A Girl Like That(59)
Traffic on my blog was heavier than it had been during the days of the Nadia Durrani fight, the gossip about Zarin and Rizvi being repeated at school through different sources.
“You know there was this other girl in the twelfth two years ago,” Layla said a few days later. “She began complaining of stomach cramps. They hurt her so bad that the teacher had to make her lie down on a row of chairs at the back. Then she was absent for a long, long time. No one knew what happened. Then last year, I found out that she had an abortion in India. She was absent like Zarin. One day, two days a week. No one thought much of it initially.”
At some point, the teachers got wind of the tale—at least some version of it. That much was evident from the sudden lectures our Math teacher would launch into in the middle of Algebra, discussing the ills of girls who could not keep their eyes lowered when they passed a group of boys.
“A good girl? A good girl, my children, will look straight ahead and keep walking. A bad girl, on the other hand…” He walked the length of the classroom and then turned, though never looking at any girl in particular, not even at Zarin, whose face was studiously bent over her textbook. “She will look back.”
Our Physics teacher started out by giving Zarin the cold shoulder at first, completely ignoring her requests to go to the bathroom, and then picking her to answer every possible question she could think of from our textbook.
“Fool!” she would shout when Zarin gave a wrong answer. “This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to your studies!”
Beside me, Layla and a few other girls hid smiles behind their hands.
It was only during English and Phys Ed that Zarin found any kind of relief. Khan Madam practiced her usual brand of favoritism by behaving as if nothing was out of the ordinary, even though she had scolded Layla and me many times in the past for inattention in the classroom.
The Phys Ed teacher barely noticed Zarin except to give her permission to sit out the games when Zarin made an excuse about being on her period one week and having stomach flu the next. The teacher went around in her usual salwar-kameez and sneakers, blowing her whistle at the rest of us, while Zarin simply sat on the stairs and watched.
*
Zarin did not take the school bus anymore. Instead, her uncle drove her to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon. Sometimes, a new boy came in his stead; the girls had grown used to seeing his battered green station wagon waiting at the pickup/drop-off point behind some of the better cars there, including Farhan Rizvi’s BMW.
“Who’s the guy?” Alisha asked Zarin once, about the boy.
“His name is Porus.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
For a second I thought Zarin’s eyes appeared watery, but then she blinked and I realized it was a reflection of the fluorescent light overhead. She tilted her head sideways and smiled. “Who do you think he is?”
The rumors, if there had been any hope of them dying out before, continued, evolving again to include this new character in the equation. Zarin and Porus, Porus and Zarin.
Someone sent me a grainy shot of them sitting in Porus’s car with the caption Latest Gossip, which was a little silly, because neither of them was hiding their relationship. He picked her up from school, for God’s sake. In front of everyone.
“He’s hot, isn’t he?” I heard some of my classmates giggling. “Very macho.”
Apparently, several others thought the same. I often saw a group of seniors standing by his car, openly appraising him, sometimes even shooting him wide, flirty smiles. Though Porus wasn’t traditionally handsome, I could see why he would be appealing to these girls. The stocky build. The scowling eyebrows. The way his face softened when he looked at Zarin, like he had eyes only for her.
“I would love to have someone look at me like that.” I could see the hearts forming over Alisha’s head. “It makes me feel warm and giddy inside.”
“Ugh!” Layla made a face. “Seriously, get a grip on yourself. Did you get a look at his eyebrows?”
I tuned out the argument. It wouldn’t be the first one I had heard when it came to the topic of Zarin and her new boyfriend. Every other day different voices rose. Fingers stabbed the air. No one seemed to notice or care about the circles around Zarin’s eyes. No one commented on the way Porus watched her when he dropped her off and picked her up; how he sat, straight-backed and stiff; how he always seemed to park as far away from Rizvi’s car as he could.
Mother always said that of her two children, I was the one with the instincts, the one who knew when something was off, the one who sensed danger.
Abdullah may have made fun of me wanting to be a psychologist, but he didn’t know that I noticed everything: from the tapping of his fingers when he was nervous to the inward movement of his Adam’s apple when something shocked him. He did both when I told him the rumors about Zarin and Porus.
“Wow.” A muscle in his cheek twitched. He turned up the television again and leaned back against the sofa. “She sure moves fast, doesn’t she? Then again, why am I not surprised?”
It was the first time he’d even spoken about her since their breakup, the only hint he gave of knowing her in any way. After the rumors about her dumping Rizvi broke out, he mostly stayed confined in his room, huddled in front of the computer typing project reports or e-mails, chatting late into the night with “a friend” on Skype, he told me. To my surprise, he also began to grow a beard. As religious as Abdullah had always pretended to be in front of our father, this was a new step for him. A serious step, I realized, when he occasionally began to invite some of the boys from his Qur’an Studies class to our house.