Compared to Mumbai’s dry, dusty heat, the Paris air felt chilly on my face.
I stood outside the terminal, clutching a small purse into which I had stuffed one hundred euros and change, converted from Indian rupees. It was a small fortune for my grandfather, and he had given it to me grudgingly, but even though he didn’t want me to come to Paris, he certainly didn’t want me to starve here.
I had known there would be nobody at the airport to greet me, so Nilu had figured out that the best and cheapest way for me to get from Charles de Gaulle Airport to my aunt’s house was on the airport bus.
As I waited for it to appear, with exact change in my hand for the ticket, I stared at a loose leaf of paper that was dancing in the wind, pirouetting on the pavement. I knew there was so much else to see if I would only look up, straight ahead of me. But it was precisely because there was so much to see that I couldn’t. I was overwhelmed. I had never before been among so many foreigners, alone in a strange place. Now that I was finally here, even I was beginning to question my grandfather’s decision to send me. It was mid-morning and glorious, and I was surrounded by people. Yet I was as scared as if I were in a dark alley alone at night.
The back of the bus was empty, so I pulled my small trolley bag and brown suitcase down the aisle, shielding my face as I went with my scarf. There I pressed my face against the glass window pane. Some Asian tourists in front of me already had their cameras out, clicking shots of the skyline with its succession of planes taking off and landing. I realized then that I had completely forgotten to bring a camera, and nobody at home had thought to remind me. I was certain that if I had suggested it, my grandfather would have pointed out sternly that I was “not on some jolly vacation.”
I smiled as I thought of him, then remembered my coat pocket. I fished inside it and found the piece of paper that he had shoved into my hand just as I was about to board the plane. On it, written very clearly in Nana’s dark-blue fountain-pen ink, were Tariq Khan’s phone numbers at work and at home. Nana had instructed me to call Tariq as soon as I arrived in Paris, aware that Tariq wouldn’t call me, as that was against protocol. His grandfather had made the first overture to mine, and it was for us-as the family of the supposed bride-to make every effort from then on.
But I didn’t want to think about any of that. I wanted instead to keep staring out of the window, anxious for the driver to start his engine, impatient to begin the journey that I had only dreamed about.
More than an hour passed before we arrived on the street where my aunt lived, and I followed the directions she had conveyed to my grandfather and found myself standing in front of a low building that stood behind an old, dry, stone fountain. There was a tiny elevator into which I just about managed to squeeze myself and my luggage, the smell of which, oddly, reminded me of home. My aunt’s apartment was only one of three that were crowded onto a narrow floor, suddenly dashing my visions of grand halls and curved, polished wooden staircases.
I knocked lightly, and I heard a slow shuffling inside. The door opened, and there she was, the aunt I had never known, dressed in a thick sweater shrugged over a salwar kameez, beige-colored socks on her shoeless feet. She looked as if she had just woken up, her hair uncombed, her face weary. Beneath it all though, if I stared hard enough, I could see that she too was probably once very beautiful.
“Hah, you have come,” she said, stepping aside to let me in. I reached over to hug her, but instead she forced a smile, patted my back, and turned around.
“Your room is there,” she said, pointing to a door halfway down a hallway. “I’m making lunch. Come and eat.”
After a meal of lentils and rice, during which Aunt Mina asked me a few cursory questions about my grandfather, I requested her permission to take a shower.
“OK, but quick one,” she said. “Water bill comes very high.”
Despite my new exotic environment, I dressed the way I always did in India, in a salwar kameez, this time with a mismatched shawl covering my head. I pulled a few euros out of my purse and went out, finding a bench at the end of Aunt Mina’s street. I sat there for two hours, gazing at the foreign-looking people as they rushed by, on their way to somewhere important, newspapers folded under their arms, a cigarette between long fingers. Then I walked around the block, careful to note the little landmarks I was passing, scared that I might get lost. When I grew familiar with that one street, I walked onto another, then another. I stayed out for five hours, even after I grew hungry and thirsty from all the walking and gawking. But I did not have the courage to enter a store and buy a bottle of water, not knowing how to ask for what I needed, and worried about every euro I would have to spend.
For the next three days, that was all I did. Each day, I went a little farther, marveling at the pretty lace things I would see in a shop window or smelling freshly baked breads outside a bakery, trying to catch even one isolated word from the blurred conversations around me. Three days after arriving, I finally found the courage to walk into a store and buy a bottle of orange juice, drinking in the pulpy sweetness as a silent, solitary toast.
That night, when I returned home, Aunt Mina chastised me for being out of the house.
“Again you are roaming-roaming,” she said, not looking up at me from the television, on which a videotape of a Hindi soap opera was playing. “You have come here for a reason, and I’m not understanding why you are spending all your days and money just roaming.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped.
“I am not well,” she continued, this time turning to look at me. “May Allah help me. Doctor says bad blood pressure, maybe clot is coming. Heart attack. Stroke even. Shazia is arriving tomorrow to care for me. I will need the spare room for my daughter. You can sleep on couch in the meantime, but please, now, you just finish your matter and go back home.”
It was evident that she had no interest in hearing from me, so I went into the little bedroom and shut the door. I knew that my mother and Nana, my two closest living relatives, were waiting to hear from me, sitting by the phone in our fluorescent-lit living room. A sense of guilt crept in as I took comfort in the fact that they were unable to contact me unless they left the house and headed to the corner booth, and that the reason for their silence so far had been the expense of such a call-especially so soon after the one initially made to Aunt Mina. I remembered the look on Nana’s face as he had said good-bye to me in Mumbai, the tears he would not allow to fall from his eyes, the kiss he gave me on my forehead as he whispered in my ear: “May Allah be with you and keep you safe.”
I know I should have been ashamed at myself for misleading them like this, promising one outcome only so I could achieve another.
A small radiator hummed quietly as it hugged the wall. In the suddenly warm room I took off my coat, with the piece of paper with Tariq’s number now covered in lint and stuck to a foil candy wrapper. I stared for a moment at a photograph that sat atop a chest of drawers-of Aunt Mina and her daughter, Shazia, for whom I would have to vacate this room the next day. My grandfather had told me a little about Shazia’s allegedly wild lifestyle as a single working girl in Los Angeles, referring to her as “a bad sort” and insisting that I not “get any ideas” from her.
The next day, we were back at Charles de Gaulle. My second visit to this airport in only four days was enough to make me feel like a proud veteran of the city. Shazia’s plane had been delayed, so as Aunt Mina rested on a low leather seat at the back of the cavernous hall, I walked up and down the arrivals area, occasionally stopping to gaze overhead at the huge board that announced the movements of the planes-where they were going, which ones had just touched down. I watched as well-dressed women in trim pantsuits and high-heeled boots pressed lips with their arriving lovers, and I watched young children throwing their arms around their mothers, who were returning alone from God-knows-where. I wanted to go up to each of these people, to ask them who they were, where they had just been, what they had done there. But of course I did no such thing, not just because I had been trained not to speak to strangers unless absolutely necessary, but also because the only word I had learned in four days was “bonjour,” and that wouldn’t take me very far.
I noticed then that people were looking at me, too. A group of curly-haired Algerian men clustered around a pay phone whistled as I walked by, one of them raising his eyebrows as if asking me a secret question. I covered my head again with my dupatta and hurried past. I walked farther down and leaned for a minute against the railing, my back turned toward the throngs of people arriving. In front of me, two elderly women were seated, and they smiled at me when my eyes caught theirs. One turned to the other and said something quickly in French, and I knew they were talking about me.
“They’re saying you’re hot,” said a voice behind me. I turned around. Shazia was shorter than she looked in the photograph in her room, her face plumper.
“Mummy said you would be here. I knew it was you, even from the back,” she said, giving me a hug, still on the other side of the metal railing as a security guard hurried her along. “I was thinking, who else would be covered head-to-toe on a beautiful night like this? Wow,” she said, her eyes resting on the silver streak in my hair. “I’d heard about that, but thought people were making it up. Can I touch?”
I smiled and hugged her again after she had made her way to my side of the railing, the side on which she now belonged. Despite the length of her journey, she smelled like fresh lemons. I liked her immediately.
“Where’s Mummy?” she asked, pulling off her sweater and wrapping its sleeves around her waist.
“Over there, sitting down. She’s not feeling so well,” I said.
“Come,” Shazia said, leading me by the hand. “Let’s go get her and head home.”
The Metro was full, but a man gave up his seat for Aunt Mina while Shazia and I held on to the plastic straps that hung from the ceiling, holding between us a pile of bags and jackets and shawls.
“You never know what the weather will be like here,” Shazia said, motioning to all her stuff. “In Paris, you have to be prepared.
“So have you been enjoying your stay here? Mummy said you came here to see a boy.” For the last part of that sentence, Shazia slid into a Pakistani accent. She wobbled her head from side to side, uttering the words just as her mother might-or mine for that matter-and then giggled at her own insolence.
“Yes, I came to see a boy, but haven’t seen him yet,” I said, wanting to change the subject quickly. “How was your flight? Long way from Los Angeles, yes?”
“Not as long as coming from India,” she said. “You really must have wanted to be here.”
“Yes,” I replied, my eyes now turned downward as I thought guiltily of how I was avoiding phoning home. “It was my dream to come.” Shazia smiled at me and reached up to pull away a few strands of my hair that had become affixed to my lip gloss.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve come to look after Mummy for a while, but not 24/7, so we can hang out together, paint the town red and all that.”
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but I certainly liked the sound of it.
The following evening, Shazia and I took a taxi-the first time I had been in one since arriving in Paris-and went to the Buddha Bar, which she told me was one of the most fashionable places in all of Paris. We entered into a space that was as dark as it was loud, handed our coats to a girl sitting in a small cubicle, and almost collided with a waitress in a red-and-gold silk dress carrying a tray of multicolored drinks. Shazia grabbed my wrist and took me down a flight of stairs. I stopped in the middle of the restaurant and stared up at an enormous golden Buddha that dominated the room.
“You can close your mouth now,” Shazia said, smiling. “You’re wowed. We get it.” She pulled me over to a long table at the back that was filled with her friends. She hugged and kissed all of them and introduced me as her cousin from Mumbai. They all nodded enthusiastically, some of them recounting a trip to Rajasthan or Calcutta or how their boss/roommate’s boyfriend/neighbor is from India, as if that would help me feel more welcome. I sat next to Shazia and a girl she used to work with, unable to pay any attention to their conversation. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Buddha; the girls in their short, sharp dresses and high shoes; or the men in their smart shirts tucked into jeans. Everyone had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, dancing in their own world to music that boomed through the speakers. My eyes began to smart with all the smoke, and nobody else said a word to me the whole night, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
I realized then that Paris with a friend-or better, a far-removed cousin who had become a friend-was a lot less lonely than it had been. Shazia had lived here most of her life, so knew the city as intimately as anyone would. Every day, Aunt Mina would ask me when I was leaving, if I had “finished my matter,” but Shazia would take me by the hand and, ensuring that her mother was tended to for the next couple of hours, would tell her to “stop bugging” me and would take me out.
In the few days after Shazia arrived, once she had recovered from the jet lag, she showed me the Paris that only insiders know. She had said we would do all the tourist things, like window-shop around Saint-Germain, go boating down the Seine, take coffee and croissants at Les Deux Magots, and ride the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
But we also visited her friends who lived in a basement apartment that had been transformed into something that reminded me of pictures in an old storybook of Aladdin’s Cave, and others who took us out for Chinese food in a restaurant that was an hour’s Metro ride from our home, but worth it for the fragrance of the rice and the crispiness of the steamed vegetables. On a sunny afternoon, we went to the Île St-Louis and ate the creamiest ice cream I had ever tasted in my life, its flavor lingering on my tongue long after I’d finished the last spoonful. French words came tumbling out of her mouth at every turn, and I made it a point to learn what I could from her, loving to imitate her irritated “mais non!” and enthusiastic “bah oui!” and the string of “alors” that referred to nothing in particular.
“You’ll get there,” she said smiling. “It’s actually an easy language to learn, once you get the hang of it.”
“You say that as if I’ll be here forever,” I said as we stood one evening on the Pont Neuf, watching the lights of the city flicker in the distance. “I came here to do something, and I’ve not done it yet.” The guilt resurfaced. The slip of paper still lay in the pocket of my coat.
“It’s never easy going against the grain.” Shazia’s voice was suddenly quiet, the darkness of the river seeming to mirror her momentary mood. “I did it, and I’m still paying the price.”
Shazia’s father, Reza, a Pakistani immigrant who had opened a small tourist store on the farthest reaches of the rue de Rivoli twenty years ago, had left Lahore to seek out a better life for his wife and their infant daughter, and had ended up first in England, working at an Indian restaurant in Birmingham. When he one day overheard a table of diners talking about a trip they had just made to Paris, and all the wonderful shops they had seen there, something in his heart stirred, and he instantly believed that that was where he could make a good living.
Shazia was five years old when her parents took the ferry from Dover to Calais and headed straight to the French capital. Her father had purchased a secondhand Linguaphone system to learn some basics of the language, but with his heavy Lahore accent-slightly tinged by the broad Birmingham brogue he had acquired-it was not surprising that nobody could understand him.
But still, he was fortunate to find a small space on the heavily traveled tourist street, and put down most of his life savings for the first and last months’ rent and a security deposit. With what little he had left, he rented a studio apartment in the Latin Quarter, all three of them living in one room. Shazia told me that her mother cried every day for a month after coming to this country, baffled by the language and the habits and the incessant smoking of these people. But Shazia took to it instantly, picking up the language as if it were her own. After a decade of working hard and saving everything, Reza was able to buy a larger place, with a bedroom for their only daughter who was fast becoming a woman.
Reza died three years ago. He had been stabbed in the back by a burglar who had forced his way into the store at closing time, then made off with four hundred francs from the register and a pile of J’ADORE PARIS sweatshirts. Reza’s blood was splattered over the rest of his stock, dripping from the small shot glasses embellished with motifs of the Arc de Triomphe and the porcelain platters featuring Moulin Rouge dancers.
“Gypsies,” the police had said, as Aunt Mina lay crumpled in a heap on the floor, Shazia holding on to her but feeling desperately faint herself. “They used to be just petty thieves. But now, they find knives.”
Shazia, who had been working as a legal secretary in an American law practice at the time, for a short while thought about quitting her job and taking over her father’s small shop, to honor the man he had become and the decent business he had built on his own.
But a week after his murder, she stood alone in the store and stared at the now cleaned-up merchandise and the empty cash register, and knew she would be miserable, consigned forever to her father’s death.
“The place is cursed,” Aunt Mina had said. “I have already lost him here. I will not sleep another night in my life if you start working here too.”
So Shazia went back to work at her shiny office near the Place de la Concorde while her mother stayed home and wept and prayed for Allah to come and take her away too.
There was insurance money, and Shazia was earning well, so they lived comfortably. But Mina had never known anything but marriage, and now the only reason she had come to this country was gone. It was her dream, she kept saying, to return to Lahore to live out her days. Once her daughter was married off, that was what she would do.
“And then I got the transfer,” Shazia said, telling me the story that first night. “ California. Los Angeles. Sunshine three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Oh my God, how could I not go?”
Aunt Mina fell into a heap again when her daughter told her she was moving out and leaving home, and neither threats nor begging did anything to convince Shazia otherwise. On the day she was leaving, her mother rammed a taveez-a talisman to ward off bad luck-into her daughter’s bag, kissed her on the forehead, and pleaded with her to return soon. Shazia sent money every month, along with letters and photographs describing her new Los Angeles life, all of which made Mina yearn for Lahore even more.
“We are the same, you and I,” Shazia said to me as we stared over the bridge into the Seine. “We are the only children in our families, only daughters, both fatherless, both with mothers too consumed in their own grief to really look at us.” Shazia wiped away a tear, the first time I had seen her show any emotion.
“We are like sisters,” she said, linking her arm in mine. “And I will do everything I can to help a sister.”