Being Zarin

a girl like that by Tanaz Bhathena. Published in 2018 by Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 7th floor, Infinity Tower C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002. Pp: 378. Price: Rs 399.

Tanaz Bhathena’s (pictured) a girl like that begins with an accident on a highway in Jeddah. Both Zarin Wadia and Porus Dumasia are dead. The first two sections of the prologue are written from the point of view of Zarin and Porus, as they hover above the accident site and narrate the goings-on, both "completely dead, but not entirely gone.” The story is presented by way of a flashback narrated by several persons. Besides Zarin and Porus, we hear the points of view of Abdullah, Zarin’s boyfriend; Mishal, his sister; and, Farhan Rizvi, captain of the school soccer team, popular and devastatingly handsome, on whom Wadia has a crush. This works to a certain extent. However, it would have been preferable if the characters had been given individual voices, instead of the single authorial tone.
No boy from a good family would like to know, let alone marry ‘a girl like that.’ The girl is Zarin, whose mother (a Zoroastrian!) worked in a bar in Bombay where she danced to "remixed versions of popular Hindi songs” and was amply rewarded by wads of 500 rupee notes. The fact that she did this to support herself and her younger sister (Zarin’s masi) did not condone this aberration. To make matters worse, she fell in love with a hit-man for a Bombay mafia don who never married her. Zarin’s father, Surat Shinde, went off to Dubai where "he was blown up by a pair of guns. The End.”
When her mother dies under gruesome conditions, Zarin is relinquished to the care of her masi and masa. The aunt is convinced that Zarin has bad blood running through her veins; after all she was "illegitimate, half-Hindu, a gangster’s daughter.” She is very anxious that Zarin should not follow the path of her mother. Advised by her friend, the Dog Lady, her aunt rules over her niece’s life with an iron hand and is obsessed with young boys trying to make passes at her. The situation is further aggravated by the fact that masi has severe mental problems for which she is under medication. So worried is she that her niece will go astray that she even dresses her like a boy by making her wear jeans and cutting her hair very short.
Zarin is a lonely and isolated child. She is so ashamed of her parentage that she avoids making friends so that she will not have to answer the inevitable questions about her shady past. She hangs around Cama Colony all by herself till she is befriended by Porus. Bhathena portrays her as a girl who deliberately refuses to fit in. With a Zoroastrian dancer mother and a Maharashtrian father, she is rejected by the Parsi community and particularly the priests who, of course, refuse to perform her navjote. When the family moves to conservative Jeddah, where a woman is not supposed to look a man in the eye, she is once again an oddity. Here, she is ostracized by her classmates and retaliates by smoking cigarettes and missing her classes to go to secluded places with a series of different boys. This is particularly dangerous in a city where unmarried couples are forbidden to travel together and much of their time is spent in keeping an eye on passers by and the police. She is a free and independent spirit who refuses to be limited by the constraints of her sex.
Porus, from Cama Colony, who re-enters her life in Jeddah several years later, offers her a way of escape. He is protective and affectionate and provides her with tenderness and love which she has never received since the death of her mother. But she’s so used to being categorized as the bad girl and constantly tortured by her demented masi that she is unable to respond.
Bhathena does a good job in describing vividly the society in Jeddah with its double standards. It is a well-known fact that different laws apply to men and women in Middle Eastern countries and the author introduces several vignettes to demonstrate the unequal status of women. When Abdullah’s male friends visit, it is always Mishal who has to retire to her bedroom and remain invisible. The fact that he has tried to seduce Zarin and taken her to lonely places is irrelevant. The same applies to Farhan who has a string of girls whom he takes to the deserted warehouse. He is 15 but, as his father is often traveling, has the use of the car to drive his mother around. However, blame can often be placed on the women who don’t rebel against injustice. Abdullah and Mishal’s father has taken a second wife which results in their mother being almost a recluse, locked in her room with her sarangi (traditional stringed musical instrument). She is no mother to her children especially not to Mishal for a greater part of the novel.
Bhathena peppers the book with sufficient clues about the reasons for Zarin’s behavior. However, it is only when Zarin has to make a presentation and speak about herself that we realize what she has gone through and her entire life has been a fight against the shame she has always had to endure coupled with the pettiness of her companions and her unhappiness with her uncle and aunt.
It is a contradiction to note that we complain about our dwindling population but fail to notice the upsurge of new Parsi writers, of which Bhathena is one. F. G.