I shifted on the sofa. “Maybe I should get going and let you study.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If you want to go, go. No one’s stopping you. No one even asked you to chauffeur me around either, you know.”

“Your uncle did. When he has important stuff at work. You know this, Zarin.”

The call had come unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. “I don’t have a choice in this,” Rusi Uncle had said in a voice that sounded years older. “They are being difficult at the office. You know what they’re like, Porus, these Arabs. And I don’t trust anyone else. Please, dikra. Please help us out.”

“You didn’t have to say yes, did you?” Zarin asked now, almost as if she had read my mind.

No, I thought. I didn’t have to say yes. Part of me longed to get up and leave the way I’d said I would. But somehow I couldn’t.

“At school, girls call me so many things,” Zarin said after a pause, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to herself. “They think I’m not listening, but I am. All the time.”

I placed my half-eaten biscuit back in the saucer. “It doesn’t matter what they say.”

“Oh no, of course it doesn’t. I’m supposed to be used to it by now, isn’t that it?” She laughed that strange laugh once more.