Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve come to look after Mummy for a while, but not 24/7, so we can hang out together, paint the town red and all that.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I certainly liked the sound of it.

  The following evening, Shazia and I took a taxi-the first time I had been in one since arriving in Paris-and went to the Buddha Bar, which she told me was one of the most fashionable places in all of Paris. We entered into a space that was as dark as it was loud, handed our coats to a girl sitting in a small cubicle, and almost collided with a waitress in a red-and-gold silk dress carrying a tray of multicolored drinks. Shazia grabbed my wrist and took me down a flight of stairs. I stopped in the middle of the restaurant and stared up at an enormous golden Buddha that dominated the room.

  “You can close your mouth now,” Shazia said, smiling. “You’re wowed. We get it.” She pulled me over to a long table at the back that was filled with her friends. She hugged and kissed all of them and introduced me as her cousin from Mumbai. They all nodded enthusiastically, some of them recounting a trip to Rajasthan or Calcutta or how their boss/roommate’s boyfriend/neighbor is from India, as if that would help me feel more welcome. I sat next to Shazia and a girl she used to work with, unable to pay any attention to their conversation. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Buddha; the girls in their short, sharp dresses and high shoes; or the men in their smart shirts tucked into jeans. Everyone had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, dancing in their own world to music that boomed through the speakers. My eyes began to smart with all the smoke, and nobody else said a word to me the whole night, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be.

  I realized then that Paris with a friend-or better, a far-removed cousin who had become a friend-was a lot less lonely than it had been. Shazia had lived here most of her life, so knew the city as intimately as anyone would. Every day, Aunt Mina would ask me when I was leaving, if I had “finished my matter,” but Shazia would take me by the hand and, ensuring that her mother was tended to for the next couple of hours, would tell her to “stop bugging” me and would take me out.

  In the few days after Shazia arrived, once she had recovered from the jet lag, she showed me the Paris that only insiders know. She had said we would do all the tourist things, like window-shop around Saint-Germain, go boating down the Seine, take coffee and croissants at Les Deux Magots, and ride the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  But we also visited her friends who lived in a basement apartment that had been transformed into something that reminded me of pictures in an old storybook of Aladdin’s Cave, and others who took us out for Chinese food in a restaurant that was an hour’s Metro ride from our home, but worth it for the fragrance of the rice and the crispiness of the steamed vegetables. On a sunny afternoon, we went to the Île St-Louis and ate the creamiest ice cream I had ever tasted in my life, its flavor lingering on my tongue long after I’d finished the last spoonful. French words came tumbling out of her mouth at every turn, and I made it a point to learn what I could from her, loving to imitate her irritated “mais non!” and enthusiastic “bah oui!” and the string of “alors” that referred to nothing in particular.

  “You’ll get there,” she said smiling. “It’s actually an easy language to learn, once you get the hang of it.”

  “You say that as if I’ll be here forever,” I said as we stood one evening on the Pont Neuf, watching the lights of the city flicker in the distance. “I came here to do something, and I’ve not done it yet.” The guilt resurfaced. The slip of paper still lay in the pocket of my coat.

  “It’s never easy going against the grain.” Shazia’s voice was suddenly quiet, the darkness of the river seeming to mirror her momentary mood. “I did it, and I’m still paying the price.”

  Shazia’s father, Reza, a Pakistani immigrant who had opened a small tourist store on the farthest reaches of the rue de Rivoli twenty years ago, had left Lahore to seek out a better life for his wife and their infant daughter, and had ended up first in England, working at an Indian restaurant in Birmingham. When he one day overheard a table of diners talking about a trip they had just made to Paris, and all the wonderful shops they had seen there, something in his heart stirred, and he instantly believed that that was where he could make a good living.

  Shazia was five years old when her parents took the ferry from Dover to Calais and headed straight to the French capital. Her father had purchased a secondhand Linguaphone system to learn some basics of the language, but with his heavy Lahore accent-slightly tinged by the broad Birmingham brogue he had acquired-it was not surprising that nobody could understand him.

  But still, he was fortunate to find a small space on the heavily traveled tourist street, and put down most of his life savings for the first and last months’ rent and a security deposit. With what little he had left, he rented a studio apartment in the Latin Quarter, all three of them living in one room. Shazia told me that her mother cried every day for a month after coming to this country, baffled by the language and the habits and the incessant smoking of these people. But Shazia took to it instantly, picking up the language as if it were her own. After a decade of working hard and saving everything, Reza was able to buy a larger place, with a bedroom for their only daughter who was fast becoming a woman.

  Reza died three years ago. He had been stabbed in the back by a burglar who had forced his way into the store at closing time, then made off with four hundred francs from the register and a pile of J’ADORE PARIS sweatshirts. Reza’s blood was splattered over the rest of his stock, dripping from the small shot glasses embellished with motifs of the Arc de Triomphe and the porcelain platters featuring Moulin Rouge dancers.

  “Gypsies,” the police had said, as Aunt Mina lay crumpled in a heap on the floor, Shazia holding on to her but feeling desperately faint herself. “They used to be just petty thieves. But now, they find knives.”

  Shazia, who had been working as a legal secretary in an American law practice at the time, for a short while thought about quitting her job and taking over her father’s small shop, to honor the man he had become and the decent business he had built on his own.

  But a week after his murder, she stood alone in the store and stared at the now cleaned-up merchandise and the empty cash register, and knew she would be miserable, consigned forever to her father’s death.

  “The place is cursed,” Aunt Mina had said. “I have already lost him here. I will not sleep another night in my life if you start working here too.”

  So Shazia went back to work at her shiny office near the Place de la Concorde while her mother stayed home and wept and prayed for Allah to come and take her away too.

  There was insurance money, and Shazia was earning well, so they lived comfortably. But Mina had never known anything but marriage, and now the only reason she had come to this country was gone. It was her dream, she kept saying, to return to Lahore to live out her days. Once her daughter was married off, that was what she would do.

  “And then I got the transfer,” Shazia said, telling me the story that first night. “ California. Los Angeles. Sunshine three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Oh my God, how could I not go?”

  Aunt Mina fell into a heap again when her daughter told her she was moving out and leaving home, and neither threats nor begging did anything to convince Shazia otherwise. On the day she was leaving, her mother rammed a taveez-a talisman to ward off bad luck-into her daughter’s bag, kissed her on the forehead, and pleaded with her to return soon. Shazia sent money every month, along with letters and photographs describing her new Los Angeles life, all of which made Mina yearn for Lahore even more.

  “We are the same, you and I,” Shazia said to me as we stared over the bridge into the Seine. “We are the only children in our families, only daughters, both fatherless, both with mothers too consumed in their own grief to really look at us.” Shazia wiped away a tear, the first time I had seen her show any emot
ion.

  “We are like sisters,” she said, linking her arm in mine. “And I will do everything I can to help a sister.”

  Chapter Four

  My first ten days in Paris passed as if in a dream-watery, surreal, almost too quickly to savor.

  On day eleven, a mere seventy-two hours before I was scheduled to return to Mahim, the future I had been avoiding showed up on my doorstep.

  In the middle of the afternoon, when Aunt Mina was napping and Shazia was chatting lazily on the phone with one of her old school friends, the doorbell rang. I peered through the peep-hole, and knew instantly who it was.

  “Tanaya?” he asked, as I opened the door.

  I nodded silently.

  “You are even lovelier than I expected,” he said, smiling. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Tariq.”

  He was about to extend his hand, but stopped upon realizing that it was perhaps too Western a gesture for me to embrace. I quickly covered my head and stepped aside so he could come in. We stood in the narrow doorway, me too uncomfortable to suggest he approach any farther, him picking up on that.

  “I never heard from you,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that you were OK, that nothing had happened to you. I didn’t have a phone number, only an address. Through my grandfather. You know how old-fashioned these people are.” He smiled and shrugged, his features broad and handsome. In each ear dangled a tiny gold loop, the only things about him reminiscent of a glorious Mughal heritage and accoutrements that looked strangely complementary to his dark suit and tie.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call. I’m fine,” I said, nervously fingering one end of my dupatta. I hadn’t thought through what I was going to tell my family when I returned home. My grandfather had finally called a few days before, but I was out, as usual, with Shazia. Aunt Mina had answered the phone, but told me later that she informed my grandfather that she had “no idea” about any alliance between Tariq and me.

  “I don’t know where you have been going,” she had said to me later. “You deal with this yourself with your Nana. I do not wish to get involved.” Nana had told Aunt Mina to instruct me to call him back. I hadn’t done so yet.

  “I’m not going to ask you why you didn’t contact me,” said Tariq. “We all have our own reasons for doing things. I thought it was weird myself, a girl flying all the way from India to view me. It’s unusual, you know. But I wanted to be open-minded. Living away from Pakistan has altered my outlook.”

  For a second, I remembered Sabrina, the girl who had led me here. I closed my eyes for a moment and wanted to recall what I had been seeking, what had brought me here. I still wasn’t “of the world.” I was still standing on the sidelines and watching. Perhaps it took longer than two weeks. After almost a fortnight here, I was still the same girl. I remained silent, my eyes on the floor, knowing that I had no explanation.

  “Well, I may as well get going,” he said. “As long as nothing happened to you.” He turned to face the door, then turned around again.

  “Don’t worry about anything,” he said. “I will take care of it.”

  When Shazia got off the phone, I told her about my unexpected visitor. She laughed gleefully and then raised her hand, expecting me to slap it, an odd mannerism that she had displayed numerous times.

  “Well, at least that’s over with,” she laughed. “He got the message. You’re done with him.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said to her quietly, keeping my voice down so Aunt Mina wouldn’t overhear. “They only sent me here on the express condition that I would agree to marry him. I didn’t even call him. What will I tell them when I go home?”

  “What makes you think you’re going home?” she asked.

  When the phone rang the next day, I knew instinctively that it was Nana. I decided to answer it myself.

  “Tanaya? Beti! Where have you been?” he asked. I could imagine him frowning, his face red, and I could hear the chatter of voices in the background, other people crammed into booths next to his.

  “Sorry, Nana, that I’ve not called. I’ve been meaning to, but with the time difference and all,” I said lamely. “Everything is OK. I am OK.”

  “Everything is not OK!” he shouted. “I have just had a call from Tariq’s grandfather. I understand that the boy has rejected you. I am ashamed. What did you do wrong?”

  My mind went blank for a second, before I realized that that was what Tariq meant when he said he would take care of things. It was far more acceptable for him to turn me down than for me to have never even called him in the first place.

  “I did nothing, Nana. I met him. I was pleasant.”

  “Did you do something to your face? He was told you were a beauty. Did you change something? Do you have a pimple?”

  “No, Nana, nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “Maybe he just didn’t like me.”

  “Hah!” he grunted. “So much expense to send you there, and for what? I told my friend that I will never speak to him again, that his grandson is ill-mannered and unworthy of our efforts. How dare he turn down a Shah girl!”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Nana. But it is all the will of Allah,” I said, trying to appease him.

  He told me he had made arrangements to pick me up from the airport in Mumbai three days hence, and I quickly hung up.

  The next morning, Paris was in its fullest glory. Shazia and I had decided to take a walk down the Champs-Elysées, and I marveled once again at its wide tree-lined streets and the sparkling stores that dotted our path. The sun was high in a pale blue sky, and a calm wind rustled my polyester-chiffon ensemble and caused a slight chill to cover my bare feet. I couldn’t imagine that in forty-eight hours, into which I was planning to cram a lot, I would be back at my home in Mahim, with nothing but the incessant rumbling of the trains from the railway station across the street to keep me company. The building we lived in was called Ram Mahal-literally “God’s Palace”-so named because when my grandfather had first bought our apartment there decades ago it was indeed a palace relative to the other buildings in the area. It had originally been painted a light yellow, but after forty years of monsoon rains and no upkeep, the exterior was now chipped and gray, with none of the pleasant prettiness of its heyday. Each of the five floors boasted a small courtyard, in which the children of the building would play catch and hide-and-seek, drinking tongue-pinching Limca from dirty glass bottles. There was no elevator, so the oldest and most infirm of the building’s residents remained at home for years on end, having everything brought to their door, finally having to be carried out on a stretcher. As a child, I used to love running up and down the stone steps, lit only by a single hanging bulb, feeling the smooth, thick curves of concrete banisters as I went from floor to floor visiting my friends. It had been the only building in the neighborhood to offer indoor plumbing. But now merely turning off the side street and into the entrance would yield the overpowering stench of human waste. In the last twenty years or so, squatters had set up camp right across the street, living beneath tents made from bamboo sticks, blue plastic sheets, and coarse burlap rice sacks. Small children, their hair crawling with lice, their clothes tattered but their tiny eyes still lined with kohl, would stand on the street and beg for a few rupees from the occupant of a passing car, or else they would forage for leftovers in the big mounds of trash that often lay uncollected in the street for weeks at a time.

  “I really don’t want to go back there,” I said suddenly, shaking my head, turning to Shazia, as we continued our walk down the thoroughfare.

  “Then don’t,” she replied, stopping. She put her hand on my arm. “Tanaya, you’ll think I’m crazy, but I honestly feel like you belong here. Like Paris isn’t done with you. I don’t think you should go home now.”

  The wind felt cooler, and I wrapped my sweater tightly around me.

  “But I have to go. There’s no way I can stay here. My ticket is ‘non-refundable-non-rerouteable-non-endorsable,’ ” I said, repeating my grandfather’s stern directive. �
�If I don’t use the return portion, it will go to waste.”

  “That’s what return tickets from Paris are for. Wasting,” she said. “Look, come and sit a minute.” She led me to a nearby bench, and we eased ourselves down. I ran my finger over a rusty nail that held the painted green planks in place, confused about the conversation that Shazia and I were starting to have.

  “I’ve been in your shoes,” she said. “I wanted to be somewhere else and it upset everyone. But I did it, because I had to. I know it’s hard. But see how long it took you to get out. What are you going back to Tanaya? Tell me.”

  “My family,” I said softly. “My usual life. That’s all.”

  “Please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “From what you’ve told me, you don’t have much going on there. I mean, it’s hardly like anyone is lining up to make a reality show on you.”

  I blinked, not really knowing what Shazia was talking about, but understanding her point anyway. I knew that since things hadn’t worked out with Tariq, Nana would enroll me in the nearby Mrs. Mehra’s Institute of Domestics. All the girls in my neighborhood went there if marriage was for any reason delayed, and six months later “graduated” with important knowledge such as how to pickle lemons, how to remove stains from limestone, and how to best iron a man’s shirt so that the collar lies flat just so. I had assumed that I would go there too. I told Shazia this now, and she let out one of her typical guffaws.

  “It’s like your whole life has been missing,” she said. “Mrs. Mehra is going to have to wait.”

  The thud resonated in my ear long after I had put the receiver down. Fear-terror, actually-had helped keep my voice steady for the past fifteen minutes, but once Nana had ended the call, and no doubt dispensed with his love for me at the same moment, I allowed myself to sob on Shazia’s shoulder.