Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

Two weeks later, the envelope was returned to me, unopened. On the front, I recognized my grandfather’s handwriting and the thin, dark-blue fountain-tip pen he always used, the ink spelling out the words: PLEASE RETURN. SENDER UNKNOWN.

Dimitri said he didn’t want to lose me, that I was his best client, that my future was as bright as the moon and that I would be his nest egg.

But he said that to me as he handed over a plane ticket to New York. His eyes sincere, one palm pressed against his small face, he told me how much he would miss me, but that his cousin Stavros, who ran the New York branch of his operation, would look after me.

“Your future is there, not here. Of that I am sure,” he said. “It’s what the Viva people want. The campaign is global; the brand is booming. New York is the center of the world. When this contract finishes, there will be no end of opportunities, but you must be there to exploit them. Stavros will see to it. Don’t worry about anything; from the time he picks you up at the airport, he will take care of everything. You will be to him like you have been to me, his number-one girl.”

The girls threw me a farewell party, although only Dimitri and Mathias were invited. We sat around the apartment and ate miniature quiches and vegetable terrine on crunchy toast, all courtesy of Café Crème. I drank apple juice while they had champagne, begging me again to have one little sip, just one, to properly bid them farewell. I shook my head, joking that I was in enough trouble with Allah to begin with, and they laughed as I cried.

Stavros was gorgeous. He had salt-and-pepper hair and pale gray eyes, and he was tall and tanned. He gallantly took my baggage cart from me as soon as he saw me, whisking me through the chaos of the terminal at JFK and into a waiting black car. Inside, he lit a cigarette, looked me up and down, and smiled through straight white teeth.

“You are going to have quite a career here,” he said.

I turned to look out the window, trying to take in the roughness and speed of the city.

“So everyone keeps telling me,” I said.

“Because it’s true. Compared to Dimitri, I run a totally professional organization. I even have an office these days. I have some fabulous girls on my books, but nobody quite like you-nobody as exotic, delicate, and strong at the same time.” He reached over and pulled aside my hair, which had fallen like a curtain over one side of my face. I caught the driver’s eye in the mirror, and he averted his gaze, turning up the volume on the radio.

“Please, you’re making me uncomfortable,” I said, moving over closer to the window. “I’m not accustomed to this kind of attention.”

“Well,” he said, shuffling back over to his side of the car. “Get used to it.”

He had found me an apartment in a building with an elevator and a glass door in the front through which access could only be gained by pushing a code into a keypad. We were on the Upper West Side, a nice neighborhood, a place where I would be safe yet from where I could easily travel to shoots. He had put down two months’ deposit on my behalf, which he would eventually deduct from my earnings. He handed over an envelope containing my schedule for the next day, five crisp hundred-dollar bills, and a subway card. Inside the small furnished apartment he had left a folder containing menus from nearby restaurants that delivered, along with a list of emergency contacts, his home and cell-phone numbers at the top. He told me to get some food brought in, to go to bed early, and that he would send a car for me in the morning. Then he shook my hand, stopped for a second to stare at me some more, and left.

I stood and looked around. There was a bedroom off the living room, the bed covered with an orange chenille blanket, a Chinese lantern shading a lightbulb on the ceiling. The attached bathroom was small, but done up in a pretty shade of lilac, and had been freshly cleaned, the smell of ammonia coming off the tiled floor. In the kitchen a cupboard held spices and cans of food, a partially filled fruit bowl rested atop a small corner table, and two large bottles of water took up part of the counter. There were stamps, extra keys, flashlights, a notepad. Stavros, it seemed, had thought of everything.

I wasn’t sure what to do next, nor even what part of the apartment to venture into. It occurred to me that this was the very first time, in all my nineteen years, that I would be going to sleep under a roof where nobody else slept, that I would be completely alone, vulnerable to being attacked or killed. That somebody could break in, in the middle of the night, could rape and maim me, just like my grandfather had cursed. I closed the windows tight and made sure the door was locked. Then I called Shazia, comforted by the thought that she was only three hours behind me. I gave her my new number and made her promise to stay in touch. Then I retreated beneath the comfort of the chenille.

Madison, Fifth, and Park. Stavros told me that I needn’t concern myself with any other parts of New York than those, with the exception of a party or two I might want to attend in an area he called the Meatpacking District, and which made me wrinkle up my nose at the vision of pork carcasses being hung up on large iron hooks, baffled that anyone would want to throw a party there.

But for now, I was going with him in a Town Car to meet someone from Pasha de Hautner, a famous fashion designer who was as wealthy as the women he dressed, and who might pick me to be one of his girls at his upcoming runway show.

“We have to shake things up a little,” said Stavros, explaining his strategy. “Viva has been great for you, but we don’t want you to be known for just one thing. The international catwalks are where all the action is, all the exposure. Pasha likes to select the models for his shows himself, especially the new ones. And those are the girls who eventually land on the cover of Vogue. We’re overrun by Eastern European models at the moment-you know, those emaciated types who suddenly blossom once they land in New York. But you, Tanaya… you are something quite different.”

Perhaps jet-lagged, perhaps still a little sad and confused, I didn’t feel much like talking. It was if we were sitting in a huge parking lot that stretched across the city, the traffic barely moving. I had thought that only Mumbai had gridlock as bad as this. Even on the occasions I would accompany my grandfather from Mahim into the metropolitan areas, when he had had some banking or legal matters to take care of, I would always be amazed at the numbers of people crammed onto the streets, spilling out of buildings at lunchtime. Those were the only times I could see another India, the one that was new and modern, the tall buildings lined up along Nariman Point, barely any space between them, looking as if at any moment they might fall on top of one another. This was the place where black Mercedes-Benzes were filled with young men in suits, talking urgently on their cell phones in the back while a uniformed driver carried them around the city to important meetings. This was the place where girls who had been born with looks, money, and slightly more permissive parents would stop for lunch at restaurants with names like Jazz by the Beach, dressed in colorful tops and tight jeans, sunglasses perched atop henna-dyed hair. I would gaze at them as I waited for Nana to finish whatever he had come into town for, and then he would take me by the arm and we would walk to Churchgate Station, my shoes getting stuck in the creviced roads, Nana taking care not to trip over a man heaving his torso around with handless arms. There, we would crowd into the second-class carriage, pressed into the thousands of workers who were making their way home from the business zone to the outskirts where they, like we, lived. If I was lucky, I would find a seat, and Nana would push me into it as he stood protectively in front of me. He would tell me to look at no one, talk to no one, to keep my eyes on the floor and a smile off my face. And when we arrived back at Mahim Station, covered with grime and sweat and soot, I longed to be back in the city, close to the perfumed girls and their handsome boyfriends.