A Girl Like That(62)

The Tall One did not flinch the way I would have or hesitate when Porus turned around. The flat of the hockey stick smacked Porus’s shoulder first, barely giving the boy any time to express his shock before cracking over his skull. Again and again.

The crate crashed onto the tarmac. When Porus finally managed to grab the stick with his hands, a thin trail of blood was already running down one side of his face. That’s when the Short One came in with his cricket bat. But by then, Porus was ready, throwing off the Tall One and leaping to his feet to block the Short One’s swings.

It wasn’t an easy fight. This much I knew from the sweat beading their foreheads. At one point, I even sensed anxiety, the Tall One glancing quickly at the Short One, before they both launched themselves at Porus.

Porus might have known how to fight. But he hadn’t grown up on the streets, fighting in the gutters. United, Bilal’s men overpowered him with a slam of the cricket bat over his head and the slap of the hockey stick against his jaw, and he collapsed to the ground in a mess of sweat and blood and spittle.

The Tall One looked at me and nodded. Their job was done. I finally made my way over to the body lying sideways on the ground and leaned over so I could speak in his ear. “An eye for an eye. A nose for a nose,” I said before I kicked him in the face.





Zarin

Days passed like liquid tar spreading over the ground. Thick and glutinous, a blackness clinging to them as Masa and Masi continued to go about their lives, pretending as if nothing had happened, until I found one or the other staring at me, as if expecting me to detonate at any second.

To fill the silence, Masi left the television on in the living room while she worked in the kitchen, sometimes pausing to watch a segment on cooking, or an American talk show where people came to cry over their past lives and traumas. “Airing dirty laundry in public,” Masi said disgustedly, even though she was the only one who wanted to watch the show.

Sometimes she used the television as a cover to mask the phone calls she made to Porus’s mother from the telephone next to the kitchen. “I’m sorry to hear that, dear,” I heard Masi saying. “I will talk to him if I see him today—make sure he listens to you. Thanks for trying.”

So now they were trying to turn Porus against me as well. I stood still for a while, watching her put down the phone and then straighten her spine, as if sensing my presence in the corner. I slipped away before she could see me.

I resisted the urge to pick up my phone and call Porus. I’d taken to calling him these days, late at night, when I jerked awake after nightmares about my mother or Rizvi, a scream choked in my throat. Porus was the one who insisted on me making the phone calls.

“You need to talk to someone. You can’t keep things bottled up. Besides, I’m pretty much an insomniac these days,” he told me. “When night falls, I think of Pappa and I keep listening for his voice outside my room, talking to a friend on the phone or joking with Mamma. It’s like there is this giant hole in my chest that I can’t fill up no matter what I do. You do a good job of distracting me.”

He did a good job of distracting me, as well, with silly jokes and outlandish Persian myths. Sometimes we didn’t even talk, but simply listened to each other breathing over the other end of the phone until we fell asleep.

Once, on a weekday, I surprised him with a phone call when he was taking a break at work. The happiness in his voice made me glad I had, even though I hung up after a short conversation. I didn’t want to get him into any more trouble with his boss, which I knew he had in the past, thanks to his mother telling Masi about it.

It had been a couple of days since we’d last spoken, mostly because the meds I’d taken for the flu had completely knocked me out of commission, earning me a single night of dreamless sleep.

I thought of the argument I had had at school with Layla Sharif that morning and shook my head. I shouldn’t have reacted. I should have ignored her. That’s what Porus would have done.

Only today, when I called to tell him about this, he didn’t pick up.

*

Hours later, when my cell phone rang, a familiar number flashing on the display, my heart skipped a beat, a slight smile grazing my lips. I shut the textbook I was unsuccessfully trying to study from and picked up the phone. “Hey, Porus, I was—”

“Stay away from him!” A woman’s voice.

“Arnavaz Aunty?” I asked, shocked. In the time I had known Porus’s mother, she had rarely spoken to me, and never with such venom in her voice. “What happened? Is Porus okay?”

“No thanks to you, he is,” his mother spat out. “Ever since he met you he has been ignoring everything around him. His work, his family. Do you know where I spent most of my afternoon? At the hospital where my son was brought in, beaten up and bloody. He won’t even tell me what happened or who he fought with. But I’m no fool. I know this has something to do with you.”

I tasted metal in my mouth. When I licked my lip, it stung. Somewhere in the background there was a lull in the sound of the television. I sensed another presence in the room, a shadow hovering at the edge of my left eye. Masi.

“Aunty.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. “Aunty, please, I didn’t know—”

“Of course you didn’t know.” I could hear from the tone of her voice that she didn’t believe me. “Well, remember this, Zarin Wadia, I have only one son. God might have taken my husband, but I won’t let the likes of you take away my Porus from me.”