Stavros, I could tell, felt ashamed instructing me to lose weight, especially after his earlier speech to me, the one that celebrated my relatively curvaceous figure, at least compared to the reed-thin girls who he was convinced would hate me now.
“They will despise you because there are too many of them, and only one of you,” he said. “You are their worst nightmare.”
But while I had no real objection to losing weight, I put my foot down at Pasha’s insistence that I cover over the pearly strands in my hair. I told Stavros to tell Pasha as much, and that if he was inclined to drop me from his show because of something that made me different, I didn’t want to be part of it, not really believing the sudden strength of my convictions, but knowing that my Shah streak was far more important than a few minutes in the spotlight. I watched Stavros as he nervously dialed Pasha’s number and spoke to him hurriedly, mentioning something about how the streak was my good luck charm. Then he nodded, smiled in my direction, and replaced the receiver.
“You win,” he said. “But the weight still has to come off.”
I had three weeks left until the start of New York Fashion Week, and while I had only been booked for one show, Stavros said this was going to be my New York debut, the one that would open the doors for me to fame, fortune, and endorsement deals.
“And you should start having some fun, too,” he said. “What model has no fun?”
Almost as soon as Pasha had delivered his weight-loss directive, Stavros booked an appointment for me with a nutritionist who, in her sleek office on the Upper East Side, measured my body fat and wrote down everything I liked to eat: lentils and eggplant, chicken in butter sauce, and cardamom-infused rice.
“You don’t actually have a weight problem,” she said. “You’re exactly where you need to be. Your caloric intake is a little on the high side, but your metabolism rate is high. In short, you can afford to eat,” she said, smiling.
“It’s in the genes,” I replied, recalling the long, lean frames of my aunts, and their ability-like mine-to eat as they pleased without gaining an ounce.
“She’s making her catwalk debut,” Stavros interjected.
A frown appeared on the nutritionist’s face.
“Ah, one of those again. Always happens this time of year. I don’t like it, but I’ll help you, if it’s what you really want.” She looked over at me again, a glimmer of disapproval in her bespectacled eyes.
“Start by giving up your morning lassi, and we’ll go from there, OK?”
After stocking up on celery sticks and flax crackers, Stavros took me to meet with Marco, a personal trainer who had worked out with some of the best bodies in the business. He had close-cropped hair that reminded me of a military inductee, perfect bone structure, and muscles that bulged through a thin, light blue T-shirt. I felt self-conscious as he stared at me, asking me to stretch my arms out like a scarecrow, checking for muscle tone, telling me I didn’t have much of it.
“You’re not fat, and you have back fat. What’s that about?” he asked, looking unimpressed.
“I’ve never exercised before,” I said. “Well, maybe a little yoga with my grandfather. Does that count?”
He ignored me.
“Tomorrow, six a.m., we begin,” he said, writing down my details on a clipboard.
I met him in Central Park. He showed me how to warm up, bending over to touch his toes. Meanwhile, I could barely reach my knees. He twisted his torso from side to side, grabbing me by the waist as I flinched, helping me to do the same. He strapped a little band onto my wrist that he explained would monitor my heart rate, then suggested I start walking slowly, increasing my pace as I went. Everyone else around me looked as if they had been doing this all their lives, sprinting and talking with their running companions as they went, while I could barely go fifteen minutes without needing to stop and take a breath.
“Three weeks, girl,” he said. “No time to be dragging your feet.”
Afterward, he took me to a private gym where he worked me out on elaborate weight machines, laid me on the floor to do stomach crunches, and made me squat and rise repeatedly. Even in Mumbai’s sultriest summers, with no air-conditioning in our home, I had never sweat this much. I couldn’t believe that people actually enjoyed doing this.
In between all of this, and remembering to bake chicken and shred spinach leaves, I had to schedule fittings at Pasha’s office. I was going to model four outfits, which had to be systematically taken in until the day of the show. Thankfully, I had no time to mope about being alone. And when I told Shazia, she was positively envious.
“What I wouldn’t do to have someone care about every ounce I had on my wobbly behind,” she sighed. “Tanaya, you don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Nine pounds, three ounces. Bravo!” Stavros said, peering down at the weighing scale in my bathroom. “You’ve done it!”
It was six a.m., and our call time was in a couple of hours. The show was one of the first of the day and, as Stavros pointed out, because it was only the second day of Fashion Week, the style crowd hadn’t yet developed the cynicism they were noted for, and thus it would be much easier to love a new and fresh face before the toll of the week had been taken.
I shrugged my newly slenderized body into a pair of jeans and a light sweater, and Stavros pulled out a pair of high heels for me to wear, telling me that I had to look like a model, even before the show. He was beginning to behave like the ayah I had when I was growing up, my pudgy Gopibhai, who fussed over me like I was a wounded bird.
Initially nobody backstage looked my way. We were at the Bryant Park tents, or “fashion central” as Stavros called it. Men with bright blond hair, buff arms, and high-pitched voices were fussing with curling irons. Women wore aprons around their T-shirt-and-cargo-pants-clad bodies, brandishing everything from fluffy makeup brushes to spritz bottles. Music coming from a sound system behind me was louder than it needed to have been, a string of rhymes and four-letter words rat-tat-tatting in my ears. The other models were immersed in their own world, reading glossy magazines or listening to their iPods or texting messages to some lover who might be awaiting them on the other side of the runway. Stavros was asked to leave and, telling me that I was in good hands, disappeared into the cavernous darkness of the long room I would soon be walking into.
All the commotion, combined with the smell of cigarette smoke that hung heavily in the room and the fact that I hadn’t eaten in two days, made me feel lightheaded. I didn’t belong here, and I would never be able to feign the coolness of these people.
“Hey, you’re number ten,” said a black man in a tight white T-shirt, streaks of orange running through his hair, as he glanced at a clipboard. “Let’s get you situated.”
He installed me in a chair and signaled to someone from the hair and makeup team to start working on me. One of the models in an adjacent chair finally took her eyes off her BlackBerry long enough to notice me.
“Hey, you’re new aren’t you?” she asked. “Haven’t seen you around before.”
“Yes, hello, my name is Tanaya.”
“Pippi,” she said. “Pleasure. Lovely name you have. Where’s it from? I’m from London myself… Bolton, actually, but none of these other birds know where that is, so I just tell ’ em London. Here. Fag?” she asked, offering me her packet of Winston Lights. I shook my head.
“So tell me, did that poofter Pasha by any chance tell you to drop some pounds? He does that to all the new girls. Sexual harassment, if you ask me. He’s got some weird skin-and-bones fetish, I’m sure of it. But I live for this business, so I’m not one to speak, am I? Anyhow, losing the weight is easy. I’m sure you did what every girl in this business does, you know… the typical new-model diet?”
I looked at her, puzzled.
“Coffee, ciggies, and cocaine. Stick to that for a week, and even a mean old rump-humper like Pasha would be satisfied.”
I had had a horrible migraine once, many years ago, and standing at the far end of the catwalk, preparing to walk down it, was a bit like that. The camera flashes went off with such ferocious intensity that, for a second, I couldn’t see where I was going. I forgot where I was, what I was wearing, what had brought me here. All I could focus on were those hundreds of flashes, like exploding stars, right where I thought people would be. The numbness appeared much more quickly than in a migraine, starting at one side of my head and wending its way around and down the rest of my body. I was suddenly frozen. Under my breath, I whispered, “Nana,” just like I used to when I would awaken from a bad dream and run into his room. The black man with the streaked orange hair yelled, “Go! Go!” from the sidelines. I put one foot in front of the other and walked, thrusting my hips from side to side, just the way I had rehearsed with Stavros. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I made it to the end, thunderous applause elevating me and carrying me back the way I’d come.
It’s true what they say about modeling: If you’re any good at it, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
I was, I realized after that terrifying flit down the runway, very good at it. By the time the second outfit was on and I was poised to make that journey again, it felt as natural as brushing my teeth.
Stavros, not one to idle away the hour-long wait before the show started, had decided to start a game of Chinese whispers. From his third-row seat, wedged between a fashion reporter for an online magazine and the owner of a boutique in SoHo, he told a story.
By the time the show was over, the story had reached the front row.
After it was all over, he returned with a bouquet of lilies, which he handed to me as I was unfurling the chignon I had been given. He reached down to kiss me lightly on the cheek. I was so buoyed, so suddenly and profoundly confident, that I wanted to turn toward him and let his lips touch mine. But I did not.
“You were magnificent,” he said. “Everybody is wondering who you are.”