Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

“Please leave,” I said, my voice starting to tremble.

“You’ve got nerve,” he said. He bent over and picked up his portfolio. “I thought you’d be a bit friendlier, given everything I could do for you.”

I came out of the kitchen and looked at him.

“Well, my girl, I’m like this with the people at French Vogue,” he said, crossing two of his fingers in front of my face. “I could have landed you something pretty major there, something any other upstart model like you would do anything for. But you’ve just blown it, haven’t you?”

He slammed the door behind him, and I started to cry.

“No matter how it might appear, that kind of behavior is not normal.” Mathias looked over at me sympathetically as I took a break during my shift the next day. He had calmed down significantly since I first told him what had happened with Robert; his first reaction had been a desire to race over to what he described as “that British punk’s studio,” and, from the sounds of it, hit him.

“You know, people think that fashion is all about sex,” he said, deep in thought. “I suppose in many ways it is. But then they think that all models are cheap, willing to give themselves over to anyone because, after all, they are willing to take off their clothes for a living. It’s not fair, but it’s the way this business is perceived. Perhaps the cad has never met a virgin model before.”

I thought of Nana, who would grumble and groan each time he spotted a copy of Stardust-the glossy magazine charting the lives and loves of Bollywood’s finest-in our house.

“Decent girls don’t dress like this,” he would spit out, pointing to the cover photo of a comely Aishwarya Rai in a belly-baring choli, her bountiful cleavage peeking through its sequin-encrusted surface.

I looked down at the snug jeans and T-shirt that Karla had insisted I wear that day and wondered what Nana would think if he saw me now.

The Viva ad campaign launched some weeks later. Dimitri showed me a couple of magazines and newspapers in which large ads were placed, a shiny, smiling me in full-color glory. My roommates, who had wasted no time in telling their other friends and colleagues that they lived with me, wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate, to pop open a bottle of champagne and insist I take a sip-just one-to help me feel the thrill of this. For one evening they pleaded with me to forget that I was Muslim, and to succumb to the forbidden lure of alcohol. Instead, I kept my hand around a glass of club soda, sipping away quietly while they ordered another bottle of the bubbly liquor.

They had seen the photos, and Nana, so I was told, almost had a stroke. Aunt Mina, I had been informed by Shazia, had been sitting in the waiting room at the cancer specialist’s clinic, had randomly picked up a magazine, and had to look five times at the picture before she realized it was me. The Viva girl was now in a light blue lace camisole and matching underwear, her head hanging upside down off a couch, hair sweeping a gold colored carpet, a round, ripe cherry in her red-painted mouth. Shazia said that her ailing mother had turned the magazine around countless times in a bid to rule out any possibility that it was me. But there I was, cleavage and all, my legs crossed at the ankle above me.

Owing to a newfound and curious affinity with my grandfather, Aunt Mina had ripped out the page and mailed it to him. After all, they both now shared the pain of having disobedient and disgraceful daughters. Such was their closeness, that my grandfather had even returned to the phone booth around the corner from our house to call Aunt Mina, to cry down the line about the shame of rearing a girl who had become, as he had put it, a “common prostitute.” My mother had apparently snatched the magazine page from her father’s trembling hand, ripping it into a thousand pieces, convincing herself that in so doing she was killing me off.

Why Shazia felt compelled to call me and tell me this I could not understand. It was like she wanted me to know that my family’s disgust with me was now so profound and so complete, that I could surely never redeem myself with them, that any vague hope I might have had of reconciling with them in the future was now utterly trashed. It was like she wanted to ensure my isolation.

That night, smarting with shame, I lay in bed, willing myself to sleep and imagining Nana lying in his. He would do as he always did when bothered about something-stare at the dust-covered ceiling fan that whirred softly overhead, his hands folded behind his head, his glasses resting on the bedside table. He was probably praying that nobody else would ever see that photograph. I could imagine my mother in her own misery in the room next door, the room she once shared with me, mystified at how such a well-brought-up girl could have turned out so badly.

My last day at Café Crème came exactly three months and four days from when I had started there. After my first shoot with Viva, Mathias had reckoned that it would be just a matter of time before I would feel motivated to move on.

“There is no need for you to be sitting behind that desk and counting money when you are making so much of it on your own,” he had said.

My contract with Viva was for a significant enough sum that I could have even moved out and rented my own place, probably somewhere hopelessly chic in the 16 earrondisement. But I was interested in no such thing. Karla, Teresa, and Juliette were still my only friends, and the only people with whom I spent time when I wasn’t being photographed, strutting down a catwalk, or being filmed for a television ad. When Dimitri had arranged for me to be interviewed by Madame Figaro, one of the best-read publications in France, the reporter had used a headline that translated, roughly, as THE LONELY MUSLIM MODEL. She had asked me questions about my culture and faith, about how many times a day I prayed or whether I went to the mosque or if anyone in my extended family had ever considered being detonated. She asked me if I would eventually be one of numerous wives, consigned to living life in a burka behind the high white walls of a Saudi palace. I explained to her that I was Indian, and not Arab, that I ate no pork and consumed no alcohol but that being here, in Paris, I had figured out in which direction Mecca was and still prayed to it.

Then she asked me about my family, and how they felt about my newfound success, to which I mouthed a soft “OK. Fine.”

“Actually, no, wait,” I said to the interpreter. “That’s not true.”

I then told them about the scene in Sabrina that had pulled me toward this magical place, and the note with Tariq’s phone number on it, and a cousin named Shazia who had been determined that I stay on here and to “follow my destiny.” I told them about the grandfather I thought had loved me more than anything else in the world, and who now considered me dead, and a mother who didn’t have the courage to fight for me. These were things I had told nobody, not even the girls I lived with, and while a part of me felt I was betraying the code of silence that is often imposed on girls like me, I didn’t care anymore.

Shortly afterward, I stared at the printed article, a photograph of me atop a hotel roof, taken from the side, gazing over the buildings that crouched beneath. I looked as wistful and sad as I felt, the words conveying my melancholy. I carefully clipped the feature out, folded it neatly, and slid it into a large brown envelope. At the post office, I paid extra for special handling and delivery, a guarantee that it would arrive at its destination and that I’d be able to track it if it didn’t. I sent it off and waited for the phone to ring.