Salaam Paris

by Kavita Daswani

  “Sabrina?” Tariq asked, smiling now, acting as if he had heard nothing but that. “You went to Paris because of Audrey Hepburn?” He laughed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “Don’t make fun of me,” I said quietly. “I don’t expect you to understand. It was something I just had to do.”

  “Well, you made it to Paris,” he said. “But you didn’t have to take it as far as you did. There was no need for the improper behavior. And then, to top it all off, you hook up with a rock star who I am sure is on drugs. Were you so desperate?”

  Nilu was the only person I had told the truth to. Now I broke the confidentiality agreement once again, telling Tariq exactly what my arrangement had been with Kai.

  “So, you didn’t, um, do anything with him?” he asked when I was done. “You are still saving yourself?”

  “Of course,” I said quietly. “My life has not changed me that much. Every woman in my family waited until their wedding nights to give of themselves. I will be no different.”

  The disapproval that had lingered on Tariq’s face the past couple of times I had seen him was now gone. His jaw relaxed; his eyes regained their brightness.

  “It was a charade,” I said to him. “This thing with Kai.

  My career. I don’t know what I was seeking, but in the end, I didn’t discover what I thought I would. I never had my Sabrina moment. Right now, I feel like I have nothing but heartache.”

  He put his hand on top of mine.

  “We may not have married,” he said. “But because of what our grandfathers once had, I would like very much to be your friend.”

  At home, an hour later, Tariq back at his hotel, I sat on my couch. My high-heeled sandals lay under the coffee table, a red light flashing on my answering machine. It was probably Stavros. And Felicia. And Kai. I didn’t want to see anyone.

  I went into the bedroom, opened my closet, and pulled out my tattered brown suitcase.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Damn that Page Six. Or thank Allah for it. I wasn’t quite sure, two mornings later, as I lay in bed with the newspapers, Felicia at the foot of the bed like a minder in boarding school, her arms crossed in front of her bosom, her left foot tapping on the ground.

  “Disaster,” she said, shaking her head. “Absolute, bloody unmitigated disaster.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, reaching over for my bowl of cornflakes. “At least now the truth is out.”

  Right there, as the lead item, was a little story about Kai, the hot new British rock star, being caught in a rather compromising position with his bass player, a lovely fellow named Jerome, in an alley outside Chimera.

  “You know, it’s all because you weren’t there,” she said. “This whole thing could have been avoided if you had just shown up as promised. His career is probably in tatters now. But I couldn’t really care less about that. It’s you I’m worried about. What is going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said as I threw off the covers and put my feet on the floor.

  “Well, now that Stavros is done fixing the mess you made with those German filmmakers, we can start from scratch. I know I’m your publicist and not your business manager, but a few opportunities have come up that we can look at. You’ve gone pretty much as far as you can go with your modeling career, so I really do think it’s time to move on. You’ve made it clear that acting isn’t for you. You’ve got the beauty endorsement. So what else? What else shall we do?” she asked, lowering herself onto my bed.

  I could see what she was getting at, but at this point in time, my work, my career, this thing I did, was meaningless.

  Felicia’s eye fell on a photograph that was lying flat on my bedside table. It was the picture my mother had sent to me, the one of her and my father on their sad wedding day, the one with which she effectively said good-bye.

  “Who are all these people?” Felicia asked, glancing at it. Her finger rested on top of my mother’s semiveiled head. “And who’s that? She could be a candidate for Extreme Makeover,” she said.

  “That’s my mother,” I answered, my voice now brittle.

  “Oh, my, I’m sorry,” Felicia said, now contrite. “That was really insensitive of me. I think I overdid it with the caffeine this morning, and this whole thing with Kai and Page Six has really gotten me wound up. I wasn’t thinking. Of course it would have to be a family picture. Why else would you have it? But,” she continued, “has anyone ever told you that you look nothing like your mother?”

  “Everyone,” I replied.

  “Anyhoo, back to business,” she said, getting up and pacing around the room. “I’m thinking your own fragrance line, you know, à la Naomi Campbell. Or perhaps a really sexy and exotic ready-to-wear collection, something that has haute bohemia written all over it. You’re perfect for that kind of look. People would expect it from you. What do you think?” she asked, oblivious to the fact that I was opening drawers and pulling clothes out from them.

  “I think I’m done,” I said.

  “You can’t leave!” she shrieked. “Not now! Not with all this going on! You’ve peaked! You’re the hottest you’ll ever be, especially with the new scandal!”

  She was waving newspaper clippings in the air again. She knew that her phone would be ringing off the hook all day today, from In Touch and Star and the all the entertainment news shows, desperate for a quote or an interview and more insight into the spectacular revelation that one of the hottest men in rock, in a supposedly sultry affair with a luscious exotic model, was, in fact, gayer than Christmas.

  “You will emerge from this smelling of roses,” she said, her voice now calmer. “You’ll have everyone’s sympathy. Everyone will be throwing deals at you. You could open any business you want, with as much backing as you need. You could become an empire!” she said, raising her voice to the sky as if summoning some majestic power.

  I sat down on the bed again.

  “Felicia, if any of this had ever been important to me to begin with, I would be thrilled at what you are telling me right now. If all I ever wanted in my whole life was fame and riches and a beautiful wardrobe, I would be kissing your feet in gratitude. But you’ve known me long enough to know that this is not what drives me.”

  “Then what does?” Felicia sat down on the bed next to me. “What’s going to get you excited?”

  “I don’t know,” I said softly. “All this time, with all the amazing opportunities and experiences, a part of me has felt dead. There have been moments when I’ve been absolutely thrilled, like that first time on Pasha de Hautner’s catwalk. But mostly, I have been too guilty to enjoy it. I feel as if in claiming my life, I have taken away somebody else’s.”

  “So how long are you going for?” Felicia asked when I stood up again and resumed packing. “You do realize that once you’ve been out of the public eye for a while, you run the risk of not being hot anymore. A thousand girls will be waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.”

  “Let them,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Whoever decided to name Mumbai’s international airport Chhatrapati Shivaji should maybe have thought about it for a bit longer. In the days when Nana journeyed in and out through the building as if it were his home, it used to be called Sahar-sweet and simple. By the time I finally got around to seeing it, it had been given a name, which while easy to say if a subcontinental dialect was your first tongue, was monstrous to enunciate if you spoke anything but.

  I considered this as I heard the American flight attendant try to announce our destination over the speaker, and I smiled at her efforts. I realized then that it had been a few days since I had allowed a smile to cross my lips, so immersed had I been in anxiety over my grandfather. My biggest fear was that he would die right before I got there, which typically happened in many of the Hindi movies I had seen: The heroine makes a mad dash across crowded thoroughfares to see a long-lost and very ill relative, but life leaves him just as she’s entering the doorway.
<
br />   Roll credits.

  I didn’t want that to be my ending.

  Of course, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting. I knew there would be no open arms to welcome me; of that I could be certain. But I was hoping that my mother would at least let me into the house and stop long enough to listen to me. And that my grandfather would be so happy to see me and would be so appreciative that I had come to him in his moment of need, he would forgive all. That he would stroke me on the head like only grandfathers can, and tell me that both he and Allah would overlook my sins.

  The seat next to me was empty, so I put my bag in it and folded my legs under my haunches. I was wearing the exact same outfit I had on when I left Mumbai more than a year before. It was a thick cotton salwar kameez in pale yellow, printed with small green flowers. The carry-on bag next to me was the same one I had left with, made from black PVC, bought from near Crawford market while Nana was shopping for vegetables and fruit and halal meat. It was three days before my scheduled departure for Paris, and Nana had said that for a parting gift I could choose one thing: that bag, a pair of woven leather slippers, a lightly embroidered woolen shawl, or some silver-and-stone earrings. I had opted for the bag, drawn by the fact that I would be able to put things into it that I had never owned before: a passport, an airline ticket, a pair of sunglasses that Nilu had given me. I hadn’t even used the bag after my career began, going instead for the high-priced ones that I was so often gifted with.

  An outside pocket was partly open, a piece of paper caught in the teeth of the zipper. I pried it loose and saw that it contained Tariq’s phone numbers. It was the note that Nana had shoved into my hand as I got on that plane. The digits looked faded now, the paper grimy with my own fingerprints. I started to crumple it up, to toss it into the empty teacup that sat on the tray table in front of me. I would have no use for it anymore. But instead, I folded it neatly and slid it into my wallet.

  Tariq had offered to come with me. That night, at dinner, when I told him that I had decided to fly back to Mumbai to see my family, he said that he was long overdue for a trip himself and would accompany me, that he would spend a few days in Mumbai seeing friends and then would hop across the border to see his own grandfather.

  “Something like this makes you realize that they can go anytime,” he said, his eyes growing wistful. “I think I should go see my elders before it’s too late. I can’t let work run my life.”

  But I had told him that this was something I needed to do on my own, and he had nodded politely and paid the bill. Outside the restaurant, he had shaken my hand stiffly, wished me well, and turned around to head back to his hotel. I stared at him as he went, waiting for something, not sure what. Then, as if sensing that I was still there, he had turned around and walked toward me again. He stood in front of me, one foot away, both of us bathed in the glow of yellow light from a lamp overhead.

  “I am very pleased that I finally got a chance to talk to you, and to know you,” he said. “I had wondered, all this time, what you were like. In a way, I am sorry that it had to be under these circumstances, having to share bad news with you. But I also know that if it weren’t for that news, I would have had no occasion to call you. So, strangely, I am also grateful for it.”

  I was quiet for a minute, taking in what he said, charmed at his honesty.

  “I can see now that my nana was right,” I said. “Without even meeting you, he knew what kind of a man you were, based simply on your grandfather’s word.”

  Tariq nodded and shook my hand again. “Tell your grandfather I say hello,” he said before moving out of the yellow light and stepping back into the night.

  It was growing dusky as we approached. Gray rivers snaked their way through barren land on the outskirts, with urban density intensifying toward the center of the city. Lights started to come on in the ramshackle buildings as the sun slowly set. The plane descended, and the slums came into view, concrete walls separating them from the airport terminal.

  The aircraft landed smoothly and taxied straight up to one of the gates. I slipped my feet, now cold and a little numb from the frosty cabin air, back into the ballerina flats that lay under my seat, the only thing I had on that was from my “second life.” I picked up my things, covered my head with my shawl, and walked the short way down the aisle toward the arched, open door.

  The lines at immigration were backed up down the large hallway. At the far end, there was a special section for flight crews, and I watched as the attendants from my flight, accompanied by their pilots, whizzed through. My grandfather, in his day, must have done the same.

  I suddenly felt nauseated as I thought of him again. We were in the same country now, and I was standing on the same spot where I was sure thousands of times in his life he had stood. I could almost feel him near me.

  When I finally got to the front of the line, the immigration officer picked up my passport, still relatively new and crisp despite its extensive use. He flicked through the pages, peering at my photograph, and then back at the various stamps that covered its pages.

  “Madam, you are off-duty stewardess?” he asked, his eyes appearing red and watery through his scratched bifocals.

  “No, sir,” I replied.

  “But you are unmarried?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So how you are gallivanting to so many countries all by yourself?”

  “For my work,” I said, taking the passport back and squeezing past his desk before he had a chance to ask me any more questions.

  I went through at least four other checkpoints after that, each officer rubber-stamping the same stamp that the previous officer had given me, slowing down a process that shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes and making me yearn for the smooth efficiency of Zurich, the pristine airport halls of Singapore. I had barely been back thirty minutes, yet I was starting to feel frustrated. “I’m in India now,” I had to remind myself. “Get used to it.”

  At customs, they barely glanced at me. It appeared as if the more affluent a person seemed, the higher the likelihood of being singled out for a full luggage inspection, the assumption being that expensive electronics and velvet pouches of jewelry were probably lurking somewhere between folds of underwear and cotton shirts. But in my average outfit, my face free of makeup, my ears and fingers and wrists unadorned, I was nobody, an uninteresting, average woman who was arriving back at her homeland as anonymously as she had left it.

  Nilu was waiting outside, pressed against the metal railings that divided arriving passengers from the people there to greet them. She looked happy to see me, almost relieved, but she also couldn’t hide the surprise on her face.

  “You made it!” she said, throwing her arms around me. “I was thrilled when you called to tell me you were coming back, but for some reason thought you might chicken out at the last minute. But,” she said haltingly, “why do you look like this?”

  “Like what?” I asked, glancing down at myself. “These are my clothes.”

  “Yes, I remember that outfit. You wore it when you came to my house to say good-bye the afternoon you were leaving. But I guess I thought you would return in your full regalia, you know, with the sunglasses and the high heels and those skinny-type pants and that sexy blouse you were wearing when I saw you in New York. Remember? I thought you’d come back looking like a movie star. But you look just like you.”

  “I am me, Nilu,” I said softly as we maneuvered my squeaky luggage trolley through the crowds and to where rows of waiting vehicles were lined up. “Which one is your car?”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Our household, like every household in the world, had a routine. And no matter how long I’d been away, or where I might have gone, I would never forget it. There were nuances to my daily life in Mahim that seemed to remain the same day to day, year after year, times when everything would happen concurrently-phones ringing, servants shouting, radios blaring-and then again when everything was suddenly quiet. As mundane as my exi
stence had been, there was a rhythm to it.

  I glanced at my watch and worked out where, exactly, my family would be in the cycle of trivial events that made up their days. Dinner was probably over and, this being a Wednesday night, was most likely chicken cooked in masala spooned over saffron rice, a dal, a bhaji. In my previous life, Nana would be standing up, flicking the grains of yellow rice off his white kurta onto the table to be swept up by the servant’s wet rag, and then he would strap on his black leather sandals for a quick walk around the building.

  “Good for digestion,” he would say, standing up to go. “Helps with emptying of stomach in the morning.”

  Sometimes I would go with him. We would stroll around our floor first, glancing in through any doors that might be open, willing to nod and say a quick hello to any of the neighbors who might be in the middle of their own rhythm. Then we would make our way up the staircase and walk around subsequent floors, Nana repeating that climbing up and down stairs was good for the heart. Mostly, he and I would walk in silence, taking in the slow buzz of activity-of babies crying and children playing and televisions turned on too loud-that marked a day in the life of Ram Mahal, of just about any middle-class building in India that evening.

  If Nana could still walk, that is exactly what he would be doing right then.

  “I can tell; you’re thinking about him, right?” Nilu asked. She was sitting in the back next to me, her hand pressed into the spongy leather seat. “I haven’t been to see him since it happened. But the whole neighborhood is talking about it. It’s very good of you to come.”

  “How could I not?” I asked, trying not to cry, trying to hold it all together. “Who knows when, or if, I might ever see him again?”

  “It was pretty bad when it happened,” Nilu continued, although I partly wanted her to stop. “It was right there, you know, next to that electrical shop with the owner who is always drunk, opposite that place where your mother bought you the rose pink hair clips. We’ve gone past that area a million times you and I. That’s exactly where it happened. The auto-rickshaw was such a put-put that it just stopped, right there, in the middle of traffic. There was no way the bus could have stopped in time. The rickshaw-wallah died, there and then.”