Kavita Daswani - Salaam Paris

But the question caused my mother to drop her pea pods for a minute, and to lift her eyes and cast them out toward the balcony.

“It’s easy,” she said. “You just think of everything you hated about them. You just focus on the absolute worst in their personalities, the most disgusting habits, the things that irritated you to the point of insanity. I was only with Mr. Hassan Bhatt for two months. But there was so much about him I hated. I might have loved him too, but I have forced out of my mind and heart every recollection as to why. I only remember the hatred. That way, I don’t feel the pain.” Then she calmly shoved her hands back into the white plastic colander and continued shelling.

My mother had rarely been right about things, but she was right about this. I supposed that if I closed my eyes tight and thought about all the things I disliked about Nana-his constant and unforgiving sternness, the gruff way in which he bid me good morning, his habit of pulling out with his bare fingers bits of sticky white rice that lay impacted in his molars-that if I concentrated only on these things and on nothing else, then maybe this feeling of complete devastation wouldn’t overcome me, that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t die from guilt.

“What do you want to do?” Tariq asked as we stood outside his hotel fifteen minutes later, the crush of New Yorkers getting off work gathering around us.

“I don’t know,” I said, still too dazed to think. “Maybe go back… but how? They hate me.” I looked down at my snakeskin-tipped shoes.

“Look, I have a meeting now, but it should be over in a couple of hours. Why don’t you come back here and we’ll go out to dinner. That is, if it’s OK with your boyfriend,” he said, lowering his voice at the last word as if he were uttering some profanity. “Let’s try and figure something out. You need to see your grandfather. You can’t ignore this, you know.”

“I know,” I said, shaking his hand meekly and walking down the street, where I dialed Kai’s number and explained my situation.

“What the crap do you mean you can’t come? The whole goddamn world is going to be there!

“This is bleeding crap, you know that?” he bellowed. I had promised him that I would be there, front and center, at a performance he was giving that night at Chimera, a hot new club in SoHo. He was the star attraction and I, apparently, was a nice little extra inducement. In exchange for him showing up and giving an “impromptu” performance, the owner of the club-a media mogul who was branching out into nightlife-would reward Kai with a Louis Vuitton suitcase and just about anything he could fill it with from up and down Madison Avenue. After Kai’s gig I was to go up, kiss him, beam at him, and then at the photographers who would be hovering in the background. It had all been planned, and my dress had been laid out. But now, something more important had come up.

Kai sounded irate, as always. I heard him sniffing, although he moved his mouth and nose away from the phone. I was certain it was cocaine, which he carried around in a container meant for talcum powder, and which I hadn’t even noticed until our recent spell in the Turks and Caicos. Until then, I’d thought his moodiness was just that.

“Something has come up, Kai. Please understand. It has to do with my family. I need to go meet someone. I’m sorry, Kai. I know it means a lot to you, and I know you’ll do a wonderful job whether I am there or not. For all this time, I have never not stood by the terms of our agreement. But tonight, I need some time off. It is just one appearance. I’m certain people won’t even notice.”

He swore at me again as he replaced the receiver.

While I was dining with Tariq at Da Silvano’s, it occurred to me that, apart from Nana, I had never been alone with a Muslim man before. There was, I realized, something deeply comforting about it. Although we were in the middle of a sophisticated restaurant, surrounded by sophisticated people, sitting this close to him, our elbows touching atop the crisp linen tablecloth and our knees just a hairbreadth away beneath it, I felt like I could have been back at home in India, embedded in the security and safety with which I had grown up.

I wasn’t sure why he had asked me out. I had thought that we had said all we needed to over tea, when he told me about Nana and the accident, something I had yet to fully absorb. I had gone through the following few hours in a state of restlessness, there but not, conscious of the yellow cabs honking at me to cross the street quicker, the gawks of the people as I walked by, and the smell of beef franks sizzling from a cart. But I wasn’t, for those few hours, really in my body at all. I was somewhere else, in my home in Mahim, holding Nana’s frail hand as he lay on his bed, his legs lifeless beneath a thin white bedsheet. I forgot, almost immediately, that he was once dressed in navy gabardine, smart little wings on his shoulders, his peaked pilot’s cap sitting proudly on his head.

“You want a soda or something?” Tariq asked as the waiter came by to take our order. I glanced at the menu, rattled off a request for some vegetables and risotto, and turned back to Tariq. His hair was curled over his ears, his silk tie loosened around his neck. He smelled nice. He felt reassuring. I realized that despite the way I knew he judged me, I was very happy to be with him.

“So you managed to get away from your boyfriend for a night, did you? From what I’ve read, you two seem inseparable.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” he replied sarcastically. “Anyway, that’s all beside the point,” he continued. “What do you think you’re going to do about your grandfather?”

“You know they’re not speaking to me, right? You know that as far as they are concerned, I’m dead?”

“But you’re not. Dead, I mean. Which means that as long as you have the inclination, you probably need to try and fix this. They are your family, after all. You may think you have it all-famous boyfriend, big job, lots of money. But did your nana never teach you about the importance of the blessings of our elders? That without those, we are nothing?”

He was beginning to anger me. Something in Tariq’s voice, the patronizing way in which he spoke to me, was irritating.

“What? Can’t handle the truth?” he asked, thrusting his fork into an asparagus spear.

“It’s easy for you to talk,” I said through clenched teeth.

I could feel the anger in my belly, and I was forcing myself to sit on it, to squash it back, to make it retreat. Da Silvano’s was no place in which to have a fit, especially with people at neighboring tables looking my way, wondering who this handsome man was, most likely figuring that he was a brother or cousin. Almost in honor of being with him, I was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and fluid pants, a scarf draped around my neck, as if ready to hoist up to my head at a moment’s notice.

“It’s easy for you to preach on about family blessings,” I said. “You have always had them. No matter what you decided to do, you would always have them. Go to law school, go to med school, stay home and become an auto mechanic. Your parents would never have cursed you with Allah’s wrath because you are a man. You were meant to go out and conquer the world. But if a girl tries to do it, suddenly there are accusations of betrayal and threats of being disowned. I couldn’t even walk out of my apartment building without being followed by Nana. But you? You could study in America, work in London, move to Paris, whatever you wanted. Why? Because you are a boy and I am not?”

“It’s not that, and you know it,” he said, his gaze now steady on mine. “If you had told your grandfather that you wanted to get a proper education, take on a decent career, he might have eventually agreed. Even I would have fought for that on your behalf. But what is this? This taking off your clothes for the world to see? This sleeping with a strange white man who plays music for a living? What kind of behavior is that for a decent girl?”