A Girl Like That(8)

I had posed the question to the girls during break—or at least to the ones who weren’t chasing one another, skipping rope, or playing hopscotch in a chalk-drawn grid on the tarmac.

Muslim, Muslim, Hindu, Muslim.

Christian, Muslim, Christian, Muslim.

“Zoroastrian,” Zarin said.

“There’s no such thing.”

“There is.” Lines appeared on the skin over her brows, reminding me of the pictures I’d seen of the Hindu men the teacher had shown us in class—three pale skin-colored streaks on a forehead that was now pink with anger.

“Come on,” I said, irritated by the sound of a word I’d never heard before, a word that to me sounded like something Zarin had made up out of the sheer boredom of having no friends in class. “You don’t have to lie to us. What are you? Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jew?”

“I’m not lying.” Her dusty black Mary Janes scraped the ground as she got to her feet. Her knees, darker than the rest of her legs, were bruised, red blots and scratches slowly turning purple from the fights she sometimes got into with the girls in the classroom beside ours.

I felt myself growing stiff, even though outwardly my voice showed no change. “Well, you told us you had parents too. But you don’t. You live with your aunt and uncle.”

“I’m not lying,” she said, snarling the last word.

“You are too,” I insisted loudly, in an effort to be heard over the general din on the playground. “You don’t have parents and you don’t have a religion either.”

In fact, my voice was so loud that many of the girls playing nearby had fallen silent and stopped their game-play to watch Zarin’s reaction.

And what a reaction she gave them.

Before I realized what was happening, she caught hold of my arm and sank her teeth into it. We rolled in the courtyard, bit, pulled, scratched, and screamed, until a teacher yanked us apart and called us a pair of hooligans.

Of course, Zarin wasn’t lying about her religion, and my mother told me as much when I came home that afternoon.

“You learn this now, Mishal,” Mother scolded, “while there is still time. Tomorrow you will go and say sorry to that girl.”

Yet, though I filed away this fact on Zoroastrianism for future reference, I had no intention of apologizing to Zarin. She did not apologize to me either. Instead, we always tried to top each other in the classes we liked best, though I’d never beaten Zarin in English and she’d never beaten me in Arabic. When not competing in the classroom, we competed outside of it, usually on the school bus we both took home, our battles limited to taunts and name-calling.

I stared at the page in my textbook: Consider the motion of a car along a straight line …

From the mosque outside my window, the muezzin sang a call for the isha prayer.

Downstairs, Abdullah switched the channel to The X Factor Arabia. On another night, I might have shouted at him for turning up the volume so loud. I might even have unrolled my mat and prayed. But I couldn’t study anyway. And I was not sure if any of my prayers would be accepted after the things I’d done. I tossed my book aside.

In the room next to mine, Mother had begun another song. Quiet plucks of the strings that were slow at first and then quick. Staccato notes, I think she called them. Rapid little jabs to the heart.





BEGINNINGS





Zarin

There was something about the boy’s back that caught my eye, that made me pause on the way to the used-books stall and watch him string lights over a painted wooden stand at the annual school fair the summer I turned fourteen. Hours later, when the air cooled and the sky darkened, the lights would flash red, blue, green, and yellow and hordes of students would squeeze into the parking lot at Qala Academy’s boys’ section in Sharafiyah to stuff their faces with popcorn and cotton candy, buy bangles and DVDs, and throw darts at colored balloons to win cheap two-riyal toys made of old sofa foam and lint-covered velvet.

Maybe it was the translucent white polyester of his shirt that revealed the absence of the white undershirt worn by most schoolboys. Or the breeze that pressed said shirt to the long, smooth indent of his spine: a tunnel that trailed from nape to waist, flanked with thick muscle on both sides. Or maybe it was simply the novelty of being able to leisurely stare at a boy, without Masi constantly hovering around me like an overprotective bulldog.

“She’s growing up fast,” I had often heard her complain to Masa. “Too fast.”

Too fast based on the looks she said I got from boys and even from some men at the deli, the supermarket, and the mall. From the way I walked, my “hips swaying like a loose woman’s,” if the boy that followed me home from the DVD store when I was eleven was any indication—even though at the time I had not known what it meant to be a loose woman.

Too fast, like my mother. A woman who, even as a teenager, wore no sudreh under her clothes and tied no kusti around her waist.

“How could she?” Masi’s voice would boom through the house, as loud as a priest’s at prayer time. “With those small-small shirts that she wore? ‘It wouldn’t be fashionable,’ she would always say.”

According to Masi, the story of my birth could have been made into a tragic film for Indian parallel cinema. My mother had worked as a bar girl in Mumbai, a woman who danced to remixed versions of popular Hindi songs in a shower of Gandhi-faced rupee notes, accompanied by drunken compliments and whistles. After my great-grandfather’s death, it was the only way she could make money to support herself and her younger sister, my masi—not that Masi was ever grateful. My father worked as a hit man for a Mumbai don. He and my mother fell in love, did not marry, but had me. Then my father abandoned my mother, went off to Dubai, and got blown up by a pair of guns. The End.