A Girl Like That(9)

There had been several articles in the newspapers about my father’s death. “Fugitive Mumbai Gangster Shot Dead in Dubai.” “Massacre in Deira.” “Suraj Shinde’s Final Salaam.” On a trip back to Mumbai, I looked up these headlines one afternoon in the archives of a public library and even managed to find a small color photo of him—a broad-shouldered man with a square jaw, warm brown skin, and a frown exactly like mine.

My mother’s death, on the other hand, was not documented anywhere, except perhaps in a Mumbai morgue. I would hear Masi talking to the Dog Lady about it at times over the phone—how some of my mother’s bar patrons had shown up at the funeral—until the talk inevitably turned to me and the way I behaved after my mother died. “Never even cried, that girl,” Masi would always say. “You’d think she had no feelings whatsoever. She makes me so angry sometimes. Keeps egging me on until I hit her.”

My uncle had never approved of her hitting me. I had heard them fighting about it once a couple of years ago, when she’d left a bruise on my cheek for failing a Math test. But apart from that, he rarely, if ever, intervened about any other form of punishment Masi doled out. My disobedience was something he didn’t approve of either; he often told me that Masi and I would get along better if I listened to her more, if I tried harder at school, if I didn’t make her so angry by being argumentative.

In any case, Masa could never stay mad at her for long. The night they had argued, Masi woke us up with her screams. “I won’t let you!” Masi’s body jerked upward as she struggled against my uncle’s grip on her wrists. Her teeth gnashed. White drool gathered at the corners of her lips. “She isn’t—she isn’t going with you!”

I’d watched Masa gently coax her out of the episode, the way he had several times before in Mumbai. “It’s okay, Khorshi. It’s okay. Did you forget your medicine again?” It took him two hours to make her take the pills and then soothe her back to sleep, crooning an old Hindi love song. A lullaby for a grown woman. Neither of them seemed to notice that I was there, watching from behind the partly open bedroom door.

I, on the other hand, never screamed when I had a nightmare. Neither Masa nor Masi knew about the cold sweats I woke up to late at night when I first came to live with them in Mumbai, or the ones I sometimes woke up to even now in Jeddah. Most nights I dreamed of my mother, saw candles glowing, tasted chocolate flakes on my lips. “Smile!” she would say, and a flash would go off repeatedly, until I woke up with a start. Other nights, I would have different dreams. Scarier ones of a man tossing me up high into the air. A loud cracking sound. A woman’s scream. But then, just as quickly, the mornings would come and Masi’s voice would rise, sonorous in prayer. I would turn once more into the Zarin they knew—a girl who no longer cried or jumped back in surprise when her aunt gave her a beating.

One day she made me so angry that I stuffed my underwear in a clothes drawer, allowing the navy-blue cloth of my academy kameez to touch my skin without hindrance, resisting the itch of the rough cotton. It had been worth it to hear Masi screech when she saw the outline of my nipples through the cloth—even more satisfying than the way her face purpled each time I winked at a boy at the mall or exchanged smiles with one at the supermarket.

It no longer mattered what Rusi Masa said in her defense—“She means well!” or “It’s for your own good!” By then, I was fourteen and I already knew the truth: that Masi’s protectionism stemmed not out of a genuine concern for my well-being, but from a paranoia of having males around me, especially those who reminded her of my “good-for-nothing gangster father.”

It was basic psychology, Mishal Al-Abdulaziz told us at school. Girls were often attracted to boys who reminded them of their fathers, and boys, in turn, to girls who reminded them of their mothers.

But that day, at the academy fair, I was not looking for a fight with my aunt. I glanced around quickly, scanning the faces of the growing crowd of fairgoers for the glint of her big gold-rimmed spectacles or my uncle’s bald head. I couldn’t see either, which meant they were still talking to that man from Masa’s office on the other side of the fairgrounds. It had been the man who’d suggested the used-books stall when Masa told him that I liked to read.

“Let her go,” Masa had told Masi. “Maybe she can find those Harry Potter books the kids are always talking about.”

Masi had frowned for a moment, but to my surprise, she did let me go, probably unwilling to create a scene in front of Masa’s colleague. “No wandering around,” she had told me in her curt voice. “We will join you very shortly.”

The faint call for the maghrib prayer floated through the air from a nearby mosque. It would soon be followed by the rustle of prayer mats being rolled out in front of the stalls on the tarmac, the snap of shoelaces and the scrape of Velcro as men slipped off their shoes, splashed their faces, hands, and feet with water from a bottle, and stepped onto colorful rectangles with paisley designs, their heads covered with kerchiefs or netted skullcaps.

The sound of salah was one I always associated with Saudi Arabia, a time when work came to a pause and shops rolled down their shutters for several minutes, five times every day. In Mumbai, life went on as usual, the blare of traffic horns competing with mosques, temples, and churches alike. In Jeddah, however, a sort of stillness fell over everything. Here, prayer’s melody was distinct, audible over every other sound. As a six-year-old, I’d often fallen asleep listening to a salah after a nightmare. Even as I grew older, the sound had never failed to ease my restlessness. Until now.