Salaam, Paris (24 page)

Just then, I heard a car honk behind me. I turned around and saw a taxi pull up right next to me. The door opened, and out stepped my aunt Gaura, suitcase in her hand.

“Tanaya, you’re here!” she said, her face beaming, her arms wrapping themselves around me before I had a chance to move. I sunk into her embrace, our two silver-streaked heads bowed together.

“When did you arrive?” she asked, releasing me. “Why are you standing here? I’ve come to see Nana; he’s very sick, you know.”

“I know.” I began crying again. “I tried to see him yesterday, right after I flew in, but Mummy wouldn’t even let me through the door. They really hate me. So I went to a hotel.”

“What nonsense!” she said, now frowning. “I never understood why they treated you so badly. You are one of our own. They might not have agreed with your choices, but you are a grown woman now.”

I stepped back and looked at my aunt with gratitude and surprise. I realized then that I had never really known her, despite our closeness when I was an infant. I had never taken the trouble to visit her in Pakistan or even to reply to the letters she would write to me, when she would always enclose a leaflet of shiny stickers or a dried flower she had made in an arts and crafts class. I had set her correspondence aside, reading and then ignoring it, seeing it as nothing more than a formality between an aunt and her niece.

“You have always been like a daughter to me, Tanaya,” she said then, smoothing down my hair. “I should have called you, and I am so sorry I did not. I think I knew that you would always come home and make things right. In the meantime, Nana and your mother refused to even let your name come up. It was very sad,” she said, shaking her head. “But, my girl, you are home now. We will do what we can to bring us all together again.”

 

She didn’t bother knocking on the blue painted door. It was ajar, as it always was this time of day, so the cook would hear the cries of the vegetable seller as he made his way down the corridor, a large circular basket of tomatoes and parsley and okra atop his head. Aunt Gaura simply pushed the door open, announced her presence, clutched my hand, and walked in.

“What is
she
doing here?” my mother asked, emerging from the bedroom we once shared, her black hair wet and stringy against the polyester gown she always wore at home, a sprinkling of fragrant white talcum powder visible around her neck. The cook emerged from the kitchen, smiling at me.

“She was waiting outside,
bechari,”
Aunt Gaura said, referring to me as the “poor girl” that I felt like I was. “How are you treating her like this? Has she harmed anyone? Yet even so, she has come to ask for forgiveness.”

“Ma, I just want to see Nana,” I said, my voice cracking, looking toward his closed bedroom door.

“He doesn’t want to see you,” she spat out. “He’s in poor shape. Seeing you will kill him.”

“That’s not true,” Aunt Gaura said. “He’s been asking for her, and you know it. Don’t lie. Come,” she said to me, taking me by the hand again like I was a child and this was my first day of kindergarten. “Let’s go see your nana.” She set down her suitcase, walked toward his room, and pushed the door open.

Had I not known he was still alive, I would have thought I was looking at a corpse. He was half his weight, shrunken and bony beneath a white cotton sheet. His eyes were closed, his skin pale, a gray stubble roughening his cheeks and chin. His silvery hair, lighter and thinner than I remembered it, stood straight up on his head, disheveled and uncombed. Lying there, he reminded me of a broken fluorescent tube light, all brittle and skinny and shades of gray, the monochrome broken up only by a black thread worn as a necklace, a small silver talisman hanging off it. On the table next to the bed was a copy of the Koran and his reading glasses, dusty with nonuse. Bottles of pills and syrups cluttered another table, a large glass jug of water next to them. The room smelled of urine and antiseptic, like the hospital where my grandmother had died years earlier.

I stood there as if glued to the floor.

“He’s sleeping,” Aunt Gaura whispered to me. “He needs his rest. At least you have seen him. Come, let’s have some tea and return later.”

 

When I was a child, my most profound fear was losing my grandfather.

Every time a plane crashed somewhere in the world—even if it was a charter jet in the interiors of Russia, something I rationally knew my nana would have nothing to do with and was nowhere near—I couldn’t sleep until he returned safely to our home, his peaked cap nestled on his bedside table. Each time I put on the television and the news came on, I was anxious until the sari-clad newsreader, her
bindi
as big and bright as the moon in the center of her forehead, moved on to sports, knowing then that there had been no plane crashes in the world that day.

And even after Nana had retired and he was always there, in the next room, the pages of his newspaper rustling in the mid-afternoon breeze, I don’t think I ever stopped worrying about him. Every time his temperature went up a few degrees, or he complained of a headache, or perhaps was afflicted by a bout of indigestion after a particularly rich meal, my thoughts would always run to the extreme: It was cancer, a brain tumor, he was about to have a stroke.

It only occurred to me much later, that the dread with which I held my nana when I thought I was about to lose him was the same dread with which I encased him when he was well and sound and happy. I feared him; I feared for him. There was, I realized, nothing about our relationship that wasn’t based on fear.

“You have to know how much he loves you,” Aunt Gaura said. We had returned to my hotel, and were seated at the coffeeshop, cups of
masala chai
in front of us. “You have to know that no matter what you did, there wasn’t a day when he didn’t think of you. At the same time as he was cursing you, he prayed for you.” She sighed and readjusted her headscarf. “I will never understand that man. I will go to my grave, and he to his, without ever truly knowing him.”

She paused for a moment and glanced around the coffeeshop, her eyes falling on the smartly dressed people at adjacent tables. Even in her simple light orange cotton
salwar kameez
she was a stunning woman, heads turning toward us when we walked in, us looking more like sisters than aunt and niece.

“You have done well,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “When I was your age, I was married with a child on the way. I would never have been able to afford even a cup of tea here, much less to stay here on my own. You have broken every rule of our family. But somehow I cannot judge you. I cannot be like the others. I fed you from my own breast when you were just days old, and I cannot kill you off in my mind like the rest have done.”

I started to cry softly, deeply moved by my aunt. She reached over and put her hand on my head, atop the Shah streak, and smiled at me softly.

“If I really think about it, I guess I can understand why Nana is the way he is,” I said. “He is from another generation, after all. He is an old-timer in every sense,” I said, now laughing. “But to see the fury on my mother’s face—it shocked me. I had never seen such a thing. I had never seen much of anything on her face.” I stirred my tea, watching as the swirls of milk dissolved into the caramel-colored liquid.

“It pained me to see how she was with you,” my aunt said, her expression now sad. “I couldn’t understand how a mother couldn’t love her child.”

I thought back, for a second, to Zoe, my first roommate in Paris, the short-haired American girl who had given birth to a daughter that she had never wanted either. Perhaps it wasn’t so uncommon after all.

“When your mother saw how beautiful you were becoming, she almost turned against you,” my aunt continued. “She wanted you to be like her. She began to see you as a stranger. And when she realized how much your grandfather loved you, and how close you were to him, she put herself in the background of your life, concerning herself with whether the vegetable basket was full and that your school fees were paid on time. But she never knew how to really be a mother to you, did she?” my aunt asked, looking at me with such tenderness that I wanted to cry.

Aunt Gaura’s words were shocking to me, even though she was telling me something I think I always knew. I pushed my chair back as if I needed to stand up and go somewhere, when I really had nowhere else to go.

“
Maasi,
tell me something,” I asked. “My friend Nilu told me that Nana had the accident on his way to the post office, that he was going to mail something to me. What was it? Do you know?”

Aunt Gaura scooped another spoonful of sugar into her tea. She then lifted up her head and stared straight at me.

“It was a letter from your father.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Spandau Ballet was playing in the elevator as I rode up back to my room. I recognized the song from a fashion show I had done in Rome a month earlier, where the designer had resurrected the trends—and the music—of the 1980s. He had put me in a lime green jacket with big padded shoulders and a peplum waist, and had given me a tiny miniskirt to wear with shiny pantyhose and high-heeled pumps. He had crimped my hair and clasped dangling gold earrings onto my lobes. When I was ready, staring into a mirror backstage and preparing for my turn to head out to the catwalk, the young dresser whispered in my ear that I looked like a “poor Bangladeshi Ivana Trump.” I had laughed, too carefree to really be offended.

As I stood outside my room, searching for my key card, I thought back for a moment to those days when my life was an endless flurry of fittings and parties and limo rides and photographers and hundreds of hours spent in fancy airport lounges where all the food was free.

Even when I was famous, I never felt it. And now, being a lifetime away from all that, it didn’t even feel real anymore. I barely gave a thought to what had happened with Kai and his career, and Felicia and her neuroses, and Stavros and the wife he pretended he wasn’t married to. They all seemed like characters I had read about in a book long ago, part of a life I had never really sought out, and that I was now happy to leave behind.

I was just about to pull down my door handle when I heard the pleasant ring of the elevator, the upward arrow turning red, footsteps coming down the hall toward me, quicker than usual.

“You’re a hard girl to find.”

I looked up.

“Your cook told me you were staying here.” Tariq looked happy and radiant.

“What are you doing here?” I said, surprised but not displeased to see him. “I thought I asked you not to come.”

“You did indeed,” he said, still grinning. “But I was on my way to Pakistan to see my own grandfather, just as I told you. And my office wanted me to take a meeting with some financiers in Bollywood. So here I am. I went by your place hoping to see you, but got your cook instead. So it didn’t go well, then?”

“No. Quite badly, actually. But my mother’s sister, Gaura
maasi,
is helping me. She’s the only one in my family who understands and who actually doesn’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, if that makes a difference,” he said, the overhead lights bouncing off his shiny black hair, his tiny earrings trembling with the slightest of movements.

“You’ve been very kind to me,” I said. “I don’t deserve it. Right now, I can only think of my nana, of getting him to see me, to know that I dropped everything and came back for him. I’m supposed to go back later this evening, when he will hopefully be awake.”

“Sounds good,” Tariq said. “I’ve finished my meeting and don’t have to leave until the day after tomorrow. So please, let me come with you.”

 

This time, he was awake. This time, there was nobody to tell me I couldn’t go in, that I couldn’t touch the hand of the man who had loved me more than anybody else ever had. Aunt Gaura silenced my mother again and waited outside the bedroom door, making awkward conversation with Tariq, who clutched on to a bottle of mineral water.

There was no anger in my nana’s voice, and in a way I wished there had been, because that would have told me that at least he had some energy left, that all his senses hadn’t been diminished and deadened by his accident.

“
Beti,
you’ve come,” he said, his voice low and guttural yet consoling.

“I’m so sorry, Nana.” I was sobbing now, relieved that at least I was able to see him before he got any worse, and even more relieved that he didn’t hate me like he said he did.

“I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know why I had to leave. I should never have. Please, I beg you, forgive me,” I said. I placed my head on his chest, like I used to do when I was a little girl. This time, like he did then, he put both his hands on my head and stroked it. When I sat up again, tears coursing down my cheeks, he turned his head slightly to look at me, his eyes a little wider.