If my nana hadn’t died of shock by now, this would definitely do it.
Our plane landed on a private airstrip just outside New York. As the stairs lowered, Kai grabbed his bag with one hand, and took my hand in the other. He had put on a pair of dark glasses, pulled out his shirt from his pants, removed his socks. He looked scruffy, relaxed, sexy. He suggested I leave my sunglasses off, that they needed to get a really good look at my face, and I agreed.
As we descended the stairs, I noticed that the airstrip was completely bare, except for a car that was there to pick us up. And then, popping out from behind a van like a gopher, I spotted a photographer, a camera slung around his neck, a cell phone attached to his belt loop. He smiled, took the picture, gave us a thumbs-up, and drove off.
Felicia, as always, knew just who to call. We were the lead item on Page Six the next morning, on the inside page of USA Today, and on seven different Internet gossip sites.
MUSLIM SUPERMODEL FINALLY HOOKS UP! screamed one headline.
ROCK DUDE SWEEPS AWAY FASHION’S LATEST HOTTIE! said another.
KAI AND TANAYA: FORBIDDEN LOVE? speculated an online column.
At my apartment, alone, I slammed shut my laptop, set the newspapers aside, and took the phone off the hook. I went into my bedroom and opened the top drawer in my bedside table. I rummaged around for something that Stavros had given me not long after I got here. I finally found it, held it tight in the palm of my hand, and went back outside to the living room.
Staring at the compass, I located the direction that, thousands of miles away across oceans, lay Mecca, our big, glorious, historic place of worship. Then, for the first time in months, I lowered myself to the ground, closed my eyes, and prayed.
Shazia, an avid reader of all things gossipy, was on the phone in no time. She was always fascinated by where I had gone the previous night, whom I’d had lunch with, what I was wearing, which country I was traveling to next. She had asked me to lobby Stavros to find me something in Los Angeles. She said she really missed me and wanted to see me again, but I think she wanted me around so she could latch on to the vague aura of stardom that seemed to have enveloped me.
“Kai… you’re going out with Kai?” she asked, sounding more excited about it than I was. “He’s so yummy! How’d you score that? Come on, seriously, tell me. Oh, and what’s he like in the sack? I’m dying to know. I told the girls at work I’d find out from you.”
“How’s your mother?” I asked, sidelining her questions completely. “And have you been back to Paris recently? I’ll be going, in a couple of months, for couture. You should meet me there,” I said, wishing immediately that I could have taken the words back.
“Oooh, I’d love it!” she squealed. “Will you get me a front-row seat? Can I come to the parties with you? Will there be gift bags? Oh my God, will Kai be there?”
I realized then that the only thing worse than being a groupie, was having one in the family.
As my “relationship” was proceeding as planned, it wasn’t too hard to stick to the terms of our agreement. By this point, Kai and I had repeated our story so many times, it had become rote. And yet we somehow both managed to sound as excited, as if it were all true. It was a story shrouded in glamour, enfolded in allure. I was on a magazine shoot in Jamaica; he was there on vacation. He had vaguely known who I was. He saw me as I emerged from the pool and watched stealthily as I wrapped myself in a pareo. He sent over a cocktail, and I turned it down because I didn’t drink. He was charmed, he said, and hooked. He played his guitar to me as we sat on a rock by the beach, under the moonlight. He sang of lost love and dashed desires, his number-one song that summer. The chemistry was unforgettable, he told everyone. By the time he was done telling the story, me blushing at his side, even I believed him.
The voice on the phone was faint at first, vaguely recognizable. She repeated my name over and over, as I stopped breathing, wondering if it could really be…
“Nilu?” I said. “Is that you?”
“Yes! Tanaya!” She sounded thrilled. “I’m in New York. I had to look you up.”
Getting my number was a long and arduous process, apparently-beginning with calling the switchboard at Blaze, a makeup line with whom I had just signed an endorsement deal. Five different connections later, she had reached Stavros, who recognized her name from my stories and had immediately passed on my number. I stood in my apartment, the phone to my ear, trembling, delighted to hear the voice of someone who knew me before all this started.
She was only in town for a few days, so we made plans to meet immediately. Her brother, a systems analyst in London, had come to New York for a job interview and had asked his sister to join him for a few days. He was making enough money to get her a visa and buy her a plane ticket, so she didn’t hesitate.
We met outside a restaurant in Greenwich Village, close to the apartment she was staying in with her brother and a friend of his. I saw her approaching, turning a corner at the far end of the street, and I ran toward her, my heels clicking along the pavement. I stood in front of her, saw my ecstatic face in those small round glasses of hers, and flung my arms around her.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you,” I whispered in her ear, trying to stifle my tears. “I can’t tell you what it’s been like not to have my friend.”
She hugged me back, tightly.
“I’m here now, Tanaya!” she said, brightly. “For a few days, anyway; it will be like old times.”
I couldn’t even wait for the menus to arrive before bar-raging her with questions-about Mahim and Mumbai and the weather and the latest movies. She told me that I had been the subject of a recent profile in the Times of India, a generally positive feature about a Mumbai Muslim who had made it big in the world of modeling.
“On our street, everyone is so proud of you,” she said, breaking off a piece of bread and wiping the crumbs away on her napkin. “The paanwalla tells me everything, that people stop by and complain about the economy and the rain, but always say, ‘Hah, but that pretty Shah girl from Ram Mahal, now she is doing very vell.’ ” “I laughed at Nilu’s rendition, but could imagine the chatter on the street, the claims to fame at the corner stall.
“Really,” Nilu said, now serious. “You’ve done something great, Tanaya. You know, I am now at Mrs. Mehra’s School of Domestics? Where else would I go? But you have escaped all that. You are doing what I knew you always could. You are making your own money and creating your own name, no more just Zakir Shah’s beautiful granddaughter from flat 1B. Do not be ashamed,” she said. “Be proud. I am very proud of you.”
I was quiet for a moment, waiting for her to answer a question I couldn’t ask.
“Yes, I saw them,” she said softly. “I went by there when I knew I was coming here, to try and maybe get your contact details. I had thought, possibly, that you wouldn’t be on speaking terms but wasn’t sure, that maybe Nana wasn’t as stern as you made him out to be. But, after I saw him, I guess I could see why you were always afraid of him.”
I chewed on my straw, scared for her to go on, but needing to hear about my family from someone who had just seen them. I had been gone almost a year, my new life unrecognizable. Some of the other models I had befriended here rarely spoke of their families, and if they did, it was usually as an afterthought. Until the day I got on that plane for Paris, in search of Sabrina, my family had been my entire existence.
“Well, it will just hurt you to hear it,” Nilu said, as she looked at my questioning face. “We should talk about other things. Your life is beautiful now. There is no need to put yourself through this.”
“No,” I said, placing my hand on top of hers. “Just tell me how they are, Nana and my mother. How they look. How their health is. What they said…,” I stammered, “when you mentioned my name.”
She looked down at her food for a minute, unsure.
“Your grandfather has always been very nice to me,” she said. “Every time I came over to see you, he wou
ld always go down to the corner and buy candy for us to share. Remember? And anytime there was a new Archie comic at the bookstall, he would bring it for us to read together.” Her face softened into a smile as she thought back.
“But when I went over there last week, as soon as he opened the door to me, his face turned so gray and angry, I swear I thought he was going to slap me then and there,” she said, the smile disappearing. “For a minute, I think he thought that it was all my fault.”
I felt the tears returning, but wiped them away. People in the restaurant had already recognized me, and I could already anticipate the headlines: SUPERMODEL BREAKS DOWN OVER LUNCH WITH MYSTERY WOMAN. My life, I could see, had become a series of newspaper captions.
“You know all this already, Tanaya. Don’t make me go on,” she said. “It’s as painful for me to tell it as it is for you to hear it.”
“I need to hear it anyway,” I said. “If that is the only thing that helps to keep my nana and mamma in my mind, then it is better than nothing.”
She sighed and stabbed her fork into some slivers of beet.
“He wasn’t happy to see me, but he invited me in anyway,” Nilu continued. “He’s always been very polite that way, no? Your mother was there, in her room, and she came out when she heard my voice, but didn’t say anything. Your servant offered me tea and biscuits, but I said no. We just stood there, the three of us, in the little corridor. I asked how they were, and they nodded but said nothing. Then Nana asked me what I wanted, and I said I was there to see if maybe he had your phone number in New York. He looked shocked. Tanaya, do they even know what part of the world you are living in?”
I felt ashamed suddenly, that I was now not so different from the other girls I had met here, the ones from Missouri and California and Alabama who had to forsake their families and their former lives for fame and free martinis in New York. I had never wanted to be one of those girls. But now, with my closest relatives not even knowing where I was, I had become one. It was apparent then that either Aunt Mina had stopped communicating with my grandfather or Shazia had finally stopped talking to her mother about me. The dusty web of family relations that my grandfather had tried so hard to keep intact no longer included me.
Chapter Twenty-two
To me, confidentiality agreements didn’t apply to best friends. While the law might have stated otherwise, there was no way I could allow my best friend from home to think that I was actually dating a bad-boy rocker with a baby face and a tattoo that stretched from his elbow to his shoulder. Looking at Nilu’s face, I could tell that she didn’t believe it anyway, which was the fundamental benefit of having a friend who really knew you.
“Saif was still sending me magazines,” Nilu said, giggling as we left the restaurant and walked down the street toward where she was staying. She had her arm looped inside mine, the way we always walked back on the streets of Mahim. “I have read all about your love affair. He seems nice,” she said. “But I never would have pictured you with someone like that. I had thought, that even with all this, your glamorous life and all, that you might still want to wait. You know, until you found ‘the one’-someone who loves Allah like you do, someone your family would approve of. But I guess it’s hard, living here amidst all this, not to become a different person. He’s rich and good-looking and famous, and so are you. So what does it matter?”
I could tell that Nilu was trying hard to keep the judgment out of her voice. She had always been kind and tactful, and I somehow always imagined her working as a diplomat. Unlike Nana, she would never impose her beliefs on anyone.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but it’s not what you think,” I said, stopping, the warm air from a sidewalk grate sweeping up our skirts. “This whole thing with Kai, nothing is really happening there, no matter how it looks.”
She stood with her mouth slightly agape, her eyes wide behind her glasses, and listened as I told her about Felicia’s plan and Jamaica and the chasteness of my relationship with a rock star.
“We have kissed for the cameras, but that is all,” I said. “If we think a photographer has followed us, he will come to my apartment, then leave after drinking a cup of hot chocolate. People call our affair ‘sultry’ and ‘hot’ and God knows what else, but there is no such thing. In fact, it is really rather tame. We are like brother and sister. But I signed a piece of paper that said I could never tell a soul about this. So you must promise me that it goes no further. It doesn’t matter what people say about me, if, when you go home, they call me a whore and a hussy. You must be absolutely quiet about this, believing the same as them. Maybe one day, far in the future, the truth can come out. Just not now. OK?”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked. We continued walking, Nilu squeezing my hand, a light drizzle that had suddenly appeared merging with the tears on my face. “What purpose does it serve to have people think something about you that isn’t true?”
“You know, Nana never thought I was worth very much,” I said, my head bowed in sadness. “He thought that all I was good for was this face, that it would be the only thing to land me a rich and fine husband. But as it has turned out, my career-this thing I do-it’s all I have now. I have to make the most of it. It is my intention to be as successful as possible in a very short span of time, to earn and save as much as I can. And then I will take what I’ve made and do something significant with it, although I don’t know what yet. Maybe, in the end, it will help me to win my family back. Although maybe by then, also, the damage will have been too much. But the people who work with me, the people I trust, they have told me that if I do this, I will go from being a fairly famous fashion model to an extremely famous one.”
Nilu nodded, then was silent for a minute. “Tell me something,” she asked as we arrived at the entrance to her building. “After everything you’ve been through, do you think you would do it again, leaving India and all? With all that you’ve lost, I mean with your family and all, has it been worth it?”
I gave her a hug good-bye and, just as she was pulling away, whispered into her ear: “Yes.”
Chapter Twenty-three
For someone who had never had to manage money before, I had become rather good at it. I used to live on a weekly stipend-about the equivalent of five dollars-which would have bought me a coffee and a bagel on the streets of New York, but in Mahim allowed me to indulge in several movies a week from Book Nook, daily dosas at the neighborhood dhaba, and my monthly issues of Stardust and Cine Blitz, even if they were used. Occasionally I was able to save a few rupees at the end of the week, and when I had left for Paris, in addition to the small amount of money Nana had given me, this was what I had taken. It was a beautifully uncomplicated life. Money, for all I could care, was something to be spent on cold coffee and cotton candy. Before all this had happened, I figured that I would eventually be married someday, and to a man who would give me an allowance in order to purchase vegetables at the market and pay the dhobi to wash our clothes.
Stavros had helped me open a bank account shortly after I came to New York and helped me invest the money I had made in Paris. In addition to being my agent, he also called himself my manager, tending to what he described as my “business affairs.” The payments for everything I did, from the runway shows to the magazine shoots to the advertising campaigns to the makeup endorsement deals, would initially go to him. He would deduct his commission and then send me the rest. I had no cause to question the way he was doing things. Every so often, he would sit me down and tell me all the expenses that had to be paid-Felicia’s salary, my rent, cash for my personal expenses. He aimed, as much as possible, to ensure that I got as much as I could without paying for it: my clothes from Viva, for whom I still worked, more out of a sense of loyalty than anything else; my makeup from Blaze; and just about anything else I wanted by calling a stylist. He educated me about the power of demands, how I could use as leverage my growing fame, and that designers would fall over themselves getting me in one of their outfits
if they thought it would result in more business for them. I eventually understood how this world worked, although I never felt comfortable just assuming that things were there for me, just for the asking. It was interesting that while Nana believed in hard work, and had had the same job as an airline pilot for more than two decades, he had never inculcated that in me. He had taught me the importance of saving money. But earning it, as far as he was concerned, was not something I ever had to worry about.
So just short of a year from the time I left India, now officially out of my teens, I was stunned to see the amount of money in my savings passbook. I took out a calculator and worked out what it was in rupees, then determined that in all the twenty-three years that my Nana worked as a pilot, he never made what I had accrued in twelve months. But I knew he would be as impressed by that as if I had told him that I had made the money selling my body as a prostitute. To him, it would all be the same thing.
“How about Parrot Cay? Turks and Caicos?” Kai asked me one afternoon as he lounged on the couch in my living room, scraping something out of his right ear. I smiled as I thought of how this was the same man, with his toenail infection and the retainer he put on every night before bed, that millions of girls all over the world lusted over. They bought T-shirts with the words MRS. KAI scrawled over the front, and had his face as their computer screensaver. They would envy me for everything I knew about him; for a fake relationship, we spent a lot of time together, perhaps because our profile made it hard for him to be seen with anybody else. In a sense, he was almost stuck with me.
“Huh?” I asked, rearranging the kitchen cabinets.
“To vacation in. Turks and Caicos Island, at the Parrot Cay Hotel over there. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it,” he said, noticing the blank look on my face. “Oh girl, where have you been? It’s where Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner just got hitched, where Bruce Willis has a pad. It’s the vacation spot of the moment. It’ll be great for us to be seen there. Anyway, don’t you need a little break from all your shoots and shows and stuff? I know I do.”
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