Their stories gave me the courage to tell my own and make a little more sense of the life I lived before.Īnd so, I did. I also read blogs and first-person accounts of people who still lived in Jeddah and in Riyadh. I read Arab News and Saudi Gazette again. To write about these things would be painful. To remain quiet would mean censoring myself again. The countries you live in are like people in that sense: No matter how much you love them, they can’t always be seen through the rosy shades of nostalgia. Yet, at the same time, old problems began cropping up-issues I’d turned a blind eye to when I lived in Saudi Arabia, things I’d silenced myself on. On familiar ground in a place where things made sense when nothing about my illness did. When I began writing the short story that would eventually become A Girl Like That, it felt like I was back home. Zarin Wadia’s voice emerged first, a girl with Zoroastrian heritage who was both funny and sarcastic, followed by other voices, spawning fourteen different short stories set directly or indirectly around a fictitious Jeddah school. So instead of writing what I didn’t know, I began writing about what I did.Īnd all of a sudden, words began pouring out. The story wasn’t working out as well as I wanted it to. Freshly diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, I began writing again to escape, initially starting a fantasy set in India. My parents and I immigrated to Canada when I was sixteen, but it wasn’t until I graduated university that I considered writing about Saudi Arabia at all. Back then, books were closely scrutinized banning books set in the Kingdom was as common as censoring a kiss in a foreign movie or shading a woman’s bare thighs with black Magic Marker. As a teen, I always avoided mentioning Zoroastrianism in my stories, and I also never set anything in Saudi Arabia. Non-Muslims aren’t allowed to publicly practice their faith in the Kingdom and, as I grew older, things that I paid little attention to as a child-discreet prayer ceremonies and gatherings in homes and apartments, windows and doors shuttered from prying eyes-took new meaning.įor me, this secrecy often extended to what I wrote. I quickly learned to avoid answering this question (“Zoro-what? Are you making that up?”) and rarely ever made reference to it among strangers. Back in the ’90s, in Riyadh, one of the first questions people asked after your name was “What’s your religion?”

I was born in Mumbai, India, to Zoroastrian parents who, seeking better jobs abroad, ventured to Saudi Arabia, where I studied in an Indian school. I didn’t succeed at the comedy bit-my story turned out darker than I anticipated. A dark comedy about a character who didn’t exactly leave after dying but, like a spectator, made sarcastic running commentary on what went on after she died: how things looked and how everyone reacted, especially the people she was closest to.

A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena