Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

I was prepared to do just that.

Felicia, in the meantime, had decided it was time to go on the offensive.

“Here’s the thing,” Felicia said, her face turning serious, a cigarette dangling between two fingers. “I don’t know how it is in your neck of the woods, but in these parts there’s no such thing as a naïve, socially inept supermodel. It’s an oxymoron. Understand?”

We were in her office, where she had hurriedly called a meeting with Stavros and me. On the way there, Stavros had described the event as a “summit,” saying that Felicia could strategize more forcefully than an army general.

There in her office, Stavros looked at me, nodding in agreement.

“I’ve wanted to create a particular image for you-elegant, elusive, all that crap-and it’s worked,” she continued. “But it’s just getting a little too stale, a little too vanilla.”

“What do you have in mind?” Stavros asked.

“An alliance, quite simply,” she replied. “An affair, but one that looks potentially serious, not some one-night-stand, roll-in-the-hay travesty. With a movie star or a rock star. All the girls have one: Gisele Bündchen’s got Leo, Kate Moss has got that rocker chap, whatever his name is. We need to align you with someone who has a great profile, a strong image of his own, who can complement yours. Brad Pitt would have been perfect before Angelina pounced on him. Or Tom Cruise, but he’s taken too, and anyway that Scientology thing wouldn’t have meshed with your Muslimness, would it?” She snorted as I began to protest that “Muslimness” wasn’t even a word. “But you know what I’m getting at. Right, honey?”

Nana, for all his steadfast traditionalism, would have understood. He believed that fortunes were built and families were founded on the basis of appropriate alliances. He might never have thought in terms of supermodels and rock stars, but he understood and agreed with the general concept. It still pained me to think of him, so I shut him out of my mind.

“Good point,” Stavros interjected. “She needs a companion anyway. She can’t be doing this circuit on her own for much longer. Even if it’s a temporary thing, she must be seen to be somewhat attached to something other than a runway.”

“I’m not really clear on what you’re saying,” I said, looking at both of them. “You can’t just expect me to hook up with someone because he acts in movies or has a rock band. And really, I never thought I’d be with anyone until my wedding night,” I said, blushing.

“Now that’s just adorable,” Felicia said. “But let me explain something to you. This supermodel thing, technically, is over. Sure, Victoria ’s Secret will always be there to make someone a star, but on their own, models are barely worth the clothes they walk in these days. It’s all about brand-building, my girl. It’s about endorsements and acting gigs and fitness videos and cookbooks and clothing lines and anything else you might want to do. If you’re famous enough, people will eat at the restaurant you open and wear the bags you design and see the movies you act in. And how do you get famous? By being beautiful, which you are, and then hanging out with famous people, which you need to be doing more of. You need to be carousing on yachts in the Mediterranean with some A-list hottie, or be photographed in Us Weekly having a cozy coffee with whoever has the number-one single on Billboard that week. I told you from the beginning, this business is all about image. We need to cultivate a fabulous one for you, one that will take you to the top. Because that’s where you are headed, child.”

For a minute, it sounded like her speech was rehearsed, as if this is what she said to every ingénue who came through her doors. But I quickly realized that she must be talking to me, because I was probably the only nineteen-year-old fashion model she had ever met who needed professional help in finding a boyfriend.

Felicia spent the next ten days looking through copies of the National Enquirer and In Style. She called other publicists and her sister-in-law’s best friend who worked at ICM in Los Angeles. She called a contact who freelanced for Entertainment Weekly and another who scouted male models for Calvin Klein. She compiled a list of prospects and, in my presence, started crossing them off one by one. The male models were a definite no, she explained to me, because they would be “too vain,” and the competition between us would be too intense. There were some rising stars on the Hollywood scene who might be worth checking out, but the cross-country commute might be a bit too taxing, unless the prospect in question had the means to fly by private jet, and George Clooney had just come out of a relationship with a model. She thought aloud, reeling off names and facts and home addresses, as if any of it really mattered to me.

“Am I expected to do sex with them?” I said, ashamed at the question.

“You mean, have sex?” she asked, laughing. “Er, yeah. That’s what an affair is primarily about.”

I put my head in my hands. To Nana’s dismay, I had yet to fully memorize the Koran. But I was certain that premarital sex was a sin. Even though, back in India, I only went to mosque once a week, walking along the plank of land that stretched into the Indian Ocean to get to the Haji Ali that lay at the end, and even though I was certain that there were plenty of Muslim girls everywhere who contravened that particular edict, I was not about to be one of them. I had done enough to disgrace my nana already.

“I’m sorry, Felicia, but I can’t. I don’t see myself lying between sheets, naked, with some white-skinned boy. I don’t want to be touched by anyone until we have been blessed by a mullah and my grandfather has blessed me with his hands on my head…,” I said, my voice trailing off as I realized that would never happen anyway. I started to cry.

Felicia stopped her strategizing, sat back in her chair, sighed, and closed her eyes.

“Don’t worry, Tanaya,” she said, reaching a sympathetic hand across her desk toward me. “We’ll think of something.”

His name was Kai. There was no last name, not even an initial. Just Kai. He had opened for Coldplay and Maroon 5 six months ago, and now a single from his just-released album had gone multiplatinum. He was British, from Birmingham, and had conquered the United Kingdom before alighting in the United States. “He’s the personification of Brit pop,” Felicia said excitedly. “It’s no longer underground, and it’s all the rage, and kids like Kai are making it big.” He was, Felicia continued to point out to me, “absolutely the hottest thing in music today. And cute, too.”

She had come over to my apartment on a Saturday afternoon as I was packing to leave for a magazine shoot on the sandy beaches of Jamaica. From her bag, she took out a folder containing press clippings and photographs of the man that I was, apparently, going to embark on my first fully fledged romantic relationship with-fake or otherwise.

He had been chosen as one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, and I had to agree with them. In the clipping she showed me, his hair was dark like mine, spiked up in the front with a smidgen of gel. He had a happy face, slightly creased around the eyes, a shadow of stubble around his mouth. He was swinging from a hammock, his hands folded behind his head, a yellow-colored shirt open to halfway down his chest, a guitar resting by his side.

“I’m telling you, he’s the one,” she said excitedly. “I came up with a reasonable excuse-something about maybe you and him getting together on his next music video. You know, to wear something sexy and dance in it. We can work all those details out,” she continued, waving her hand dismissively.