Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  “Yes, but how did you feel?” asked Teresa. “Were you nervous?”

  “To begin with, yes, of course. But after a few seconds-maybe less-it became easier.”

  In truth, the previous night had been perhaps the most exciting of my life. Walking down the runway had been the shortest sixty seconds of my life, and also the longest. When it was beginning, I couldn’t wait for it to end, but once I had taken my final twirl, mimicking the girls who had gone before me, I wished I could do it again. It had been a moment of pure frivolity and spontaneity, two things I had never experienced before. I longed to call my grandfather and tell him about my night. But instead I told three girls who were still strangers to me.

  Bruno, the designer, sent me flowers at work the next day. I could barely read the scrawl on the tiny card that accompanied it, and wouldn’t have been able to understand it anyway, so Mathias deciphered and translated for me.

  “ ‘With all my heart I thank you for your bravery,’ ” Mathias recited. I thought Bruno’s words were dramatic, as if I had rescued someone from a burning building. “ ‘Your willingness to model my creations saved my show. If there is anything I may ever do for you, you have only to ask.’ ”

  “Sweet,” said Mathias, looking up. “He sounds most grateful. I am certain that Bruno will give you some free clothes whenever you’d like.”

  I thought back to the pink hot pants he’d put me in and confessed I could do without.

  With the tidy little bonus I had received from Bruno, I decided to spend a beautiful Sunday on my own, exploring the city again. I set off from the apartment just after breakfast, carrying with me a packed lunch and a copy of Elle that I had borrowed from Juliette, who tended to pilfer magazines from the fashion house she worked for.

  I took the Metro to Place de la Concorde and made my way into the Jardin des Tuileries, which I had first visited with Shazia during my first few weeks here. I found a stone bench that was empty, set down my things, and took in the glorious morning. Joggers sprinted by, and mothers wheeled their babies in strollers. There was a clear crispness in the air, as if the world had overnight been cleansed of all its troubles and was suddenly sparkling new again. I took a deep breath, wanting to feel as invigorated as the atmosphere. I had nowhere to be and nothing to do and realized as I sat there that the heaviness and loneliness I had been feeling since Shazia had left was slowly starting to lift. Not a day passed when I didn’t think of Nana and my mother or when I wouldn’t yearn for a platter of bhel puri from a Mahim street vendor or hope to walk into a community gathering and hear the tinkling of glass bangles and the familiar rustle of silk saris.

  But I was beginning to feel happy and at home. I took out my purse and counted, again, the two hundred euros that Bruno had paid me, shoving it into my palm as if it were a tip. I knew the other models had received far more, but they were professionals, and I was simply a cashier who happened to be tall and slim and there.

  After an hour of sitting on the bench, during which I had barely flicked through the pages of the magazine I had brought along, I decided to start walking again. I emerged through the gates of the gardens and, not quite sure where I was going next, crossed the street. I was standing in front of the imposing Hotel InterContinental, a palace of a place that I had walked past many times but had never had the temerity to enter. A pair of uniformed doormen stood on each side of the huge arched entrance, themselves almost dwarfed by ornate golden lamps. Each person passing through the doors seemed more beautiful and glamorous than the last. I glanced down at the brown paper bag I had in my right hand, inside it my modest lunch of a cheese and tomato sandwich and an apple, and tossed it into a nearby trash can.

  I took another deep breath, adjusted my dupatta, smoothed down my hair, and walked in.

  Chapter Eleven

  The crystal chandeliers overhead glinted in the sunlight, the marble floors and pillars polished to perfection. The lobby seemed unusually busy for a Sunday morning, and then I realized why: a board announcing that day’s events and functions listed a fashion show that, according to my watch, had just ended.

  I found an empty armchair in the lobby and sunk into it. I looked completely out of place, swaddled in voluminous clothes where everyone else looked defined, silhouetted against a beautiful backdrop. Crowds of people began to emerge from one of the rooms in the back, carrying programs and chattering excitedly. There were hundreds of them, far more than had been at Bruno’s a few nights before, and not a server in a French maid’s uniform to be found among them. I wished, for a moment, to have seen what they had just seen.

  A waiter approached me and asked if I would like to order anything. I looked at the menu he showed me and realized that if I wanted the money to last me the rest of the month, I could maybe afford an espresso.

  “Bon,” he said with a quick nod of his head.

  The lobby went quickly quiet, with only small pockets of people clustered here and there, discussing the show. Two American girls were talking about a lilac chiffon gown as if it were the Shroud of Turin, marveling at its perfection.

  Then I saw the models leaving, all of them lithe and willowy, their hair in neat chignons, subdued makeup on their pretty faces, looking every inch like I always imagined models would, one of them a dazzling redhead I even recognized from the cover of the magazine I was carrying. This must have been quite a show.

  I took careful, slow sips of my espresso, wanting to savor every drop, aware that this was the only indulgence I was going to allow myself there. As the crowds in the lobby thinned out, I noticed that I was being stared at by a balding, dark-skinned man who was seated on a couch a few feet away. He didn’t smile, had no expression on his face, but his eyes were glued to me as if he were blind and didn’t know where he was looking. I had grown accustomed to being noticed in Paris, attributing it mostly to my clumsy Indian attire, although Mathias frequently told me that my looks had something to do with it. But usually someone would gawk and then look away again as soon as I noticed. This man just kept on staring.

  Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, I decided it was time to leave. I paid the bill, gathered up my things, and walked quickly to the front of the hotel, trying to decide which direction to turn in. I made a right and headed back toward the Tuileries, thinking that if I was ambitious and energetic enough, I might continue on in that direction to the Left Bank and perhaps even return home on foot.

  After five minutes of walking, something told me to turn around. The man from the hotel was behind me, his pace quickening to catch up to mine, leading me to speed up. He was taller and thinner than he looked back at the hotel, and he was far too well-dressed to be trailing a girl across Paris like some ruffian at night.

  “Stop!” he said. “Please! I mean no harm. Please.”

  We were on the rue de Rivoli, surrounded by tourists, so against my better judgment I came to a standstill and turned to face him as he caught up with me.

  “Thank you,” he said, catching his breath. He spoke in accented English, but I knew it wasn’t French. Somehow, I found that comforting-that he was an alien here, just like me. “You walk fast,” he gasped.

  “I thought you were chasing me. What do you want?”

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, pulled out a name card, and handed it to me: DIMITRI MAROUNIS, VICE PRESIDENT, it said, and beneath it the name of a company with three different addresses.

  I looked up at him, still puzzled.

  “I am a scout,” he said. “It’s my job to find new talent. I saw you sitting there, and I thought that if you weren’t already a model, you should be. Are you? If so, to whom are you signed?”

  “You are mistaken,” I said. “I am in Paris for just a short while and will then return to India. I have no interest in modeling, but I thank you.” I turned around to resume my walk home.

  “But madam,” he said, stopping me. “You are a striking young woman. You could become very rich doing this if you would let me help you. We’ll start by
getting some photos taken. I will help you through the whole process, and-”

  I interrupted him mid-sentence. “I don’t believe you fully understood me,” I said. “I have no interest. But thank you.”

  Shoving his card into my bag, I turned around again and headed home, leaving him standing there.

  The next evening as I was showing my roommates how to prepare lamb curry, the doorbell rang. Juliette went to answer it and returned accompanied by a young man who looked like he had come from my part of the world.

  “Miss Tanaya?” he asked, staring at me blankly.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Sumeet. Mina Husain asked me to bring you these.”

  He stepped aside, and I saw behind him three boxes, each addressed to me care of Aunt Mina.

  I knew exactly what they were. My grandfather’s handwriting was immediately recognizable. I used to joke to Nilu that all my belongings in the world would easily fit into three small boxes, which were now positioned in front of me.

  Once Sumeet left, the girls helped me open them up. Inside were all my clothes, the ones I used to wear when chasing the children of our building up and down the stone stairs; my leather chappals that I frayed walking back and forth to the market; the books that kept me company during my lonely nights.

  At the top of the second box was an envelope, with my name written flawlessly on the front. Even at his angriest, my grandfather always had exceptional penmanship. A letter was carefully folded inside.

  Tanaya,

  You were supposed to return after two weeks in Paris. It has now been two months. I told you on the phone that you were dead to me, that you could never return home. Yet I waited. I thought perhaps someone had cursed you with insanity, but that you would eventually recover and come home to beg forgiveness, which I would have gradually given you. But now, too much time has passed. You are, I have realized, not insane. Instead, you are a horrible and shameless girl. I do not know what has come over you, and when Allah finally takes me to paradise, I still will not know. But here are your things. Having them around is nothing more than a painful reminder of your presence. You have crushed me, Tanaya. It is like you were never even my child.

  My hands were shaking as I held the single piece of paper with which my beloved grandfather had effectively ended my life. The girls looked at me questioningly, and then one by one seemed to grasp what had happened and what the contents of that letter were. Karla opened up the last box, atop which rested my parents’ wedding photograph, the one I used to sneak into our room to look at. Affixed to the back with a piece of Scotch tape was a small note from my mother.

  Your grandfather asked if there was anything I wanted to send you, as my way to say good-bye. I could think only of this photo, which always seems to have meant something to you. I am crying as I write this, because I am seeing that of all the tragedies and disappointments in my life, you, my Tanaya, are the greatest.

  Chapter Twelve

  There should have been something more to her voice, a sympathetic tone, a shared sense of loss and regret.

  But instead, Shazia just sounded like herself: defiant and devil-may-care.

  I had been crying for most of the thirty minutes that I had been on the phone with her, grateful at least that she had called me and not the other way around.

  “Up until yesterday, I really thought that when I went back home, they would forgive me and take me back in,” I sobbed. “But this, what they have done, it is so final.” I envisioned my grandfather, his white kurta clinging to his lean frame, out in the street in front of our building, disposing of all the things they had chosen not to send me: my old schoolbooks, my hair barrettes, some bottles of nail polish I had bought right before leaving for Paris and had inadvertently left behind-all the things I had hoped, someday, to go back to.

  But Shazia seemed to understand none of this, instead telling me that I was “better off without them,” that if they chose not to accept my choices, then they didn’t deserve to have me in the family. To me, she was talking nonsense. She kept wanting to change the subject, to ask me about what else I had been up to in Paris, and would no doubt have shrieked in delight had I told her about my foray on a fashion catwalk just a couple of weeks earlier. Family had been everything to me, and I was blaming Shazia.

  “It’s easy for you to say it doesn’t matter,” I said, bitterness filling my voice. “You might only understand how I’m feeling if your mother had turned her back on you, telling you that you may as well be dead.”

  There was a pause before Shazia quietly said: “She did.”

  “What?”

  “I never told you this, but once I left Paris to come to live in L.A., my mother eventually sent me everything I’d left behind, and a note telling me never to return home. It seems melodrama runs in the family,” she said, laughing weakly.

  “So what happened?” I asked. “What made her change her mind?”

  “Fear. She found out she was sick, and I was the first person she called. There’s nothing like death to make you long for someone you suddenly think you can’t live without. So you see, Tanaya, I do know what it’s like. Being disowned is not always an absolute. It may feel like the end of the world now. But believe me, when the time is right, you’ll be one big happy family again.”

  It wasn’t until I was emptying out my handbag the next morning that I found his name card. Until I saw it again, lodged in the bottom of my bag and entangled in an empty cellophane sandwich wrapper, I had forgotten about the well-dressed gentleman who had approached me on the street that Sunday, who seemed to think that I had more to offer the world of modeling than a minute on a catwalk in a darkened nightclub, done under duress. I also pulled out from my bag the copy of the newspaper that had my photograph in it, the one that had Mathias all excited until he realized that nobody would ever see it. I glanced at Dimitri’s name card and realized that, for the first time in my life, I truly had nothing to lose.

  Just to be sure I was in the right place, I looked up at the numbers atop the building in front of me and matched them to the address on the card. It didn’t seem to fit. The card was heavy and formal, the letters on it thick and embossed, like some of the wedding invitations that would arrive at Nana’s house when I was still living there, signaling occasions that were grand and regal.

  I had expected the same from Dimitri’s offices based on the quality of his name card, so was surprised to find a very modest building in front of me-a narrow, dirty glass door the only thing separating it from the street, a rack of dark stairs leading to the upper floors. There was no indication outside that these were offices, or that a talent agency was one of them. I hadn’t called Dimitri before coming, which may have been my mistake. My shift had ended early, and I had simply decided on the spur of the moment to come and talk to him, assuming that he would be around and available. A sequence of events had convinced me to do so: The girls had told me that the landlord was raising the rent and we would all equally have to share the increased financial burden, and Mathias had informed me that a recently graduated cousin of his would be joining me in my cashier duties, taking some of my hours and, consequently, some of my pay.

  “That’s OK,” I had said to Mathias when he told me. “I believe that there is enough for everyone.” He had looked relieved. Karla was taking on every freelance project thrown her way, convinced that she couldn’t afford to turn down assignments. Teresa had offered to find me extra work, most likely at night in one of the restaurants she worked in as a waitress.

  It was at that point, when Teresa wanted me to wear an apron with her and serve aperitifs all night, that Juliette chimed in with her own solution.

  “Modeling,” she had said. “You did it once, and it didn’t kill you. I think you should try it again. If you make enough money doing that, we can all quit our jobs,” she said, laughing. “Believe me, most girls become models because they have a burning desire to do so, or are terribly vain by nature. For you, it is just for the money. A
nd it is much more fun than picking up somebody’s dirty dishes, yes?”

  Encouraged by the other girls, I was standing in front of Dimitri’s building, wondering if I had made some awful mistake.

  I pulled open the door and walked up the stairs, careful to hike up my scarf so it wouldn’t trail on the dirty floor. I climbed two flights before I saw a small sign outside a door on my right: MAROUNIS GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT. Underneath was written NEW YORK. PARIS. BEIJING. A man’s voice came through the door, a stream of shouted words broken with a laugh. I knocked quietly, uncertainly. I heard a pause, and then a grim “Entrez!” I jiggled the door-knob until it finally turned, opened the door, and found myself in Marounis Global Entertainment, a room no larger than my apartment, with one balding man (Dimitri) on the phone at a solitary desk. He was dressed in a faded blue T-shirt, a cigarette dangling from two fingers. Behind him, suspended from a hanger, was the suit he had worn the week before when I had first met him. It was, I realized, his “scouting suit,” the one that made him look like a real businessman with a real business.

  As soon as he saw me, a look of astonished recognition came over his face. He whispered something hurriedly to the person on the other end of the phone and hung up.

  “I think I have made a mistake,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to come here. Sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”

  I turned around and reached for the door, but Dimitri yelled out to me.

  “Wait!” he shouted. “I remember you-the girl from the hotel. I’m so glad you have come. You should have phoned. I could have met you somewhere else.”

  He caught me looking around the room, and he suddenly appeared ashamed. “Please, sit,” he said, sweeping an empty pizza box off a chair and onto the floor. “You’ve come all this way. Please.”