Salaam, Paris (7 page)

Nineteen years later, my mother had yet to recover from the humiliation of being left by a husband because of the way she looked—or didn’t. I would catch her occasionally looking at their wedding photograph, a bland black-and-white shot framed in gold that she kept in the bottom drawer of a chest in our bedroom. I had often snuck in there to look at it myself, to gaze at the wide-eyed nervousness on my mother’s face and the momentous sadness on that of Hassan Bhatt’s, my nana standing cautiously behind them.

Chapter Eight

Soon after Zoe had left for work one morning, just as I was about to wring out the laundry and hang it up to dry in the small, square-shaped bathroom, Shazia arrived. She smiled broadly, as if I had just seen her yesterday, as if I was neither homeless nor penniless nor jobless in a still-strange city.

“How are you doing?” she asked, throwing her arms around me.

“OK,” I replied. “How’s your mother feeling?”

“Better, actually. I think me being here has really helped. We’ve been spending lots of time at home these past couple of weeks, just her and I. It’s been good. I’ve promised her I’ll come back as soon as a let-up in my work schedule allows it. I’m flying back to L.A. tomorrow.

“What about you?” she asked, finally turning her attention back to me again.

I had started to resent Shazia for encouraging me to do something as foolhardy as this, and it finally began to show. And now, she was returning to Los Angeles, leaving me behind.

“What am I doing?” I said to her, turning back toward the living room while she slipped off her coat and followed me. “This was a stupid idea, and I should never have allowed you to talk me into it. But I have nobody to blame but myself. I want to go home, but Nana won’t take me back, I’m sure of it. Once he says these things, he never changes his mind.”

“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Shazia said, her voice laced with recrimination, her face utterly lacking in sympathy. “You’re not a kid anymore. And it’s only been a couple of weeks. You’ll be fine, honest. You’ll be better than fine. We all have problems. I was supposed to marry a boy from Karachi, but he rejected me flat-out. Said I was too fat. I promised myself I would never put myself through that humiliation again.”

“I didn’t know,” I said softly. “You never mentioned.”

“Well, it’s not something I like to talk about,” Shazia said, the bitterness in her face now yielding. “It just made me really resent our culture, you know? There’s a lot about it that sucks.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m still proud of where I come from,” I said, aware that I was sounding naïve. “I can’t imagine never returning to India.”

“Nobody’s saying that,” she said. “But it’s OK to develop an affinity with another land, another culture. It doesn’t make you any less Muslim. I’m Muslim, but I’m American as well. I can’t tell you who the Pakistani prime minister is, but I know the name of Kate Hudson’s baby.” She laughed.

She pulled me down onto the couch and took a sheet of yellow lined paper out of her bag.

“Look, good news,” she said. “A job, a permanent place to live, how to get your visa extended . . . Everything you need. You start next week.”

I glanced down and saw a scribbled name of a café with an address and phone number. Below that were other addresses, other numbers. My entire new life, according to Shazia, whittled down into a few scrawled lines.

“A good friend of mine owns a cute café, very trendy, in Odéon. He needs a cashier, which I thought would be perfect for you because you don’t really have to speak. His English is great, so at least you can communicate. It’s a cash job—he pretty much only hires illegals,” said Shazia, lowering her voice although we were alone. “The pay isn’t bad, and it’s enough to share a place I found with a few other girls. Those are the details there,” she said, pointing to the second address. “You can walk to work, and all the girls keep strange hours, so you’ll have the place to yourself a lot. It’s perfect,” she said, folding her hands on her lap, a look of smug satisfaction on her face.

“I’m glad
you
think so,” I said, the resentment returning. “I don’t want any of it. I want to go home.”

Shazia’s face softened, and she put her hand on top of mine. “Listen, all those dreams you came here with, you still have to achieve them,” she said. “You haven’t had your Sabrina moment yet, have you?”

I shook my head, disconsolate, but now feeling embarrassed by my delusion.

“You can’t leave here until you feel what you said you wanted to feel,” Shazia said. “Not until you can show everyone you are no longer just the pretty Shah girl from Mahim.”

I nodded, carefully folded up the sheet of paper, and rose to bid my distant cousin a final good-bye.

 

My brown suitcase sat behind me in the cashier’s booth, waiting to be taken to its new home. It still bore half-peeled-off stickers from my grandfather’s travels—a dozen or so faded Air India tags dotted over its surface, the familiar yellow-and-red Maharajah now grimy with age.

Another bill was brought to me, a shiny credit card placed upon it, and I swiped it through the small machine on my right, punched in a code, ripped out the resulting printout, and placed it back on the tray for the waiter to return to his customer. I had been doing this for five hours and twenty minutes, off and on, and when it was slow I leafed through the English-French dictionary that Shazia had given me before she left.

The place was called, simply, Café Crème, because it professed to specialize in the sweet creamy drink, although as far as I could tell, so did every other café in the vicinity—or in the rest of Paris, for that matter. The owner’s name was Mathias, which took me a while to learn how to pronounce, and he was a good friend of Shazia’s, although neither one of them told me how. He was part German, was multilingual and fluent in English, which made my first day more comfortable than I had thought it might be. Like with Zoe, I knew he only had me around as a favor to Shazia, but he didn’t seem to mind it. He had a dimple on his left cheek that creased happily when he smiled, a mop of light brown hair, and slender eyes surrounded by long lashes. He seemed to do everything in the café, stepping in to take orders when it was busy, stocking the refrigerator with new supplies, even sweeping the floor at closing time, a pen constantly wedged in his mouth.

He had greeted me one morning with a hug and a kiss on each cheek, which is certainly not the way I imagined new employees would be received at work in India. He had started speaking to me in French, shifting suddenly to English when he saw the look of alarm on my face. He had motioned to my outfit with a wave and had uttered a
“très exotique”
before continuing on with his instructions. My hours were eleven in the morning till seven in the evening, with an hour off for lunch and fifteen-minute breaks every other hour for, as he put it, “a coffee and a cigarette.” I would work Mondays to Fridays, but might be called upon to fill in on weekends if the other cashier didn’t show up—which, by the way he was telling it to me, seemed like a regular occurrence. He asked me how I was for cash and if I needed an advance before the end of the week, and I gratefully nodded; the money that my grandfather had sent me with was all but gone, and I had hated eating Zoe’s food and drinking her tea and not being able to pay for any of it. I wanted to wander the city again on my own, but hadn’t even been able to buy a Metro ticket.

Halfway through my first day, I knew that I would probably hate this job. There was, indeed, nothing really in it to like—except for the niceness of Mathias and the downtime I had during which I could learn at least five new French words. Also, I didn’t have to pay for lunch, and Mathias even said he’d let me take something home for dinner every night. He had offered me, that first day, half of his sandwich—a baguette filled with thin rounds of sausage, forgetting for a moment that I was a Muslim and that pork was our poison. He quickly pulled his plate back in front of him when I pointed this out and promised it would never happen again.

While I wanted the day to end so I could leave, I also resisted going to my new home, a place I would share with three girls who were strangers to me, showing up there with a battered brown suitcase like a refugee in an old war movie, having them inspect me up and down to determine if I was worthy enough to share their space. They weren’t even friends of Shazia’s. She had only described them as “people I know through other people,” which had made no sense to me at all.

But Zoe had wanted her couch back, Shazia was gone, my return ticket had lapsed, and I didn’t have a choice.

They were all there by the time I arrived, all of them in various states of undress, munching potato chips and drinking Coke, the smell of something cooking in the kitchen greeting me as I walked through the door. They were all effusive and welcoming, which surprised me, their eyes bright and arms open, as if they had been waiting for a roommate just like me.

Karla was from Haiti—tall and black and lean, her hair in braids around a long, pretty face. Juliette was blond, smaller, and quieter, clad only in a long white cotton T-shirt with a large yellow smiley face on its front. Teresa was a full-figured redhead, a sprinkling of freckles spread across her wide face and over the shoulders and arms that were visible above a pink terrycloth towel.

I was to share a bedroom—one of two in the flat—with Teresa, who had been looking for a roommate since the old one moved out, apparently to go and live with her boyfriend. There was only one bathroom for all of us, which meant showers expected to last longer than fifteen minutes had to be booked in advance. There was a routine of sorts, and I was expected to fit into it unquestioningly: Karla was a freelance journalist who wrote at home and was often out on assignment, but her schedule was the most flexible of all. Juliette was a receptionist at a fashion house and had to be out by eight most mornings, so allowances should be made for that. Teresa had two jobs, both of them as a waitress, while she was waiting for her big break to become, as she put it, “the next Audrey Tautou.”

They told me all this breathlessly while I was still standing in the hallway, my suitcase in my hand. They said that my cousin had come to see the place and to meet them on my behalf, and had determined that I would be happy here. Then Juliette turned toward a desk in the corner and handed me a white envelope that she fished out from one of its drawers. It was a note from Shazia, informing me that she had already paid the first month’s rent, that it was her gift to me, her way to wish me well.

“Don’t think I’ll forget about you now that I’ve returned to L.A.,”
she had written in tiny, circular words.
“I’ll be checking up on you, and you know how to reach me, if ever you need me. It’s all going to be gorgeous. Trust me.”

I folded up the note and slipped it into my purse, wondering what Shazia must have been really thinking when she wrote it, and what I must have been thinking when I let her talk me into this.

Chapter Nine

For someone who had barely left Mahim, I was adjusting reasonably well, finding that sticking to a schedule helped me to retain my sanity. Mathias was very kind to me, which I had always assumed a boss would never be. The work itself was dull, but the enthusiasm with which he greeted me every day made up for it. It was nice, after nineteen years of not really being seen, to finally feel welcomed somewhere.

The girls with whom I now lived seemed to answer to nobody, except occasionally one another, but they had no nagging parents or grandparents calling them, asking them where they were, what they were doing. They had furnished me with a list of written rules the day I moved in, at the top of which, in screaming black felt-tip, was the directive: NO MEN OVERNIGHT! I hesitated to tell them that as far as I was concerned, they had little to worry about. The refrigerator had been separated into four different zones, and I was allotted a reasonable space on the second shelf, as well as one of the drawers. Everyone bought, ate, and monitored her own food. It didn’t matter, Teresa explained to me, who earned what; everyone was responsible for herself and contributed equally to the upkeep of the apartment. I came to assume that this was how young women outside India lived, and as startled as I was by it, I fell into line.