Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

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 envelope 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.

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?”