Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

I was quiet for a moment, waiting for her to answer a question I couldn’t ask.

“Yes, I saw them,” she said softly. “I went by there when I knew I was coming here, to try and maybe get your contact details. I had thought, possibly, that you wouldn’t be on speaking terms but wasn’t sure, that maybe Nana wasn’t as stern as you made him out to be. But, after I saw him, I guess I could see why you were always afraid of him.”

I chewed on my straw, scared for her to go on, but needing to hear about my family from someone who had just seen them. I had been gone almost a year, my new life unrecognizable. Some of the other models I had befriended here rarely spoke of their families, and if they did, it was usually as an afterthought. Until the day I got on that plane for Paris, in search of Sabrina, my family had been my entire existence.

“Well, it will just hurt you to hear it,” Nilu said, as she looked at my questioning face. “We should talk about other things. Your life is beautiful now. There is no need to put yourself through this.”

“No,” I said, placing my hand on top of hers. “Just tell me how they are, Nana and my mother. How they look. How their health is. What they said…,” I stammered, “when you mentioned my name.”

She looked down at her food for a minute, unsure.

“Your grandfather has always been very nice to me,” she said. “Every time I came over to see you, he would always go down to the corner and buy candy for us to share. Remember? And anytime there was a new Archie comic at the bookstall, he would bring it for us to read together.” Her face softened into a smile as she thought back.

“But when I went over there last week, as soon as he opened the door to me, his face turned so gray and angry, I swear I thought he was going to slap me then and there,” she said, the smile disappearing. “For a minute, I think he thought that it was all my fault.”

I felt the tears returning, but wiped them away. People in the restaurant had already recognized me, and I could already anticipate the headlines: SUPERMODEL BREAKS DOWN OVER LUNCH WITH MYSTERY WOMAN. My life, I could see, had become a series of newspaper captions.

“You know all this already, Tanaya. Don’t make me go on,” she said. “It’s as painful for me to tell it as it is for you to hear it.”

“I need to hear it anyway,” I said. “If that is the only thing that helps to keep my nana and mamma in my mind, then it is better than nothing.”

She sighed and stabbed her fork into some slivers of beet.

“He wasn’t happy to see me, but he invited me in anyway,” Nilu continued. “He’s always been very polite that way, no? Your mother was there, in her room, and she came out when she heard my voice, but didn’t say anything. Your servant offered me tea and biscuits, but I said no. We just stood there, the three of us, in the little corridor. I asked how they were, and they nodded but said nothing. Then Nana asked me what I wanted, and I said I was there to see if maybe he had your phone number in New York. He looked shocked. Tanaya, do they even know what part of the world you are living in?”

I felt ashamed suddenly, that I was now not so different from the other girls I had met here, the ones from Missouri and California and Alabama who had to forsake their families and their former lives for fame and free martinis in New York. I had never wanted to be one of those girls. But now, with my closest relatives not even knowing where I was, I had become one. It was apparent then that either Aunt Mina had stopped communicating with my grandfather or Shazia had finally stopped talking to her mother about me. The dusty web of family relations that my grandfather had tried so hard to keep intact no longer included me.

To me, confidentiality agreements didn’t apply to best friends. While the law might have stated otherwise, there was no way I could allow my best friend from home to think that I was actually dating a bad-boy rocker with a baby face and a tattoo that stretched from his elbow to his shoulder. Looking at Nilu’s face, I could tell that she didn’t believe it anyway, which was the fundamental benefit of having a friend who really knew you.

“Saif was still sending me magazines,” Nilu said, giggling as we left the restaurant and walked down the street toward where she was staying. She had her arm looped inside mine, the way we always walked back on the streets of Mahim. “I have read all about your love affair. He seems nice,” she said. “But I never would have pictured you with someone like that. I had thought, that even with all this, your glamorous life and all, that you might still want to wait. You know, until you found ‘the one’-someone who loves Allah like you do, someone your family would approve of. But I guess it’s hard, living here amidst all this, not to become a different person. He’s rich and good-looking and famous, and so are you. So what does it matter?”

I could tell that Nilu was trying hard to keep the judgment out of her voice. She had always been kind and tactful, and I somehow always imagined her working as a diplomat. Unlike Nana, she would never impose her beliefs on anyone.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this, but it’s not what you think,” I said, stopping, the warm air from a sidewalk grate sweeping up our skirts. “This whole thing with Kai, nothing is really happening there, no matter how it looks.”

She stood with her mouth slightly agape, her eyes wide behind her glasses, and listened as I told her about Felicia’s plan and Jamaica and the chasteness of my relationship with a rock star.

“We have kissed for the cameras, but that is all,” I said. “If we think a photographer has followed us, he will come to my apartment, then leave after drinking a cup of hot chocolate. People call our affair ‘sultry’ and ‘hot’ and God knows what else, but there is no such thing. In fact, it is really rather tame. We are like brother and sister. But I signed a piece of paper that said I could never tell a soul about this. So you must promise me that it goes no further. It doesn’t matter what people say about me, if, when you go home, they call me a whore and a hussy. You must be absolutely quiet about this, believing the same as them. Maybe one day, far in the future, the truth can come out. Just not now. OK?”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. We continued walking, Nilu squeezing my hand, a light drizzle that had suddenly appeared merging with the tears on my face. “What purpose does it serve to have people think something about you that isn’t true?”

“You know, Nana never thought I was worth very much,” I said, my head bowed in sadness. “He thought that all I was good for was this face, that it would be the only thing to land me a rich and fine husband. But as it has turned out, my career-this thing I do-it’s all I have now. I have to make the most of it. It is my intention to be as successful as possible in a very short span of time, to earn and save as much as I can. And then I will take what I’ve made and do something significant with it, although I don’t know what yet. Maybe, in the end, it will help me to win my family back. Although maybe by then, also, the damage will have been too much. But the people who work with me, the people I trust, they have told me that if I do this, I will go from being a fairly famous fashion model to an extremely famous one.”

Nilu nodded, then was silent for a minute. “Tell me something,” she asked as we arrived at the entrance to her building. “After everything you’ve been through, do you think you would do it again, leaving India and all? With all that you’ve lost, I mean with your family and all, has it been worth it?”