Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

“I have learned how to live, how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch,” she wrote as I mouthed the words along with her over and over again. The doors behind her were open, and I could imagine a warm wind blowing against her soft white gown. I wanted to watch this part only, and nothing else in the movie, but the Rewind button on the machine would often get stuck, so I had no choice but to start at the beginning. But it was that one scene, the one where Sabrina is perfectly poised and peaceful, that lingered in my mind long after I had to return the tape. I immediately resonated with Sabrina’s pre-Paris naiveté, with the simple nature of her life, yet her desire for more. She yearned for love, and while I didn’t care about that, I still wanted to become what she had become. To be, as she wrote to her father, “in the world and of the world.”

I resolved that I must one day go to Paris too.

Of course, I had nobody to whom to confess this profound and utterly ridiculous new desire, one that surprised even me with its pull. Up until I had met Sabrina, I would have been thrilled just to visit Goa, to rock on a fishing boat there, to sit and smell the salt in the air. So I told no one, and prayed that in some distant future our God would find it in his heart to allow a middle-class Muslim girl with a draped head and no money to become another Sabrina.

But perhaps I should not have been too surprised to have this potent longing to gaze through a window at another life. Having never left Mumbai, my only glimpses into the outside world came through my grandfather, who used to cruise across the continents in his capacity as a pilot for Air India before he retired when I was twelve, living on some small investments. But when he was still flying, I used to thrill to the sound of the mailman’s footsteps down our corridor, hoping that he would drop into our mailbox another postcard from Nana-this time from Frankfurt or Singapore or Zurich. I would stare at the pictures on the front of towering pine trees or a perfectly still lake and wonder if I would ever in my life have the grace and good fortune to see such things. And when Nana himself would return, entering through our narrow doorway carrying a small suitcase and with his captain’s hat still atop his head, I would rush to him, wanting to throw my arms around his waist. But Nana would only pat me on the head, maybe pinch me lightly on my cheek, before nodding in my mother’s direction and retiring to his room. He never talked to me about where he had been and what he had seen. It was only much later that it occurred to me that his reasons for withholding such delectable nuggets of information was to avoid precisely what had happened anyway-that I would be moved to consider life beyond what I knew. All he wanted was for me to become a wife.

So he was overjoyed when, one day, an old classmate approached him with an idea that perhaps his own grandson, one Tariq Khan, would be a good match.

“The boy is educated. A lawyer, living overseas,” Nana informed me, squinting through his glasses at the small handwritten words in the letter. “He can come here to view you; that is no problem. He has means.”

“But Nana, I am only nineteen. I think I’m too young,” I started to protest politely. “I have just finished my studies. Please, allow me to wait for a while.”

“Nothing doing,” Nana said. “I will write back to my friend today and tell him to have his grandson fly here from London as soon as possible. Time is of the essence, as the boy needs to settle in marriage as soon as he starts his new job. He will be moving soon, in the next few weeks,” Nana said, removing his glasses, “to Paris.”

I stopped breathing for a second, hearing only the loud thumping of my heart, which at that moment seemed to drown out the other sounds in the room: the radio reciting the news headlines and my mother clanging among pots and pans in the kitchen.

If this was not an act of Allah intervening, I could certainly never find another.

I shook my head at Nana, the first time I had ever done such a thing.

“If you want me to marry him, I will have to go there to meet him, to see if I like the place,” I said, my hands sweating. “It will be my new home, after all.”

The veins in Nana’s temples started to pulsate through his thinning skin, and I could almost see a stream of angry air whistling through his nostrils. My mother, as usual, remained quiet.

“You are a stupid child to even suggest such a thing,” Nana said. “You have no passport, no visa, nothing. You cannot go alone, and I will not come with you. Talk sense.”

“If he comes here, I will not meet him, and you cannot force me,” I said, getting up to go to the bedroom, trembling, stunned at my resolve.

My grandfather stood up, empty peanut shells tumbling from his white kurta onto the floor. He raised his hand above his head as if to slap me on the cheek, but then stopped in midair and lowered his arm.

“I will put this down to the idiocy of youth,” he said. “I am running this house and this family. This boy is coming here, and you will marry him.”

“I will not,” I said, my head spinning. “I will lock myself in the bedroom if I have to. I am certain he is too educated not to be put off by that, and he will then run far away from this family.”

Nana, to whom I was almost a daughter, stopped talking to me that day. He stopped asking me about my friends, what activities I had been engaged in, or whether I was close to completing the scarf I had promised to crochet him in time for winter. For the next few days, he just pretended I wasn’t there.

Three more letters followed from my grandfather’s friend in three weeks, repeatedly asking him to make a decision about Tariq. Each time, my grandfather stared at me in silence, folded the letters, and put them inside the frayed gold-edged pages of the 1972 leather-bound diary that he still carried around proudly, despite it being more than thirty years out of date.

After the fourth and last letter, my grandfather knew there would be no more, as the relatives of male suitors are proud people. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then called his old boss at Air India from whom he obtained contact names at the local passport office, and then for someone at the Consulate General of France.

His next call was made from outside the house, at one of the long-distance calling booths that occupy virtually every street corner in India, and to which he gruffly asked me to accompany him. He took along his 1972 diary, in the back of which were names of people I’d never heard of, their numbers scratched out and etched in again a dozen times as they, unlike us, moved around. As he waited his turn for the phone, his finger ran down the list, until it settled on REZA AND MINA HUSAIN, a string of long numbers following it.

“Mina-behen!” he yelled into the phone, addressing her as a sister. He spoke initially in Hindi and very quickly, aware of the six-second cost increments. Then, almost to ensure that nobody else around him could understand, he started speaking in clipped, proper English.

“That is Tanaya’s only condition,” he said. “She wants to come to Paris to see the boy. The marriage will definitely take place, but she is being most stubborn.” He paused for a second, his heavy brows crinkling beneath his graying hair. “As you know, young people today are different from our day. They don’t respect their elders.” He shot me a stern glance before turning his attention back to the conversation.