Salaam, Paris (23 page)

 

As we approached the neighborhood, it felt like I had never left. Mrs. Mehra’s School of Domestics sat on the same corner, its billboard a little more faded than I recall, the cheerful face of a woman in a sari holding a teacup and a platter of cookies two shades duller than I remembered it. All the shops were shuttered for the night, but the street activity remained: young men pedaling by on their bicycles, ringing their bells as they went, children chasing one another around big colored sheets that flapped from clotheslines. The slum dwellers squatted on the pavement, begging for coins from passersby, or rummaged through the big open bags of trash for dinner scraps.

I stared out of the car window, Nilu silent by my side, as we pulled up outside the building. A couple of lights were on in our apartment, but there was no sign of anyone, although I was certain that both my nana and my mother would be home. They were always home.

“I’ll come in with you, make sure everything is OK,” Nilu said as she was about to instruct the driver to wait. “You never know how they are going to react after everything that’s happened.”

“I appreciate the thought, but I should go alone,” I said. “I got myself into this, and I’ll have to get myself out.”

Still, I was immobile, silent and staring for a few minutes, almost waiting for a sign that I was supposed to step out of the car, down the narrow entryway into our building, then knock on its blue painted door.

“I wonder what was in that letter,” I said to Nilu, both of us knowing I was stalling for time.

“Me too. After telling you repeatedly that you were dead to him, he goes and writes to you. And on the day he decides to mail it . . . oh, it’s just so sad . . .”

“Stop it, Nilu,” I said. I took her words to be my sign. I kissed her on the cheek, thanked the driver, opened the door, and walked into the building.

The smell hit me as soon as I was inside—that combination of fried cumin seeds and boiled sugared milk, tainted by a tinge of raw, untreated sewage. I had grown up with that odor living in my nostrils, and now I inhaled it deep, as if to affirm the fact that I had finally come home.

I stood outside the door. There were voices inside—my mother’s and the cook’s. I didn’t hear my nana. The door next to it opened, and the teenage twin brothers who lived next to us peered out, looked at me in astonishment, began whispering to each other, and went back in.

Within an hour, everyone in the building would know that I was home.

I raised my hand and knocked. I felt dizzy and nauseated. It must have been pure terror, but having never felt that before until then, I didn’t initially recognize it. There was no response from behind the door, so I lifted up my hand and knocked again, this time harder.

“Kaun hai?”
I heard my mother’s voice, enquiring who it was. I remained silent, thankful there was no peephole.

“Kuch kaho!”
My mother demanded that I speak.

“Ma,” I said, softly, imperceptibly. “Ma,
main hoon.
It’s me.”

I know she didn’t hear, because I heard her muttering about being disturbed, thinking I was one of the neighbors needing to borrow some
ghee
or a pound of
moong dal
to soak for breakfast.

I heard the door unbolt, a light switch coming on. Her expression went from exasperation to something I had never before seen. Shock, outrage, incredulity, perhaps a combination of all these.

“Tum,”
she said quietly. “You?”

I had known she wouldn’t hug me, or even smile. But I didn’t think she would slap me, not after that night twelve years earlier when she unleashed her fury on me and promised never to do it again. My cheek reverberated, hot and stinging, while I stood there and stared at her, my hand on my face. Then she lifted her hand again, and this time struck me on the other side. The cook had appeared, standing behind her, a stained dishcloth slung over his shoulder, his mouth open. He had lost another tooth.

There was no sign of Nana anywhere—not even his slippers beside the door, where they always were.

“Ma, I’ve come home,” I said, tears gushing down my prickling cheeks. “I’m sorry for everything. I just wanted to see you and Nana. Please, can I come in?”

Her face was gray, the black mark on her forehead creased and darkened.

“If you are here, then you are a ghost,” she said, her teeth clenched. “Because you are dead. May Allah forgive you for your sins. But we never will. You go, and never come back here again.”

She tried to slam the door, but I put my foot over the threshold so it stopped at my toes.

“You can hate me,” I said. “But I’ve come to see Nana. I know about the accident. Please, Ma, let me see him. Before it’s too late.”

She stared at me, the anger in her eyes now turning to something else. Something like hatred. “It’s already too late,” she said, banging the door shut.

My tattered brown suitcase stood humbly on the ground next to me, outside the place I had called home for nineteen years.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I didn’t know where to go or how to feel. There were tears, I knew, clogged somewhere in the back of my brain, but it was as if they couldn’t find their way out. My cheeks still hurt, and my toe smarted from my mother slamming the door on it. I wondered if Nana was dead. The way my mother had spoken, that was certainly how it sounded. Just thinking of it made me feel like I had been kicked in the stomach. It can’t be, I rationalized. If that was the case, Nilu would have known. She would have told me. Unless, of course, it had only just happened, right before I got there, just as it always did in the Hindi films. I shook my head, tossing out those thoughts, praying that my mother simply wanted to hurt me, knowing that it worked.

My first thought was to call Nilu. But I was suddenly shamed and humiliated and thought that even the comfort of a good friend wouldn’t help me. I thought of everyone in my life—all the friends I had acquired far away—and how none of them could help me. I thought of turning around and going back in, but the look on my mother’s face told me that she felt as anguished as me. I couldn’t do that to her anymore.

I stooped over to pick up my suitcase, thinking of which hotel I should go to for the night before considering what I ought to do next. I also needed to cry, but wanted to do it away from this building with its nosy neighbors and gossiping grandmas. I just needed to get out of there.

A male voice sounded behind me, whispering my name. It was the cook, a row of teeth interrupted by big spaces, his dark face almost invisible in the night.

“Kya hua?”
I asked, wondering what had happened and why he was out here, talking to me.

In his Hindi-Marathi mix, he told me that Nana was alive, and at home. He wasn’t well, but he was a little better than he had been yesterday, which was significantly better than a week before that. He still couldn’t walk, and probably never would. He was weak, but he was eating. In a drug-induced delirium, right after the accident, Nana had asked for me. He had called my name out loud a dozen times. He had said he didn’t want to meet Allah until he saw me again.

“Main kya karun?”
I asked our cook, wondering what I should do.

“Kal,”
he said.

Tomorrow.

Chapter Thirty

Growing up, I had always longed to go to the Hotel Sun ’n’ Sand. Even the name mesmerized me. It made me think of tall frosted glasses of fresh coconut juice, tiny pieces of pulp floating inside the otherwise clear liquid, served by uniformed waiters to long-legged foreigners who sat by the pool. I would imagine platters of
bhel puri
—tiny twigs made from chickpea flour tossed with spiced rice crispies, boiled potatoes, and coriander and heaped with a dollop of tart tamarind sauce—that would lie untouched on buffet tables as rich people perused the other offerings. I used to close my eyes as we drove by in the back of an auto-rickshaw, my nana and I, on our way to somewhere far less grand and much more mundane, and I would wish to simply sit in the air-conditioned lobby for a minute or so, to stare at the wealthy locals who came there to dine and drink and dance. At its prime, on the sun-swept shores of Juhu, there was nothing else like it.

With the palm trees outside my balcony, now encased in the pale darkness of early night, I could have been anywhere in the world. It felt odd to be at home, in my birth-place, and not be in Ram Mahal. There was something illicit about it. As much as I had longed to be here all those times I had driven by with Nana as a little girl, it saddened me tremendously to have to be here now.

But I slowly unpacked, ordered up some room service, said my prayers, and waited for the sun to rise.

 

With all the traveling and time-zone hopping I had done in the past year, I still wasn’t used to jet lag. When I finally awoke, it was past eleven, and my head still felt heavy. For a second, I couldn’t remember where I was, nestled under this strange comforter and atop the starched white sheets, searching for the pillow that had gotten dislodged during the night and was now by my feet. I sat up, looked around, felt the silence of the room, and started to cry.

According to my rough calculations, it was late in Los Angeles. But I knew that Shazia would be up. She had told me that she rarely went to bed before one a.m., sitting up to watch TiVo’d episodes of
The Ellen Show
and Jon Stew-art before finally falling asleep.

She answered immediately.

“I saw this weird number on my caller ID,” she said, her voice excited. “Where you calling from?”

“Home. India home, I mean,” I said.

“You went back there? Holy crap! What’s
that
like?!”

I told her what had happened the night before, and she let out a low, disapproving sigh.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew they would act like heathens. They don’t deserve you.”

“Please don’t speak about them that way,” I said quietly. “They are my family. They told me what would happen if I disobeyed them, and I went ahead and did it anyway. I deserve what has happened to me.”

“Wow, they’ve really done a number on you, haven’t they?” I heard Shazia turn down the volume on her television, the laughing and applause in the background slowly fading. “If there is one thing I’ve learnt since I left home, left the culture I grew up with, is that our parents don’t have the right to tell us how to be. They should simply be grateful that we’ve turned out OK, with no drug addictions or criminal records or illegitimate children running around. Here, in America, a man wouldn’t
think
of disowning his granddaughter because she wanted to pursue a modeling career. Hell, I don’t think he’d care. He may even be proud of her, would boast to all his friends on the block. There’s one thing you need to get through your head, Tanaya. You shouldn’t be groveling for their forgiveness. They should be groveling for yours.”

I heard a knock on the door. Breakfast had arrived, and I used that as an excuse to hurriedly hang up.

 

The clerk at reception who had checked me in the night before had recognized me. He had done a double take, looking up again from his computer screen, a grimace of satisfaction spreading across his face when I told him my name.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when, as I was stepping out of the hotel at one thirty in the afternoon, several photographers were lined up outside the building, cameras in hand aimed at me like weapons. A young woman probably my age, standing on the sidelines, a multicolored cloth bag slung over her shoulders, came racing toward me as soon as I emerged, a small tape recorder tucked into her hand.

“Miss Shah! Miss Shah!” she yelled out, trying to catch me as a I hailed a cab. “I’m with the
Times of India,
lifestyle section. Miss, what brings you back home after all this time? Are you working on any deals with local companies? And why are you staying here instead of at your family home?”

I had one leg in the taxi, but stopped. I remembered Felicia’s advice about always being pleasant to the press, whether I was in a rush, or in a bad mood, or even distrustful of them. “The least you can do is smile and wave,” she had said. “But never be rude, and never walk away without giving them something.”

“I’m here for a family visit, that’s all,” I said, forcing a smile. I waved at the rest of the cameras, smiled again, thanked them for their interest, and folded the rest of myself into the small black taxi.

In the bright light of day, Ram Mahal looked imposing. Now, under the glare of the sun, I could see its former glory hidden beneath layers of dirty rain stains and pigeon droppings.

I was standing on the other side of the building, scared to be directly in front of the balcony, certain that my mother would emerge there at some point that early afternoon, to dry her hair on one of the rough pink towels that she always used.

Lurking in the back, shuffling from one foot to the other, I felt like a criminal. I hadn’t really planned what I was going to do or say, only that I would try and get in again, past the fury of my mother, relying on the assistance of the cook.