“Yes, of course; I am familiar with Miss Shah,” Tariq said tightly. I had seen that look before, the last time right before I left India, on my grandfather’s face at the airport. It was one of disapproval and disappointment, and it always made me sad. There, standing in front of the man I had first come to Paris for a year before, the man I should have married, I suddenly felt naked. Despite the expensive clothes on my body and the brilliant colors on my face and the showy flamboyance with which my hair was coiffed, I felt like nothing but a silly, small girl, simply playing dress-up.
“We’re taking quite a risk by putting you in this movie. As far as films are concerned, you’re not exactly a name,” Werner said, once we were settled within a cozy leather banquette at a nearby bistro. Dimitri had finally shown up, just as we were leaving the office, and nodded agreeably whenever Werner or Max spoke.
I found it hard to pay attention. Since my shocking run-in with Tariq just moments earlier, I was finding it difficult to concentrate on anything.
“So what do you think of that?” Max asked, looking at me, a question relating to a conversation that I had mentally pulled myself out of.
“Yes, of course,” I said, clueless about what I was agreeing to, and hoping that it wasn’t a nude scene.
“We’re in preproduction now and would like to start principal photography in about a month,” Werner said, peering at me over his large glasses. “That should give you enough time to get some acting classes in. I don’t expect you to win any awards for this, but it should be a little believable, huh? You should be able to engage the audience with more than just your looks. We’ll be shooting mostly in New York, so at least you won’t be too far from your beau. Perhaps we can talk to him about doing the soundtrack, yes?” Werner continued, looking over at Max again and scribbling a reminder into his notebook.
As I half-listened to the conversation, I could consider only what Tariq must have thought of me.
Chapter Twenty-six
There are some people who believe they are born to act. I am not one of them. I found the lessons excruciatingly humiliating, baffled as to how someone could stand up on a low platform in a darkened room, a dozen strangers watching, and make themselves cry. I was amazed at their ability to do so, but when my turn came, I simply stood there and stared out at them, their faces growing more expectant by the minute.
“You need to emote,” instructed the coach, Genevieve, who had been an actress herself long ago. “You need to be able to access those old hurts, those painful feelings you think are dormant but are festering in your body. Breathe deep; bring them out.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pursed my lips together, looking for all the world as though I were about to have a bowel movement. I thought of the nana who no longer loved me and the mother who perhaps never had and how truly, truly sad I was. I could feel the sadness in my blood, the slight ache that had hovered around my heart for the better part of the past year, covered by layers upon layers of little luxuries and pleasant distractions.
But no tears came, no emoting other than a little sigh indicating that I had chosen to sleep under the pain and to let it cover me like a heavy blanket.
I looked up at Genevieve, her face expectant, like those of the other students in my class.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “This is not for me. Forgive me for wasting your time.”
I returned to my seat, picked up my bag, and walked out.
I was surprised to hear Stavros’s voice on the other end of the line. It had been three days since I called him to let him know that I didn’t want to be Honey. I had explained to him that after attending a couple of acting classes, it had become patently clear to me that while other models could try their hand at acting, I wasn’t equipped to do so. I told him that it would take self-confidence and grit and being naked in the truest sense, being prepared to be devastatingly bad at something and have a dozen crew members on a film set snicker behind your back as a result. It would also require having an ego. And, if I’d discovered one thing about myself, it was that behind the klieg lights and the limousines and the private jets, I still didn’t have an ego.
The following seventy-two hours, as a result, were spent doing what Felicia frenetically described as “damage frigging control.” Dimitri and Stavros had been working on extricating me from my contract with Werner and Max and dealing with lawyers. I realized that Tariq must have been among them, but elected to think no further about it. Felicia had calls in to her contacts at Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and of course Page Six, all of whom had announced my decision to make a foray into film, and who now would be faced with the prospect of announcing my withdrawal.
“We don’t want you to be seen as flaky,” said Felicia, her cell phone, as always, pressed to her ear.
“No, God forbid,” I replied.
So Stavros’s voice was an immediate comfort to me, an indication that he was no longer upset. The line was faint, his voice far away. In the background I could hear a woman’s voice announcing flight arrivals in French.
“Where are you?” I asked him.
“I’m here, in New York. But there’s someone on the phone for you. He called me looking for you, so I’ve patched you in. Sir, go ahead,” he said, replacing the receiver at his end and telling me he’d call me back later.
“Hello, yes?” I said.
“Tanaya? It’s Tariq. Tariq Khan.”
I gripped the phone tighter and released the handful of M &Ms I had been munching on, which had now left a rainbow of colors on my palm.
“Hello, Tariq,” I said, trepidation in my voice. “It’s very nice to hear from you.”
“I don’t have time for small talk,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have a plane to catch. I’m on my way to New York, actually. I have a conference there tomorrow. But, if you don’t mind, I need to speak to you about something quite urgent. May I call you when I arrive?”
“Is this about the movie? If so, there’s nothing really to discuss. I know they are your clients, but it was really stupid and I didn’t want any part of it and-”
“It’s not about the movie.” His voice was suddenly softer. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’m glad you dropped out. I thought it was ludicrous from the beginning, but they had the cash, and I was just doing my job. It’s about something else, much more important. Give me your number, and I’ll call you when I get in, OK?”
In a corner of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, Tariq was next to me on a couch, his little gold earrings glinting in the soft shine of the tableside lamp on his right. He was as handsome as I remembered-sturdy and strong and kind. In another age, I would have been graced indeed to have been his wife.
But Tariq looked at me as if he were my parent and I was a child who had broken a brand-new toy. He had wanted to see me because he had wanted to tell me, in person, that my nana was crippled, near death. He had been riding in the back of an auto-rickshaw, on his way to post a letter, and a bus had veered through a red light and smashed into the vehicle he was in. He was lucky to be alive at all, Tariq told me, repeating exactly what he had heard from his grandfather. It had happened three weeks ago, but it had taken this long for the news to travel from Ram Mahal in Mahim to Tariq’s grandfather in Pakistan to Tariq in Paris, and finally to me, in the Four Seasons in New York, jazz playing softly in the background.
All I could think of was what my mother had said a decade ago, when a conversation turned to surviving loss. My mother’s sister Sohalia, one of the beautiful ones, had asked her one time how she had managed to remain so resilient in the wake of being abandoned by a husband when two months pregnant, how she had not descended into bitterness and endless, raging fury.
I was eleven when I had overheard the question. Aunt Sohalia was visiting from Karachi, and she and my mother were shelling peas at our dining table, their heads covered, their hands busy, their eyes on the slimy green pods in front of them. I was sitting close by, reading a comic book, waiting for my Nana to com
e home from one of his flights. I don’t recall how the subject arose, only that my aunt had been angry with her own husband about something and had, in a moment of extreme pique, even considered leaving him. Of course, we all knew she would never do it. She was, after all, a gorgeous and dependent woman, and he was a rich and powerful man, and thus it would always remain.
But the question caused my mother to drop her pea pods for a minute, and to lift her eyes and cast them out toward the balcony.
“It’s easy,” she said. “You just think of everything you hated about them. You just focus on the absolute worst in their personalities, the most disgusting habits, the things that irritated you to the point of insanity. I was only with Mr. Hassan Bhatt for two months. But there was so much about him I hated. I might have loved him too, but I have forced out of my mind and heart every recollection as to why. I only remember the hatred. That way, I don’t feel the pain.” Then she calmly shoved her hands back into the white plastic colander and continued shelling.
My mother had rarely been right about things, but she was right about this. I supposed that if I closed my eyes tight and thought about all the things I disliked about Nana-his constant and unforgiving sternness, the gruff way in which he bid me good morning, his habit of pulling out with his bare fingers bits of sticky white rice that lay impacted in his molars-that if I concentrated only on these things and on nothing else, then maybe this feeling of complete devastation wouldn’t overcome me, that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t die from guilt.
“What do you want to do?” Tariq asked as we stood outside his hotel fifteen minutes later, the crush of New Yorkers getting off work gathering around us.
“I don’t know,” I said, still too dazed to think. “Maybe go back… but how? They hate me.” I looked down at my snakeskin-tipped shoes.
“Look, I have a meeting now, but it should be over in a couple of hours. Why don’t you come back here and we’ll go out to dinner. That is, if it’s OK with your boyfriend,” he said, lowering his voice at the last word as if he were uttering some profanity. “Let’s try and figure something out. You need to see your grandfather. You can’t ignore this, you know.”
“I know,” I said, shaking his hand meekly and walking down the street, where I dialed Kai’s number and explained my situation.
“What the crap do you mean you can’t come? The whole goddamn world is going to be there!
“This is bleeding crap, you know that?” he bellowed. I had promised him that I would be there, front and center, at a performance he was giving that night at Chimera, a hot new club in SoHo. He was the star attraction and I, apparently, was a nice little extra inducement. In exchange for him showing up and giving an “impromptu” performance, the owner of the club-a media mogul who was branching out into nightlife-would reward Kai with a Louis Vuitton suitcase and just about anything he could fill it with from up and down Madison Avenue. After Kai’s gig I was to go up, kiss him, beam at him, and then at the photographers who would be hovering in the background. It had all been planned, and my dress had been laid out. But now, something more important had come up.
Kai sounded irate, as always. I heard him sniffing, although he moved his mouth and nose away from the phone. I was certain it was cocaine, which he carried around in a container meant for talcum powder, and which I hadn’t even noticed until our recent spell in the Turks and Caicos. Until then, I’d thought his moodiness was just that.
“Something has come up, Kai. Please understand. It has to do with my family. I need to go meet someone. I’m sorry, Kai. I know it means a lot to you, and I know you’ll do a wonderful job whether I am there or not. For all this time, I have never not stood by the terms of our agreement. But tonight, I need some time off. It is just one appearance. I’m certain people won’t even notice.”
He swore at me again as he replaced the receiver.
While I was dining with Tariq at Da Silvano’s, it occurred to me that, apart from Nana, I had never been alone with a Muslim man before. There was, I realized, something deeply comforting about it. Although we were in the middle of a sophisticated restaurant, surrounded by sophisticated people, sitting this close to him, our elbows touching atop the crisp linen tablecloth and our knees just a hairbreadth away beneath it, I felt like I could have been back at home in India, embedded in the security and safety with which I had grown up.
I wasn’t sure why he had asked me out. I had thought that we had said all we needed to over tea, when he told me about Nana and the accident, something I had yet to fully absorb. I had gone through the following few hours in a state of restlessness, there but not, conscious of the yellow cabs honking at me to cross the street quicker, the gawks of the people as I walked by, and the smell of beef franks sizzling from a cart. But I wasn’t, for those few hours, really in my body at all. I was somewhere else, in my home in Mahim, holding Nana’s frail hand as he lay on his bed, his legs lifeless beneath a thin white bedsheet. I forgot, almost immediately, that he was once dressed in navy gabardine, smart little wings on his shoulders, his peaked pilot’s cap sitting proudly on his head.
“You want a soda or something?” Tariq asked as the waiter came by to take our order. I glanced at the menu, rattled off a request for some vegetables and risotto, and turned back to Tariq. His hair was curled over his ears, his silk tie loosened around his neck. He smelled nice. He felt reassuring. I realized that despite the way I knew he judged me, I was very happy to be with him.
“So you managed to get away from your boyfriend for a night, did you? From what I’ve read, you two seem inseparable.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” he replied sarcastically. “Anyway, that’s all beside the point,” he continued. “What do you think you’re going to do about your grandfather?”
“You know they’re not speaking to me, right? You know that as far as they are concerned, I’m dead?”
“But you’re not. Dead, I mean. Which means that as long as you have the inclination, you probably need to try and fix this. They are your family, after all. You may think you have it all-famous boyfriend, big job, lots of money. But did your nana never teach you about the importance of the blessings of our elders? That without those, we are nothing?”
He was beginning to anger me. Something in Tariq’s voice, the patronizing way in which he spoke to me, was irritating.
“What? Can’t handle the truth?” he asked, thrusting his fork into an asparagus spear.
“It’s easy for you to talk,” I said through clenched teeth.
I could feel the anger in my belly, and I was forcing myself to sit on it, to squash it back, to make it retreat. Da Silvano’s was no place in which to have a fit, especially with people at neighboring tables looking my way, wondering who this handsome man was, most likely figuring that he was a brother or cousin. Almost in honor of being with him, I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and fluid pants, a scarf draped around my neck, as if ready to hoist up to my head at a moment’s notice.
“It’s easy for you to preach on about family blessings,” I said. “You have always had them. No matter what you decided to do, you would always have them. Go to law school, go to med school, stay home and become an auto mechanic. Your parents would never have cursed you with Allah’s wrath because you are a man. You were meant to go out and conquer the world. But if a girl tries to do it, suddenly there are accusations of betrayal and threats of being disowned. I couldn’t even walk out of my apartment building without being followed by Nana. But you? You could study in America, work in London, move to Paris, whatever you wanted. Why? Because you are a boy and I am not?”
“It’s not that, and you know it,” he said, his gaze now steady on mine. “If you had told your grandfather that you wanted to get a proper education, take on a decent career, he might have eventually agreed. Even I would have fought for that on your behalf. But what is this? This taking off your clothes for the world to see? This sleeping with a strange white man wh
o plays music for a living? What kind of behavior is that for a decent girl?”
The anger I had been sitting on threatened to erupt. I put down my fork, a clump or beige rice stuck on its end, and picked up my things.
“Wait, Tanaya, don’t leave,” Tariq said, a look of alarm suddenly crossing his eyes.
I sat down again.
“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I must have sounded like your nana there, for a minute,” he said, his face softening. “I just want to understand what this is all about. The last time I saw you, you had just left India for the first time, standing there in your aunt’s house. I could tell you didn’t feel welcome. You were so sweet and shy, and I wanted to hug you and take you away. But you told me how you felt by not saying anything at all. You only got out from under your grandfather’s thumb by agreeing to marry me. But once you got to Paris, you were done with that idea. Am I right?”
I pushed my plate away. I suddenly felt ashamed. I had used Tariq, something that had only just occurred to me.
“All I wanted to do was to see the world,” I said, my voice breaking. “All I wanted to do was to glimpse some of what my nana had seen, to share life through his eyes. I thought it would never happen. I put it down to teenage madness. But then I saw that movie, Sabrina, and I saw Paris for the first time ever in a black-and-white film, and I knew that I should be here. There was something about her in that movie, something graceful and strong. I aspired to that and thought it would happen for me if only I would be allowed to set foot in that city. It was only meant to be for two weeks. But then my cousin Shazia showed me how different my life could be. It wasn’t what I planned. But it was what happened. I was praying to Allah that my nana would understand. But my prayers weren’t answered, not that time anyway.”
Salaam Paris Page 14