She had stood next to me as I had spoken to him, her hand on my back, nodding sympathetically as if she were a nurse and I were a patient trying to down some foul-tasting medicine. She held my hand as I told Nana that I wasn’t planning to use the return portion of the ticket he had purchased for me, even after he reminded me that it was nonrefundable, as if that were the only thing that mattered. I told him that I didn’t want to return to Mahim just yet because there was nothing there for me. I know his heart must have withered a little at hearing this, because if there was nothing else in Mahim, at least there was him. I told him that soon enough I would go home, just not now. I was about to use Shazia as an example, but then thought the better of it. Nana presciently asked me, however, “Does that godforsaken girl have anything to do with this?” For a moment, his voice had sounded controlled. But when he realized that I wasn’t just teasing or testing him, that I was going to remain in Paris indefinitely, more or less on my own, he shouted at me with such wild anger that I was certain all our neighbors had heard him, as well as the slum-dwellers across the street. He called me names that I had never heard uttered by him: “whore” and “mad cow” and “bloody stupid ungrateful bitch.” I heard my mother yelling something in the background, but Nana was ignoring her as he always did, and despite my protestations that I would be OK, that I would manage somehow, Nana placed a curse on my head. In a voice dark with fury, sore with unshed tears, he said that Allah would punish me for my sins, that I would be maimed or paralyzed or left to die in a gutter.
“You want to live alone?” he shouted. “Go on, live alone. Let somebody come in the middle of the night and rape and murder you. You deserve it.” Then, his voice quiet again, he said, “And if Allah spares you, never come home to us. You are already dead to me.”
Then came the thud. My mother never even came on the phone. I thought of the last time I had seen them, at the airport as they were bidding me farewell, my grandfather expectant that I would return an engaged woman, my mother expressionless on the sidelines. I remember thanking them both for letting me go.
I looked at Shazia, and she hugged me.
“I’m making a horrible mistake,” I said then, through tears. “I should never have let you talk me into this. It seemed like a joke, but it’s not.” Suddenly I was angry with her. “They trusted me, and I abused it. You may feel like it’s OK to live without family. I do not. They are all I have. I’m changing my mind. I’m going home today as planned. I must call them back now,” I said, panic filling my voice as I picked up the phone again.
She grabbed my upper arm forcefully, pulling me back toward her.
“As hard as it seems now, you are doing the right thing,” she said. “It’s not your fault that your family is so intolerant. You’re almost twenty, a young woman. What-they expect you to get married and have children of your own, while still treating you as a child? Your grandfather was just angry. He will recover, and they will accept you back when you are ready. But now your life is here. I can see it in your heart, that it’s what you really want. Trust me. I’m never wrong about these things.”
“But what will I do here?” I asked. “How will I live? Where will I live? Your mother wants me out. Who will give me pocket money?”
“It’s OK,” Shazia said, lifting my chin up with her fingers and wiping away the tears from my cheeks. “I have it all figured out. And you know what they say-inshah Allah-if it is the will of God for you to remain here, then all the pieces will fall into place.”
We went into the guest room, and she helped me pack my things. She then led me to Aunt Mina, who was resting in her room, so I could say good-bye. Mina assumed I was on my way to the airport, wished me well on my journey, turned over onto her side, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Five
At my new home, Zoe was sitting cross-legged on a blue couch, chewing gum that smelled of spearmint. She reached up to kiss me hello. She had an unusually long neck, short dark hair that hugged a pretty, if rather angular, face. Her eyes were blue and friendly, her skin translucent. A strappy white T-shirt stopped just short of white drawstring pants, and around her right ankle were three gold chains of varying thickness.
Shazia reminded me that I had met Zoe during one of our recent nightlife outings, but we had visited so many places and met so many people that by this point all these white faces were a blur.
“Nice to see you again,” Zoe said, removing the gum from her mouth, folding it into a pink tissue and picking up a packet of cigarettes. She offered me one, but I politely shook my head. Shazia, meanwhile, reached out and pulled one out of the pack. I had seen Shazia do a lot of things in these past two weeks, but never smoke, so her ease with lighting up and inhaling took me by surprise.
“Zoe is from the States,” Shazia informed me. “But she’s been living here a long time. What, like fifteen years or something, right?” Shazia asked her friend.
“Give or take,” Zoe drawled, smoke circling out of her mouth. “Came here to study, married a Frenchman, but that was a disaster. Even so, I never left. This place is addictive, you know?” She was staring at me, looking for agreement, so I nodded.
“Your parents didn’t mind?” I asked her, finally speaking. “They were OK with you leaving to come here?”
“Hell, I was over eighteen, could do what I pleased,” Zoe replied, smirking. I felt ridiculed.
As Shazia and Zoe casually discussed the more recent details of their respective lives, their conversation alternating between French and English, I took advantage of their momentary distraction to look around. It was a cramped but comfortable living room, painted in varying shades of blue, cream, and white. On a far wall was a large framed print-swirls of orange on a bright yellow background-that was so vivid compared to the relatively calm colors of the rest of the room, I felt dizzy for a moment. A dining table was stacked with newspapers and unopened mail; a couple of armchairs, creased and crumpled, looked as if they had been happily occupied over the years. A blanket lay on the floor close to a small fireplace, and a stained coffee mug sat on another table. The phone was taken off its hook, and jazz music was playing softly from a radio. It was a deeply comforting environment, but even so, I felt awkward and out of place.
I had no idea what we were doing here.
“It would just be for a while,” Shazia said as I turned my attention back to them. “Until we figure something else out.”
“Shaz, anything for you,” Zoe said, smiling and putting out her cigarette, much to my relief. The smoke in the small room was beginning to cause my eyes to dry out. “She can sleep here; this couch folds out into a pretty decent bed.”
They spoke of me as if I wasn’t even there, and while I was used to that happening in Mahim, I had thought that Shazia would treat me differently.
“I need to use the restroom,” Zoe said, lifting her long, lean frame from the couch.
“What’s this?” I whispered to Shazia when we were alone. “You’re leaving me here?”
“I had to take you somewhere,” Shazia whispered back. “Look, Zoe is really nice. She’s a foreigner too, so she completely gets it. I figured you could stay here for a couple of weeks, help out around the house, maybe cook, in exchange for having a roof over your head. By then, I’m sure I’ll find you a job and then we’ll see where to put you.”
At that moment for the first time since the decision was made for me to stay on, I was truly beginning to regret it. Suddenly I felt untethered, unwanted-a burden to everyone. I had no home, no job, no money. In Mahim, Nana had given me an allowance every week, which I would spend on my regular visits to Book Nook, or drinking cold coffee with Nilu at our favorite neighborhood café. There, at least, I belonged to someone. Here, now, on this cool Paris night, my grandfather’s curses still searing my ears, all I wanted to do was go back home.
Chapter Six
Shazia was to spend another two weeks in Paris tending to her mother before heading back to Los Angeles. But after the evening that s
he dropped me off at Zoe’s, I didn’t see much of her. She had called a couple of days later, telling me that her mother’s health had worsened and that she would be spending more time with her. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t like being left alone like this, but based on what she appeared to be going through in her own family travails, thought it selfish to burden her further.
So I spent my first few days as Zoe’s flatmate-cum-housekeeper in a subtle state of shock, still numb from being disowned by the only family I had ever known, unable to feel any joy at this so-called freedom I was experiencing. I was still waiting for Allah to smite me at every turn.
Zoe taught English at a nearby school, so was gone for most of the day. As she whizzed out the door every morning, a thermos of coffee in one hand and a paper bag containing a buttery croissant in the other, I cleaned up after her. She had told me that her ex-husband used to call her “Hurricane Zoe,” and I could see why. When she was busy, she always seemed to do everything at breakneck speed. That left little time for picking up after herself, so, given the tacit agreement between her and Shazia, I stepped into that role. I washed her pajamas and towels after she had tossed them on the floor, made her bed, cleaned her kitchen. I didn’t mind it, as the routine of it was at least something familiar, something that connected me to what my mornings used to be back in Mahim. And it wasn’t like I had much else to do. The apartment was so small that I was done cleaning by noon, and then I would turn on the television and listen to the flurry of French words until I came across something I could recognize: “demain,” or “peut-être” or “il y a,” fully cognizant that being able to only say “tomorrow,” “maybe,” or “there is” would get me almost nowhere in Paris.
I always dreaded Zoe coming home, not for any other reason except that I would have to make some weak-hearted attempt to have a conversation with her. As pleasant as she was to me, I was painfully aware that she was only allowing me to stay here as a favor to an old friend, and I was certain that she often looked at me and wondered when I would leave, returning her living-room couch to her.
“So, like Shazia, you’re Muslim too, right?” she asked me one evening as we ate a dinner of pasta and steamed vegetables in front of the television.
“Yes. But not the terrorist kind,” I said without really thinking, then realizing how stupid that sounded.
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said, startled at my response. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” I replied sheepishly, slurping an oily strand into my mouth. “It’s just… you know how it is these days. You say ‘Muslim,’ and everyone imagines long beards and bombs. Most of us are not like that. I don’t think I know anyone who would be prepared to strap dynamite on himself.”
Although Zoe didn’t ask, I told her about the religious diversity of our apartment complex, how our neighbors were Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Parsee, even Jewish.
“What about the killings-religious tension and all that stuff?” she asked. “Don’t Hindus and Muslims hate each other?”
“They’re not the best of friends, but we try and live peacefully together-not always successfully.” I realized I was speaking like an outsider already, like somebody no longer a part of that world. “Nilu, my best friend, is Hindu.” I suddenly missed her. By now, I figured, given the speedy manner in which news both significant and trivial was passed down our street, she would have heard about my absconding. Knowing Nilu, though, she would probably have been proud of me.
“I’ve always wanted to visit that part of the world,” Zoe said, setting down her plate and turning to look at me. “But I was a student for the longest time, then got married, then had the baby, and somehow never got around to it. Now that I’m free again though, I should look into it.”
Zoe’s random admission, that she had had a child, stunned me for a moment-and not just because I could hardly imagine a fetus being housed in that skinny belly or passing through those sinewy hips. There were no indications in the apartment that this woman had ever encountered motherhood-no photographs of a smiling, swaddled child, no crayon sketches pinned to the refrigerator door, not even a stuffed animal lying around.
“She’s five now,” Zoe said. “Lives with her father. I haven’t seen her since she was three months old, and that’s fine by me.” Her gaze suddenly shifted off my face, moved past my ear, and landed somewhere on the metal window frame behind me. “You know how most mothers say, ‘I can’t imagine life without my child’? Well, I could. And I did, all the time. I felt no connection to her whatsoever, and didn’t want my life to change because she was all of a sudden in it. So when my husband and I split, and he wanted custody of her, I told him he could have it. Best decision I ever made.”
She stood up to take the plates into the kitchen while I sat quietly and digested this new information. I wondered, for a minute, if my mother had wanted to give me up too, if she had felt any connection to me when I was born. I wondered if maybe the reason she kept me around was because she had no ex-husband to pass me off to.
“What was her name?” I called out to Zoe, who was still in the kitchen.
“Who?”
“Your daughter. What was her name?”
“Oh,” she replied, pausing for a second. “Emily.”
It sounded like she had forgotten, as if she hadn’t thought of her child since the day she gave her away.
Chapter Seven
My father, Hassan Bhatt, was the youngest of five sons and a member of a prominent family in Lahore. He was tall enough, rich enough, and of decent enough character-all of which seemed to qualify him as the perfect candidate for the job of my mother’s husband, a position that many other men were supposedly vying for based on our family’s legacy of exceptional beauty in our women.
Only, as was the way things were done back then, Hassan Bhatt never saw my mother until the wedding ceremony was about to begin. He had never thought to assume that she would be anything less than stunning, because no woman in my family ever had been. He admitted later that he might have heard someone comment, as the engagement was being announced, that my mother was “not quite as lovely as the other sisters, but not bad.” For Hassan Bhatt, “not bad” was good enough, and surely would still be divine. Perhaps he should have been tipped off by my mother’s name. Where her sisters were given appellations that spoke of loveliness, my mother had been christened Ayesha-named after the wife of the prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. It was a noble name, no doubt. But Hassan Bhatt, as it turned out, was not in the least bit interested in nobility.
Aunt Sohalia told me years later of the look that appeared on Hassan Bhatt’s face when the red chiffon bridal scarf that covered my mother’s head was first lifted. She described the look as one of “severe disappointment,” but nobody said a word, not even the bridegroom. And in my grandfather’s mind, there wasn’t even an inkling of a notion that this sudden and rather unseemly revelation should be an impediment to my mother’s marital happiness, given that, after all, Hassan Bhatt was far too decent a man, and from far too upstanding a family, to abandon a marriage simply because he didn’t like the way his wife looked.
For one of the few times in his life, Nana was wrong.
There had been a honeymoon planned, in Ooty, a snow-capped vacation resort in India, but that had been abruptly cancelled when Hassan Bhatt announced that he had some pressing business to take care of in Lahore. Although he tried to convince my mother otherwise, she went with him, assuming that the rest of her life would be spent by his side, being his wife.
Two months later, she was back in Mahim, at her father’s house, with me in her belly, no larger than a grain of rice.
Nineteen years later, my mother had yet to recover from the humiliation of being left by a husband because of the way she looked-or didn’t. I would catch her occasionally looking at their wedding photograph, a bland black-and-white shot framed in gold that she kept in the bottom drawer of a chest in our bedroom. I had often snuck in there to look at it myself, to ga
ze at the wide-eyed nervousness on my mother’s face and the momentous sadness on that of Hassan Bhatt’s, my nana standing cautiously behind them.
Chapter Eight
Soon after Zoe had left for work one morning, just as I was about to wring out the laundry and hang it up to dry in the small, square-shaped bathroom, Shazia arrived. She smiled broadly, as if I had just seen her yesterday, as if I was neither homeless nor penniless nor jobless in a still-strange city.
“How are you doing?” she asked, throwing her arms around me.
“OK,” I replied. “How’s your mother feeling?”
“Better, actually. I think me being here has really helped. We’ve been spending lots of time at home these past couple of weeks, just her and I. It’s been good. I’ve promised her I’ll come back as soon as a let-up in my work schedule allows it. I’m flying back to L.A. tomorrow.
“What about you?” she asked, finally turning her attention back to me again.
I had started to resent Shazia for encouraging me to do something as foolhardy as this, and it finally began to show. And now, she was returning to Los Angeles, leaving me behind.
“What am I doing?” I said to her, turning back toward the living room while she slipped off her coat and followed me. “This was a stupid idea, and I should never have allowed you to talk me into it. But I have nobody to blame but myself. I want to go home, but Nana won’t take me back, I’m sure of it. Once he says these things, he never changes his mind.”
“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Shazia said, her voice laced with recrimination, her face utterly lacking in sympathy. “You’re not a kid anymore. And it’s only been a couple of weeks. You’ll be fine, honest. You’ll be better than fine. We all have problems. I was supposed to marry a boy from Karachi, but he rejected me flat-out. Said I was too fat. I promised myself I would never put myself through that humiliation again.”
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