Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  So he was overjoyed when, one day, an old classmate approached him with an idea that perhaps his own grandson, one Tariq Khan, would be a good match.

  “The boy is educated. A lawyer, living overseas,” Nana informed me, squinting through his glasses at the small handwritten words in the letter. “He can come here to view you; that is no problem. He has means.”

  “But Nana, I am only nineteen. I think I’m too young,” I started to protest politely. “I have just finished my studies. Please, allow me to wait for a while.”

  “Nothing doing,” Nana said. “I will write back to my friend today and tell him to have his grandson fly here from London as soon as possible. Time is of the essence, as the boy needs to settle in marriage as soon as he starts his new job. He will be moving soon, in the next few weeks,” Nana said, removing his glasses, “to Paris.”

  I stopped breathing for a second, hearing only the loud thumping of my heart, which at that moment seemed to drown out the other sounds in the room: the radio reciting the news headlines and my mother clanging among pots and pans in the kitchen.

  If this was not an act of Allah intervening, I could certainly never find another.

  I shook my head at Nana, the first time I had ever done such a thing.

  “If you want me to marry him, I will have to go there to meet him, to see if I like the place,” I said, my hands sweating. “It will be my new home, after all.”

  The veins in Nana’s temples started to pulsate through his thinning skin, and I could almost see a stream of angry air whistling through his nostrils. My mother, as usual, remained quiet.

  “You are a stupid child to even suggest such a thing,” Nana said. “You have no passport, no visa, nothing. You cannot go alone, and I will not come with you. Talk sense.”

  “If he comes here, I will not meet him, and you cannot force me,” I said, getting up to go to the bedroom, trembling, stunned at my resolve.

  My grandfather stood up, empty peanut shells tumbling from his white kurta onto the floor. He raised his hand above his head as if to slap me on the cheek, but then stopped in midair and lowered his arm.

  “I will put this down to the idiocy of youth,” he said. “I am running this house and this family. This boy is coming here, and you will marry him.”

  “I will not,” I said, my head spinning. “I will lock myself in the bedroom if I have to. I am certain he is too educated not to be put off by that, and he will then run far away from this family.”

  Nana, to whom I was almost a daughter, stopped talking to me that day. He stopped asking me about my friends, what activities I had been engaged in, or whether I was close to completing the scarf I had promised to crochet him in time for winter. For the next few days, he just pretended I wasn’t there.

  Three more letters followed from my grandfather’s friend in three weeks, repeatedly asking him to make a decision about Tariq. Each time, my grandfather stared at me in silence, folded the letters, and put them inside the frayed gold-edged pages of the 1972 leather-bound diary that he still carried around proudly, despite it being more than thirty years out of date.

  After the fourth and last letter, my grandfather knew there would be no more, as the relatives of male suitors are proud people. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then called his old boss at Air India from whom he obtained contact names at the local passport office, and then for someone at the Consulate General of France.

  His next call was made from outside the house, at one of the long-distance calling booths that occupy virtually every street corner in India, and to which he gruffly asked me to accompany him. He took along his 1972 diary, in the back of which were names of people I’d never heard of, their numbers scratched out and etched in again a dozen times as they, unlike us, moved around. As he waited his turn for the phone, his finger ran down the list, until it settled on REZA AND MINA HUSAIN, a string of long numbers following it.

  “Mina-behen!” he yelled into the phone, addressing her as a sister. He spoke initially in Hindi and very quickly, aware of the six-second cost increments. Then, almost to ensure that nobody else around him could understand, he started speaking in clipped, proper English.

  “That is Tanaya’s only condition,” he said. “She wants to come to Paris to see the boy. The marriage will definitely take place, but she is being most stubborn.” He paused for a second, his heavy brows crinkling beneath his graying hair. “As you know, young people today are different from our day. They don’t respect their elders.” He shot me a stern glance before turning his attention back to the conversation.

  “Thank you, Mina-behen,” he said finally. “We have not been in touch for a long time, but we are family after all.”

  Putting down the receiver, Nana clasped his hand around my arm to lead me out of the booth. His face inanimate and voice cold, he said, “She can’t wait to see you.”

  “But who is she, Nana?” I asked timorously as we walked the short distance back to our apartment. I should have been whooping with delight that my grandfather was making all the arrangements for me to visit a place that had, until that day, been an inconceivable fantasy. “How come I have never heard of her before?”

  Mina’s grandfather and Nana’s late wife had been step-brother and -sister, born to different mothers. After Nana had moved his family to Mumbai from Pakistan, he and his wife had lost contact with most of the other family members, many of whom had stayed in Lahore. There had been the occasional letter to share some news of celebration or tragedy, but once my grandmother had passed away and her own siblings had begun to die off, the web that had once conjoined the family had slowly disintegrated.

  But Nana, being a man of the world, comparatively speaking, chose to do his bit to keep up relations by always having their phone numbers listed in his favorite old diary, even if he did not speak to or see some of these relatives for years at a time.

  “She is a widow, and deserves all the respect accorded to one,” he said, marching at a brisk pace, his hand still around my upper arm.

  “She has lived in Paris for many years, but is Muslim at heart. She has agreed to allow you to stay with her while you indulge this madness of yours. But,” he said, turning to me again as we entered our home, “make no mistake, Tanaya. In our day, we did not have the luxury of meeting our spouses before the wedding. I am only permitting this because I have already agreed to the marriage. Do you understand?”

  Nana’s frown lines were suddenly deep and dark, reminding me of grooves in a muddy road. Then, with the slight force of his hand on my back, he pushed me into our apartment and slammed shut the door behind us.

  Chapter Three

  Compared to Mumbai’s dry, dusty heat, the Paris air felt chilly on my face.

  I stood outside the terminal, clutching a small purse into which I had stuffed one hundred euros and change, converted from Indian rupees. It was a small fortune for my grandfather, and he had given it to me grudgingly, but even though he didn’t want me to come to Paris, he certainly didn’t want me to starve here.

  I had known there would be nobody at the airport to greet me, so Nilu had figured out that the best and cheapest way for me to get from Charles de Gaulle Airport to my aunt’s house was on the airport bus.

  As I waited for it to appear, with exact change in my hand for the ticket, I stared at a loose leaf of paper that was dancing in the wind, pirouetting on the pavement. I knew there was so much else to see if I would only look up, straight ahead of me. But it was precisely because there was so much to see that I couldn’t. I was overwhelmed. I had never before been among so many foreigners, alone in a strange place. Now that I was finally here, even I was beginning to question my grandfather’s decision to send me. It was mid-morning and glorious, and I was surrounded by people. Yet I was as scared as if I were in a dark alley alone at night.

  The back of the bus was empty, so I pulled my small trolley bag and brown suitcase down the aisle, shielding my face as I went with my scarf. There I pressed my
face against the glass window pane. Some Asian tourists in front of me already had their cameras out, clicking shots of the skyline with its succession of planes taking off and landing. I realized then that I had completely forgotten to bring a camera, and nobody at home had thought to remind me. I was certain that if I had suggested it, my grandfather would have pointed out sternly that I was “not on some jolly vacation.”

  I smiled as I thought of him, then remembered my coat pocket. I fished inside it and found the piece of paper that he had shoved into my hand just as I was about to board the plane. On it, written very clearly in Nana’s dark-blue fountain-pen ink, were Tariq Khan’s phone numbers at work and at home. Nana had instructed me to call Tariq as soon as I arrived in Paris, aware that Tariq wouldn’t call me, as that was against protocol. His grandfather had made the first overture to mine, and it was for us-as the family of the supposed bride-to make every effort from then on.

  But I didn’t want to think about any of that. I wanted instead to keep staring out of the window, anxious for the driver to start his engine, impatient to begin the journey that I had only dreamed about.

  More than an hour passed before we arrived on the street where my aunt lived, and I followed the directions she had conveyed to my grandfather and found myself standing in front of a low building that stood behind an old, dry, stone fountain. There was a tiny elevator into which I just about managed to squeeze myself and my luggage, the smell of which, oddly, reminded me of home. My aunt’s apartment was only one of three that were crowded onto a narrow floor, suddenly dashing my visions of grand halls and curved, polished wooden staircases.

  I knocked lightly, and I heard a slow shuffling inside. The door opened, and there she was, the aunt I had never known, dressed in a thick sweater shrugged over a salwar kameez, beige-colored socks on her shoeless feet. She looked as if she had just woken up, her hair uncombed, her face weary. Beneath it all though, if I stared hard enough, I could see that she too was probably once very beautiful.

  “Hah, you have come,” she said, stepping aside to let me in. I reached over to hug her, but instead she forced a smile, patted my back, and turned around.

  “Your room is there,” she said, pointing to a door halfway down a hallway. “I’m making lunch. Come and eat.”

  After a meal of lentils and rice, during which Aunt Mina asked me a few cursory questions about my grandfather, I requested her permission to take a shower.

  “OK, but quick one,” she said. “Water bill comes very high.”

  Despite my new exotic environment, I dressed the way I always did in India, in a salwar kameez, this time with a mismatched shawl covering my head. I pulled a few euros out of my purse and went out, finding a bench at the end of Aunt Mina’s street. I sat there for two hours, gazing at the foreign-looking people as they rushed by, on their way to somewhere important, newspapers folded under their arms, a cigarette between long fingers. Then I walked around the block, careful to note the little landmarks I was passing, scared that I might get lost. When I grew familiar with that one street, I walked onto another, then another. I stayed out for five hours, even after I grew hungry and thirsty from all the walking and gawking. But I did not have the courage to enter a store and buy a bottle of water, not knowing how to ask for what I needed, and worried about every euro I would have to spend.

  For the next three days, that was all I did. Each day, I went a little farther, marveling at the pretty lace things I would see in a shop window or smelling freshly baked breads outside a bakery, trying to catch even one isolated word from the blurred conversations around me. Three days after arriving, I finally found the courage to walk into a store and buy a bottle of orange juice, drinking in the pulpy sweetness as a silent, solitary toast.

  That night, when I returned home, Aunt Mina chastised me for being out of the house.

  “Again you are roaming-roaming,” she said, not looking up at me from the television, on which a videotape of a Hindi soap opera was playing. “You have come here for a reason, and I’m not understanding why you are spending all your days and money just roaming.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped.

  “I am not well,” she continued, this time turning to look at me. “May Allah help me. Doctor says bad blood pressure, maybe clot is coming. Heart attack. Stroke even. Shazia is arriving tomorrow to care for me. I will need the spare room for my daughter. You can sleep on couch in the meantime, but please, now, you just finish your matter and go back home.”

  It was evident that she had no interest in hearing from me, so I went into the little bedroom and shut the door. I knew that my mother and Nana, my two closest living relatives, were waiting to hear from me, sitting by the phone in our fluorescent-lit living room. A sense of guilt crept in as I took comfort in the fact that they were unable to contact me unless they left the house and headed to the corner booth, and that the reason for their silence so far had been the expense of such a call-especially so soon after the one initially made to Aunt Mina. I remembered the look on Nana’s face as he had said good-bye to me in Mumbai, the tears he would not allow to fall from his eyes, the kiss he gave me on my forehead as he whispered in my ear: “May Allah be with you and keep you safe.”

  I know I should have been ashamed at myself for misleading them like this, promising one outcome only so I could achieve another.

  A small radiator hummed quietly as it hugged the wall. In the suddenly warm room I took off my coat, with the piece of paper with Tariq’s number now covered in lint and stuck to a foil candy wrapper. I stared for a moment at a photograph that sat atop a chest of drawers-of Aunt Mina and her daughter, Shazia, for whom I would have to vacate this room the next day. My grandfather had told me a little about Shazia’s allegedly wild lifestyle as a single working girl in Los Angeles, referring to her as “a bad sort” and insisting that I not “get any ideas” from her.

  The next day, we were back at Charles de Gaulle. My second visit to this airport in only four days was enough to make me feel like a proud veteran of the city. Shazia’s plane had been delayed, so as Aunt Mina rested on a low leather seat at the back of the cavernous hall, I walked up and down the arrivals area, occasionally stopping to gaze overhead at the huge board that announced the movements of the planes-where they were going, which ones had just touched down. I watched as well-dressed women in trim pantsuits and high-heeled boots pressed lips with their arriving lovers, and I watched young children throwing their arms around their mothers, who were returning alone from God-knows-where. I wanted to go up to each of these people, to ask them who they were, where they had just been, what they had done there. But of course I did no such thing, not just because I had been trained not to speak to strangers unless absolutely necessary, but also because the only word I had learned in four days was “bonjour,” and that wouldn’t take me very far.

  I noticed then that people were looking at me, too. A group of curly-haired Algerian men clustered around a pay phone whistled as I walked by, one of them raising his eyebrows as if asking me a secret question. I covered my head again with my dupatta and hurried past. I walked farther down and leaned for a minute against the railing, my back turned toward the throngs of people arriving. In front of me, two elderly women were seated, and they smiled at me when my eyes caught theirs. One turned to the other and said something quickly in French, and I knew they were talking about me.

  “They’re saying you’re hot,” said a voice behind me. I turned around. Shazia was shorter than she looked in the photograph in her room, her face plumper.

  “Mummy said you would be here. I knew it was you, even from the back,” she said, giving me a hug, still on the other side of the metal railing as a security guard hurried her along. “I was thinking, who else would be covered head-to-toe on a beautiful night like this? Wow,” she said, her eyes resting on the silver streak in my hair. “I’d heard about that, but thought people were making it up. Can I touch?”

  I smiled and hugged her again after
she had made her way to my side of the railing, the side on which she now belonged. Despite the length of her journey, she smelled like fresh lemons. I liked her immediately.

  “Where’s Mummy?” she asked, pulling off her sweater and wrapping its sleeves around her waist.

  “Over there, sitting down. She’s not feeling so well,” I said.

  “Come,” Shazia said, leading me by the hand. “Let’s go get her and head home.”

  The Metro was full, but a man gave up his seat for Aunt Mina while Shazia and I held on to the plastic straps that hung from the ceiling, holding between us a pile of bags and jackets and shawls.

  “You never know what the weather will be like here,” Shazia said, motioning to all her stuff. “In Paris, you have to be prepared.

  “So have you been enjoying your stay here? Mummy said you came here to see a boy.” For the last part of that sentence, Shazia slid into a Pakistani accent. She wobbled her head from side to side, uttering the words just as her mother might-or mine for that matter-and then giggled at her own insolence.

  “Yes, I came to see a boy, but haven’t seen him yet,” I said, wanting to change the subject quickly. “How was your flight? Long way from Los Angeles, yes?”

  “Not as long as coming from India,” she said. “You really must have wanted to be here.”

  “Yes,” I replied, my eyes now turned downward as I thought guiltily of how I was avoiding phoning home. “It was my dream to come.” Shazia smiled at me and reached up to pull away a few strands of my hair that had become affixed to my lip gloss.