Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  “I didn’t know,” I said softly. “You never mentioned.”

  “Well, it’s not something I like to talk about,” Shazia said, the bitterness in her face now yielding. “It just made me really resent our culture, you know? There’s a lot about it that sucks.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m still proud of where I come from,” I said, aware that I was sounding naïve. “I can’t imagine never returning to India.”

  “Nobody’s saying that,” she said. “But it’s OK to develop an affinity with another land, another culture. It doesn’t make you any less Muslim. I’m Muslim, but I’m American as well. I can’t tell you who the Pakistani prime minister is, but I know the name of Kate Hudson’s baby.” She laughed.

  She pulled me down onto the couch and took a sheet of yellow lined paper out of her bag.

  “Look, good news,” she said. “A job, a permanent place to live, how to get your visa extended… Everything you need. You start next week.”

  I glanced down and saw a scribbled name of a café with an address and phone number. Below that were other addresses, other numbers. My entire new life, according to Shazia, whittled down into a few scrawled lines.

  “A good friend of mine owns a cute café, very trendy, in Odéon. He needs a cashier, which I thought would be perfect for you because you don’t really have to speak. His English is great, so at least you can communicate. It’s a cash job-he pretty much only hires illegals,” said Shazia, lowering her voice although we were alone. “The pay isn’t bad, and it’s enough to share a place I found with a few other girls. Those are the details there,” she said, pointing to the second address. “You can walk to work, and all the girls keep strange hours, so you’ll have the place to yourself a lot. It’s perfect,” she said, folding her hands on her lap, a look of smug satisfaction on her face.

  “I’m glad you think so,” I said, the resentment returning. “I don’t want any of it. I want to go home.”

  Shazia’s face softened, and she put her hand on top of mine. “Listen, all those dreams you came here with, you still have to achieve them,” she said. “You haven’t had your Sabrina moment yet, have you?”

  I shook my head, disconsolate, but now feeling embarrassed by my delusion.

  “You can’t leave here until you feel what you said you wanted to feel,” Shazia said. “Not until you can show everyone you are no longer just the pretty Shah girl from Mahim.”

  I nodded, carefully folded up the sheet of paper, and rose to bid my distant cousin a final good-bye.

  My brown suitcase sat behind me in the cashier’s booth, waiting to be taken to its new home. It still bore half-peeled-off stickers from my grandfather’s travels-a dozen or so faded Air India tags dotted over its surface, the familiar yellow-and-red Maharajah now grimy with age.

  Another bill was brought to me, a shiny credit card placed upon it, and I swiped it through the small machine on my right, punched in a code, ripped out the resulting printout, and placed it back on the tray for the waiter to return to his customer. I had been doing this for five hours and twenty minutes, off and on, and when it was slow I leafed through the English-French dictionary that Shazia had given me before she left.

  The place was called, simply, Café Crème, because it professed to specialize in the sweet creamy drink, although as far as I could tell, so did every other café in the vicinity-or in the rest of Paris, for that matter. The owner’s name was Mathias, which took me a while to learn how to pronounce, and he was a good friend of Shazia’s, although neither one of them told me how. He was part German, was multilingual and fluent in English, which made my first day more comfortable than I had thought it might be. Like with Zoe, I knew he only had me around as a favor to Shazia, but he didn’t seem to mind it. He had a dimple on his left cheek that creased happily when he smiled, a mop of light brown hair, and slender eyes surrounded by long lashes. He seemed to do everything in the café, stepping in to take orders when it was busy, stocking the refrigerator with new supplies, even sweeping the floor at closing time, a pen constantly wedged in his mouth.

  He had greeted me one morning with a hug and a kiss on each cheek, which is certainly not the way I imagined new employees would be received at work in India. He had started speaking to me in French, shifting suddenly to English when he saw the look of alarm on my face. He had motioned to my outfit with a wave and had uttered a “très exotique” before continuing on with his instructions. My hours were eleven in the morning till seven in the evening, with an hour off for lunch and fifteen-minute breaks every other hour for, as he put it, “a coffee and a cigarette.” I would work Mondays to Fridays, but might be called upon to fill in on weekends if the other cashier didn’t show up-which, by the way he was telling it to me, seemed like a regular occurrence. He asked me how I was for cash and if I needed an advance before the end of the week, and I gratefully nodded; the money that my grandfather had sent me with was all but gone, and I had hated eating Zoe’s food and drinking her tea and not being able to pay for any of it. I wanted to wander the city again on my own, but hadn’t even been able to buy a Metro ticket.

  Halfway through my first day, I knew that I would probably hate this job. There was, indeed, nothing really in it to like-except for the niceness of Mathias and the downtime I had during which I could learn at least five new French words. Also, I didn’t have to pay for lunch, and Mathias even said he’d let me take something home for dinner every night. He had offered me, that first day, half of his sandwich-a baguette filled with thin rounds of sausage, forgetting for a moment that I was a Muslim and that pork was our poison. He quickly pulled his plate back in front of him when I pointed this out and promised it would never happen again.

  While I wanted the day to end so I could leave, I also resisted going to my new home, a place I would share with three girls who were strangers to me, showing up there with a battered brown suitcase like a refugee in an old war movie, having them inspect me up and down to determine if I was worthy enough to share their space. They weren’t even friends of Shazia’s. She had only described them as “people I know through other people,” which had made no sense to me at all.

  But Zoe had wanted her couch back, Shazia was gone, my return ticket had lapsed, and I didn’t have a choice.

  They were all there by the time I arrived, all of them in various states of undress, munching potato chips and drinking Coke, the smell of something cooking in the kitchen greeting me as I walked through the door. They were all effusive and welcoming, which surprised me, their eyes bright and arms open, as if they had been waiting for a roommate just like me.

  Karla was from Haiti -tall and black and lean, her hair in braids around a long, pretty face. Juliette was blond, smaller, and quieter, clad only in a long white cotton T-shirt with a large yellow smiley face on its front. Teresa was a full-figured redhead, a sprinkling of freckles spread across her wide face and over the shoulders and arms that were visible above a pink terrycloth towel.

  I was to share a bedroom-one of two in the flat-with Teresa, who had been looking for a roommate since the old one moved out, apparently to go and live with her boyfriend. There was only one bathroom for all of us, which meant showers expected to last longer than fifteen minutes had to be booked in advance. There was a routine of sorts, and I was expected to fit into it unquestioningly: Karla was a freelance journalist who wrote at home and was often out on assignment, but her schedule was the most flexible of all. Juliette was a receptionist at a fashion house and had to be out by eight most mornings, so allowances should be made for that. Teresa had two jobs, both of them as a waitress, while she was waiting for her big break to become, as she put it, “the next Audrey Tautou.”

  They told me all this breathlessly while I was still standing in the hallway, my suitcase in my hand. They said that my cousin had come to see the place and to meet them on my behalf, and had determined that I would be happy here. Then Juliette turned toward a desk in the corner and handed me a white envelop
e that she fished out from one of its drawers. It was a note from Shazia, informing me that she had already paid the first month’s rent, that it was her gift to me, her way to wish me well.

  “Don’t think I’ll forget about you now that I’ve returned to L.A.,” she had written in tiny, circular words. “I’ll be checking up on you, and you know how to reach me, if ever you need me. It’s all going to be gorgeous. Trust me.”

  I folded up the note and slipped it into my purse, wondering what Shazia must have been really thinking when she wrote it, and what I must have been thinking when I let her talk me into this.

  Chapter Nine

  For someone who had barely left Mahim, I was adjusting reasonably well, finding that sticking to a schedule helped me to retain my sanity. Mathias was very kind to me, which I had always assumed a boss would never be. The work itself was dull, but the enthusiasm with which he greeted me every day made up for it. It was nice, after nineteen years of not really being seen, to finally feel welcomed somewhere.

  The girls with whom I now lived seemed to answer to nobody, except occasionally one another, but they had no nagging parents or grandparents calling them, asking them where they were, what they were doing. They had furnished me with a list of written rules the day I moved in, at the top of which, in screaming black felt-tip, was the directive: NO MEN OVERNIGHT! I hesitated to tell them that as far as I was concerned, they had little to worry about. The refrigerator had been separated into four different zones, and I was allotted a reasonable space on the second shelf, as well as one of the drawers. Everyone bought, ate, and monitored her own food. It didn’t matter, Teresa explained to me, who earned what; everyone was responsible for herself and contributed equally to the upkeep of the apartment. I came to assume that this was how young women outside India lived, and as startled as I was by it, I fell into line.

  A week into my new job, Mathias told me that his little café had been hired to provide the refreshments for an event and asked if I would agree to help serve. Working as a waitress was something else that well-born Muslim girls didn’t do. But I was already so far gone. So I agreed and, to my horror, Mathias pulled out a short black dress that had arrived in a box, then unfolded a small white lace apron and matching hat.

  “Here, wear this,” he said, thrusting it into my hands. Answering the curious look on my face, he replied: “The client wants all the girls to dress like French maids. Bah, it’s stupide, but we do what they ask, no?”

  Along with the three other girls from the café, I changed into the ensemble, pulling on a pair of black fishnet tights that had also been provided, and choosing from an assortment of white shoes that had also been sent. When I emerged from the small lavatory, Mathias cast an approving eye up and down my body and let out a whistle.

  “I didn’t know you had those curves under your big exotique clothes,” he said as I hid self-consciously behind a table.

  The event, as it turned out, was a small fashion show, held as part of a weeklong series of shows all over the city. They were called the defiles, and everyone from our van driver to the policeman who stopped us for speeding seemed aware that Paris comes alive in that week, even more than it usually is. This particular fashion company had decided to book a dark nightclub in an obscure part of town, finding the cheapest way to show the designer’s first collection. Although the fishnet tights were beginning to itch and the lace hat was scratching into my scalp, I couldn’t help but feel a little excited at the prospect of watching my first fashion show, and I hoped I would be able to catch glimpses of it during the passing out of palm-size bottles of champagne and little cheese-filled pastries.

  Despite a light drizzle and a cool breeze, there was already a crowd waiting outside the nightclub. Mathias was shown the back entrance and was told where to set up. We walked down a wet alley, through a metal door that was painted red, and down another hallway and into the club’s kitchen. We hurriedly set out the pastries on silver trays, speared toothpicks through olives, and lifted dozens of bottles of champagne out of ice-filled chests. I heard people come in through the main entrance and take their seats, shuffling in the darkened interior of the club, the buzz of a foreign language filling the air.

  Mathias turned to greet Bruno, the designer, with a kiss on each cheek. There were superlatives thrown out, words like magnifique and merveilleux, about nothing in particular. Bruno had dyed his hair a bright red, like pictures I had seen a long time ago of clowns in a circus. He had a small silver hoop pierced through an eyebrow, and I noticed another one in his tongue as he spoke to Mathias. A short-sleeved black shirt revealed a dark green tattoo, and beads of sweat covered his forehead. He was talking quickly, nervously, giving Mathias instructions and sizing each one of us up. Then he turned and left.

  “He will give himself a heart attack,” Mathias said to me. “So agitated. The girls from Vogue are coming, and important stylists. I told him to have some champagne, relax. But of course, he cannot. He is showing couture style on hand-picked models-twenty-two outfits on twenty-two girls, like Galliano in his early days.” Mathias told me all this as if I would understand, forgetting that until today, I had never before seen a man with his hair dyed bright red.

  In less than fifteen minutes, the curtain was due to go up. I peeked out of the kitchen and saw photographers, their cameras slung across necks and shoulders, clustered at one side of a dance floor. Leading to the dance floor was a sloping ramp, covered in plastic. Lights were being tested overhead and music-which Mathias had described as “garage techno funk”-was piercing through speakers on all sides. The people sitting in the front-row seats were smartly dressed, those standing at the back were scruffier. They were holding folders and notebooks and pens, chatting with one another or staring straight ahead. One of the other girls was serving drinks, but Bruno had instructed us to wait until after the show, when there would be a small party, to bring out the rest. He had told Mathias that if there were promises of nourishment afterward, people would stay till the end, no matter how bad the clothes were. Mathias told me that Bruno didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, which might have explained the self-inflicted mutilation of the piercings and tattoo.

  I suddenly heard a crash from the area behind the dance floor ramp where the girls were getting ready. I followed Mathias back there and saw a beautiful brunette, all long limbs and teased hair and painted nails, sprawled on the floor, pulling her knee up to her chest and wailing like a child.

  “Ouch, shit!” she screamed, in a distinctly British accent. “I think I sprained my bleeding ankle. Damn these shoes!”

  On her feet was a pair of sparkling sandals with pin-thin, four-inch heels. All the girls were wearing them, and I was surprised that the brunette was the only one to have fallen over as a result. Bruno was cradling her head and yelling at someone to fetch some ice, someone else to bring a bandage. The girl was still screaming.

  “I can’t go on,” she cried. “I can’t even stand up!” Bruno dropped her head and covered his face with his hands. Mathias stooped down to comfort him, as did the rest of the fashion team, while the model continued to yelp in pain, nobody paying any attention to her. I looked over at Mathias questioningly, who hurriedly whispered to me again that Bruno had created exactly twenty-two outfits for twenty-two different models, and that this had been boasted of in the program notes that his guests were, at this very moment, perusing.

  “It is his gimmick for the season,” said Mathias. “He cannot go back on it now. People will definitely notice. It has been in all the press.”

  I had moved over to the girl to ask what I could do to help her, when Bruno yanked me up by my elbow.

  “Oui, ça suffit,” he said, looking me over and pulling the lace cap off my head. “You,” he continued, staring straight at me. “I no speak good Eenglish, but you be mannequin today.”

  Mathias stepped in, arguing with Bruno. But after a minute of that, my boss turned to me.

  “Tanaya, I am sorry, but he is insisting. He says y
ou are the prettiest girl here. I know you have never done it. But it is only one outfit, and all you must do is walk slowly, smile, turn around, come back. Simple. It is over in a minute, and I will have helped an old friend. You will be compensated. Please?”

  Ten minutes later, the French maid’s outfit had been stripped off me, and I was waiting to be dressed.

  Chapter Ten

  The item was small, tucked away on page four, and would not have caught my eye were it not for the photograph: a small, grainy black-and-white shot of a girl who looked suspiciously like me.

  Mathias was peering over my shoulder. He pointed at the photo and yelped loudly. “C’est toi! That’s you!” he said. “Gorgeous!”

  He snatched the newspaper out of my hands and started to read from it aloud in French before translating for my benefit.

  “It says here the show last night was a big success, everyone loved Bruno’s clothes, that he will be the next big fashion star. And then they mention you, a young Muslim waitress who has never modeled before, rushed onto the catwalk. They say here you were not bad, quite good actually, maybe it’s a new career for you. You look good here, no?” Mathias said, pointing to the photograph again.

  “Ah, but this newspaper, it’s a small one, not famous, pas du tout,” he said, looking at the front page. “Nobody will see it, unfortunately. Such a shame.”

  When I had returned home the night before, my eyes still rimmed with thick black liner, my hair still stiff and coiled and smelling of chemicals, my roommates squealed in surprise. When I told them what had happened, they listened to every word in silence, their only sounds being the crunching of toffee-coated peanuts that sat in a bowl on the coffee table. After I had finished recounting the hysteria of a couple of hours earlier, they squealed some more.