A Girl Like That(78)

A high priest in white robes tended to the holy fire in a fire temple, chanting verses of an old prayer, his face masked in white. The same priest, later during the day, telling Masi he could not officially induct me into the Zoroastrian faith. “Letting her come into the temple with you is one thing, Mrs. Wadia, but doing her navjote? I can’t. Not without a Parsi father.”

A man with red lips and an orange shirt, stroking my hair. “Such pretty lips,” he told me. “Such pretty legs.” The dark-haired woman again—my mother, I realized—screaming at the man. “You may have been my husband’s best friend when he was alive, but if you touch my daughter again, I will kill you.”

A woman dressed in a white sari, talking to an old lady with a dog in her arms. “Blood is blood, Khorshed, my dear. What is inside the blood does not change.” When I looked up from the book I was reading, they had turned away from me, their faces in shadow.

The man with the red lips pulling out a revolver on a crowded street and pointing it at me. My mother pushing me aside. “Go, Zarin. Run.” Her gold bangle felt cool against my cheek. A gun slashed silver through the muggy air. A crack of sound. Blood burst out of her, warm and sticky on my lips.

“What happened?” The woman who asked the question had a mole on her lip, exactly like the one on my mother’s. She stared at my blood-covered face and then looked back at the police officer. “What happened to my sister?”

*

When my mother died, our neighbor Mrs. D’Souza told me that she’d turned into a star—shining at night, I thought to myself years later, the way she always had in a Mumbai dance bar.

I wondered now, as I hovered with Porus over the highway, if my mother too had floated over her own corpse, if she’d ever come by for a final glimpse of me.

“Blood alone does not make someone your family,” I’d heard the Dog Lady saying to Masi once. “There are so many families out there—even in our Parsi community—looking for a child to adopt. No one would blame you, you know. No one would blame you for wanting to forget.”

I imagined my aunt’s face. Her small, dark eyes under the large bifocals she always wore. Her face, bone thin and weary. Always so afraid.

Maybe it would have been better for her to forget. Better to have let go of me and started over the way the Dog Lady had suggested. To have made new memories and let the old, poisonous ones fade away.

“I cannot,” Masi had explained to the Dog Lady. “Rusi is too fond of her. He will never let her go.”

But there were times, even then, when I wondered if that was the complete truth. If there had been a little more than just anger in Masi’s tight grip on my wrist, in her constant watchfulness, her furious, sometimes venomous diatribes against my mother. Was it love? I wondered now. I did not know.

I tried to peer overhead at the stars that I imagined were somewhere over the stratosphere, and felt something within me go out in a soft hush: the rustle of a hundred butterflies, the release of a long-held breath.

A moment later, I felt the air beside me shift. “Do you remember the first time we saw each other?” Porus asked. “Not the very first time, but here. In Jeddah.”

“You mean the second time,” I corrected him. The odd question, or perhaps the memory itself, made me smile. “You flashed your pearly whites at me and held out your hand to shake mine. I cringed and acted like you had bubonic plague.”

“Now you’re gripping my hand so tight, it feels like you’ll never let go.”

I said nothing. Maybe because somehow I sensed that I would eventually have to let go of him. The wistfulness in his voice told me that Porus knew this as well.

“Do you think we’ll be reborn?” Porus asked me after a moment. “That we’ll see each other in some other lifetime?”

The priest at our fire temple in Mumbai would have said no. Rebirth was a Hindu or Buddhist concept, not Zoroastrian. But who knew the truth? And I wasn’t fully Zoroastrian anyway.

“Maybe we will.” The words lightened something within me, made me feel hopeful in spite of myself. I laughed. “Maybe I’ll even go out with you.”

Actually, nix the maybes. We would come back, I decided. I would go out with him. If he still wanted me.

I felt his warm laughter before I felt his lips. As soft as a breath. As deep as a promise. I had the oddest sensation of being in and out of my body at once, of hearing his thoughts, feeling his joy along with mine. I did not know what would happen after I let go of Porus or he of me. But for now I would not think of that. For now, I would hold on, cling to the flesh of his biceps, to the rounded curve of a kneecap, to the bits and pieces of the earthly bodies we had left behind.





Glossary of Words and Phrases

abaya (Arabic): black cloaklike garment worn by women in Saudi Arabia Ahura Mazda (Avestan): the creator of the world; God, according to Zoroastrian scriptures akhi (Arabic): my brother

arrey (Gujarati/Hindi): oh dear

as’salamu alaykum (Arabic, formal): peace be unto you Ashem Vohu (Avestan): Zoroastrian prayer

attar (Arabic): perfume

beedi (Hindi): cheap hand-rolled cigarette sold in India beta (Hindi): son

bhai (Hindi): brother

chor (Hindi): thief

dhansak (Gujarati): Zoroastrian lentil stew dikra (Gujarati): child

dupatta (Hindi): cloth used as a body or head covering; worn with the salwar-kameez Ey su che? (Gujarati): What is this?