A Girl Like That(3)
I wrote of outer space. Stars everywhere in diamond pinpricks. Bright white fire crackling in the tails of the comets. Meteors falling in showers of red, orange, and blue. Colorful planets revolving around fiery suns. The souls would continue ascending through this vast, glittering space for a very long time until they reached utter darkness and their heads brushed against something that felt like a ceiling: a delicate, thinly veined membrane that tore easily with a poke of a finger. Beyond that membrane lay heaven or hell, depending on how the souls had behaved on earth.
The priest gathered our papers and skimmed through the descriptions. “Some of you have good imaginations,” he said. “But this isn’t what really happens.”
Zoroastrian death, he explained, was followed by a journey that began three days later, at the foot of a silvery bridge arching up into a brightness that blinded the eyes. The bridge, called the Chinvat, had to be crossed by every soul three days after death.
As I grew older, I liked to think of the bridge as the Walk of Fame or of Shame. Your fate lay in the Hallowed Brightness Up Above or the Dark Abyss Down Below. If you had sinned too much, the bridge would become blade thin and you’d fall into the Abyss, but without the eternal damnation that plagued so many monotheistic religions. For Zoroastrians, there was only a temporary hell, somewhat like the Jewish and Roman Catholic concepts of purgatory.
I thought the concept of the Chinvat itself was unique to Zoroastrians until I turned twelve, when Mishal Al-Abdulaziz, the meanest girl in Qala Academy, informed me about a similar bridge in Islam called As-Sirat, or the Bridge of Hell.
There were times over the years when I found the whole process of arguing with Mishal over this subject futile. After all, Mishal’s true knowledge of what happened after death extended to corpses in boxes and rectangular graves. Similarly, mine was limited to shrouded bodies being carried up a set of stairs by pallbearers—bodies that would end up as entrées in a meal for the vultures circling the Towers of Silence on Malabar Hill in Mumbai.
Emergency lights flashed below: a new van had arrived at the scene of our accident. Two men in white uniforms emerged with a stretcher, probably to carry our bodies to a morgue. Porus didn’t seem to notice. He continued staring at his mother—the only one who, apart from my uncle, seemed to be shedding real tears.
Porus
The sky in Jeddah was bluebright. Like the sari Mamma wore to my navjote eleven years ago, blue and yellow like my father’s matching tie. Down below, dust gathered: the dust of traffic, the dust of people, our bodies turning to dust like the Christians, burning to ash like the Hindus, while the policemen in their dusty uniforms hovered over our bodies like vultures from a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence.
It would have been normal for Zarin to make some smart-ass comment by now—something about the way her masi was blowing her nose, or maybe about how uncomfortable she seemed to be making the policemen with her constant crying. But nothing was normal today. I could feel Zarin floating next to me in total silence. Her hair, which used to curl like smoke, was all smoke now. Smoke and fire.
“Girlfriend?” The police officer pointed at our bodies as he shouted at Zarin’s uncle. Zarin’s undamaged cell phone glinted silver in his hand. “Boyfriend?”
I wondered now if he had called our families to the scene of the accident specifically to ask this question instead of telling them to come directly to the morgue. My boss, Hamza, once told me that the police sometimes made examples of people for breaking the laws against dating. Khilwa, Hamza had called the offense, followed by a diatribe about how nothing good ever came out of a boy and a girl going out alone without supervision. But what could they do to us now that we were dead?
I watched Zarin’s masa open his iqama to the photo page. “Please sir,” he pleaded. “Please look at her. She was a child … a young girl…”
It was painful to hear him. Even though we weren’t related, Zarin’s masa had still treated me like a son when I first met him. “Call me Rusi Uncle, my boy. Or just Rusi, if you feel like it,” he’d said with a twinkle in his eyes. “I’m not so old yet.”
Not as old as today, when it looked like the years had crept up on him in a matter of hours. If he could hear me, I would have told him that pleading with this particular officer wouldn’t work. I could tell from the sneer on the officer’s fat face, from the way he held his clipboard—almost lazily, as if nothing anyone said mattered anymore now that he’d come to his own conclusion about the situation. Though most police interrogations were fairly reasonable (“One hour max, ya habibi, and then they let you go,” my boss had told me), there were times when they could make your life miserable.
“Girlfriend?” The officer was bellowing now, and pointing at the area where a tow truck flashed orange, hooking itself to the smoking heap of metal and plastic that used to be my old car. “Boyfriend?”
“Sister!” Rusi Uncle shouted back. “Brother!”
Behind the policeman, a black GMC stood ready, the round gold seal of the Saudi religious police painted on its doors. Two men waited nearby, their beards long, their short white thobes exposing bony ankles, their noses wrinkled against the combined smells of sweat, exhaust fumes, metal, and blood.
The job of the religious police, who were locally referred to as muttawe’en or the Hai’a, was to enforce Sharia law—from raiding shops for selling contraband like pork and alcohol to asking women to cover their heads in public places—though they needed to be with the city police to make any actual arrests. The mark of a muttawa was usually the absence of an egal, the round black cord that most Saudi men wore on their heads, over a red-and-white-checkered shemagh.