A Girl Like That(68)
Behind me, the other workers whispered among themselves. It was because of him, I imagined them saying. Thanks to his involvement with that girl.
My mother had blamed Zarin as well. After calling up Zarin to yell at her, she ordered me to stay away from her. “If you go see her again, I will never talk to you,” she had said.
If only it was that easy, I thought now. It might have been if Zarin and Rizvi truly cared for each other and if Rizvi wasn’t the biggest jerk to grace the face of the planet. If Zarin wasn’t being bullied at school.
“I will not have you before my customers in this state.” Hamza’s face was pink under his gray beard. He motioned me closer to keep our conversation private. “Also, since you are here, we might as well have a talk. You’ve not been coming to work on time. I’ve heard you have also been skipping out early, making other people take your shift.”
“I don’t want the money—”
“Money?” Hamza spat out. “You talk to me about money when whatever personal feud you’ve been having outside nearly cost me my cashier? I should fire you, you know. You are lucky that you are a good worker and that Hamza Arafat does not let a few thugs stop him from keeping the people he hires.”
The AC overhead made a clicking sound, a stray icicle rattling inside. “Shut it off!” Hamza shouted at the boy who was pretending to cut a block of salami. “How many times have I asked you to keep it shut off until the technician comes to inspect it?”
The boy, a sixteen-year-old with a shadow of a mustache, dropped a knife in his haste to switch it off. The machine grunted a couple more times before falling silent.
“Fine then.” Hamza’s voice sounded louder than usual in the silence. “Since you are here, you will make yourself useful. You will stay here today until the technician comes after hours. You will stay out of trouble and not go running off to see someone the minute a phone call comes. If you do feel the need to go out again, please do not come back tomorrow. I cannot have my boys coming and going as they wish. This is your third and final warning. Are you listening to me?”
I did not reply. I thought of Zarin, the shadows around her eyes, the things the other girls had called her when I picked her up from school. Slut. Whore.
As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Hamza sighed and placed a hand on my shoulder. “She is not your sister. Not your wife. Why are you making a fool of yourself over her? Why are you risking your job? Your life?”
My lips stuck together. I moistened them with my tongue. “You are right, sir. Of course you are. But I cannot do what you ask me to.”
Hamza’s grip on my shoulder tightened. “What do you mean, ‘I cannot do what you ask me to’? Have you not been listening to me?”
“I made a promise. To her uncle. I promised I would take care of her. She is my … she is my family now.”
My mother was going to kill me. The thought flitted through my head and was replaced by images of Zarin’s face—smiling at me from between the pillars of an old balcony, lying in the back seat of a car, leached of color.
“Family? She is your family now?” Hamza laughed and clapped his hands. “Look at this one! Look at him!”
He didn’t have to tell them; they were looking anyway: Ali the cashier, who’d taken a punch on my behalf, the other boys behind the counters, a few straggling customers.
“This is the classic case of a fool,” Hamza said. “Not only that, he thinks I am a fool too! That old Hamza, with his experience and wisdom, is giving him wrong advice. All because of some girl. In the meantime, he brings shame on us.”
I focused on the logo on Hamza’s apron and remembered the Arabic lesson Zarin had once tried to give me. “Laam,” I could hear her saying. “Ha, meem, ba, ain, jeem, ya, noon. Repeat after me; it’s not so hard.” It was one of the few times she had been patient and steady around me, the steadiest I had seen her in all the time we’d known each other.
Did I tell her how much she had reminded me of my father then? Pappa, with his endless confidence in me, his endless optimism. Pappa, who told me the story of the Persian poet when he was first diagnosed with leukemia four years ago.
“Once upon a time there was a poet,” he had said. “A man who had traveled across a desert somewhere in ancient Persia with a troupe of artists, on his way to Yazd.”
At first Pappa told me about the poet’s adventures, his rendezvous with other nomads and women with kohl-rimmed eyes. But the story quickly turned grisly. On the way, the troupe was robbed by a gang of bandits. The bandits killed everyone in the troupe except for the poet, whom they decided to torture for fun by cutting off his arms and legs and leaving him there in the scorching sand, at the mercy of the scavengers. The scavengers, great big vultures and birds of prey, attacked his dismembered arms and legs, but not the living whole of him. But the poet knew that this was not out of mercy. The scavengers were simply watching and waiting, their wings beating hot air over his face. Waiting because they knew he would die.
Broken beyond belief, the poet spoke to the One True God, Pappa had told me. “Ahura Mazda,” the poet shouted, invoking the name a priest in his village had taught him. “Ahura Mazda, you have been unfair to me. You have taken away my arms and my legs and now you are taking away my life as well. Well, I am young. Too young to die. I will stay alive for as long as possible. I will fight the odds that I have against me. I will learn to breathe both air and dust. I will learn to crawl through the oceans of sand this desert is peaked with, its cracked salt plains. I will make my way to Yazd, where you reside in the house of fire.”