A Girl Like That
Tanaz Bhathena
To my parents and my late grandparents, with gratitude and love
PROLOGUE
Zarin
The wails Masi let out were so heart-wrenching, you would think I was her only daughter lying dead before her instead of the parasite from her sister’s womb, as she had once called me. She should have been a professional funeral crier. Porus’s mother knelt in a pool of his dark blood and joined Masi in a cacophonic duet. Masa was more somber. He dabbed his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt, took deep breaths, and tried to compose himself. The officer in charge of the accident scene told Masa that our corpses would be kept in a local morgue till arrangements for the funerals were made.
His loud voice floated upward to where Porus and I now hovered, a few meters above the wreckage on the Al-Harameen Expressway in Jeddah—completely dead, yet not entirely gone.
We stared at the scene below: Porus’s smoking Nissan crumpled like a Pepsi can, the green-and-white squad cars, a flashing Red Crescent ambulance, the Saudi police in their long-sleeved khaki uniforms with black berets, our mourning families. The police had blocked off several kilometers of the highway shoulder and most of the right lane with bright orange construction cones. The area around the car was marked with yellow tape.
It had taken them an hour to remove our bodies from the Nissan, and even that had been fairly messy. There was blood everywhere. Blood that smelled like metal and gushed from our bodies like springs. Blood that had splattered across the windshield, and pooled on the floor of the car. A tire that had somehow come loose during the accident lay a few feet away, coated with the same dark, gleaming liquid.
“Aunt,” I heard Masi tell the police officer in English when he asked her how she was related to me. “Mother’s sister.”
Masi gare de phansi, I used to taunt her in Gujarati when alive. My aunt who would strangle me with a noose. Strangulation and suffocation were common ways of getting rid of unwanted children in India, the country where I was born. Quick and easy fixes for daughters who were supposed to be sons, for orphans like me who were foisted upon reluctant relatives. Once, on a vacation in Mumbai, I heard the Dog Lady tell Masi that there were rare occasions when very rich families paid their maids to do the job. Strong, limber women from slums like Char Chaali who used pillows or sometimes their own hands to snuff out the life of a newborn.
Masi’s hands were shaking now. A side effect of the pills my uncle made her take for her “sleeping problem,” as he liked to call it. With Masi, everything was a side effect. Tears, mood swings, the beatings she gave me over the years, the raging fits she sometimes threw when I did something that reminded her of my dead mother, or worse, my dead father.
A few feet away, Masa stood talking to another police officer—a short and potbellied man who was gesturing wildly in the air. We were not Saudis or Muslims, so I knew that neither Porus nor I would be buried here. Expatriates who died in the Kingdom were shipped back to their home countries for funeral rites. There were procedures to be followed, paperwork to be taken care of at the morgue and the Indian Consulate. Rites before the last rites.
But it was obvious to me, even from up here, that the potbellied officer wasn’t talking about paperwork. He pointed toward our bodies, shouting in a mix of English and Arabic. If I moved a little closer, like Porus had, I could probably hear everything he was saying. But I didn’t need to. From the context of the scenario it wasn’t that difficult to guess the reason for the police officer’s displeasure. Few infractions riled up the authorities in Saudi Arabia more than a girl voluntarily seeking out the company of a boy, especially one who wasn’t her brother or husband.
“I will miss my mother,” Porus told me softly.
I did not reply. I didn’t think I would miss anyone, really. Perhaps I would miss Masa for the times he had been remotely sane: the few instances when he spoke his mind in spite of Masi’s constant henpecking. But I tried to forget Masi as a matter of convenience. I wasn’t exactly Mother Teresa during the short span of my earthly existence, so there was no guarantee that I would spend my afterlife on a stretch of white heavenly sand. Why rack up more unpleasant memories if I ended up going to hell?
A police officer removed my school ID card from my ripped handbag. I saw him glance at my name and copy it down in his notebook: Zarin Wadia. Female. Age 16. Student. Car accident. If my English teacher, Khan Madam, was there, she would have added more: Bright student. Debating aficionado. Troublemaker. Disturbed.
The officer lifted an edge of the white shroud and compared my face to the photo on my ID. It was one of those few pictures where a photographer had managed to capture me smiling, a curl of black hair peeking out from behind my scarf, the hair partly veiling my left eye. Masa said the photo made me look like my mother during her teens. This was not a surprise. For as long as I could remember, people had told me I was my mother’s mirror image. A replica of dark curls, fair skin, and brown eyes, right down to the beauty mark on my upper lip.
I did not remember my mother that much. Sometimes I could recall the soft hum of a lullaby, the cool press of a glass bangle on my cheek, the smoky fragrance of sandalwood and loban from a fire temple. Memories that were few and far between, never more than flashes of sensation. I could often recall with more clarity the first day I grew aware of my mother’s absence. A hollow, nearly tangible silence in a warm room. Dust motes dancing in a stream of light from the window. November 28, 2002. The autumn of my fourth birthday. It was the week after my mother died—of cancer, they said, even though I knew it wasn’t.