“So, what do we have here?” he said, turning his attention back to me.

“This is Tanaya Shah, new to the scene,” Stavros replied. “She’s lived in Paris before this, India before that. I thought she had a beautiful and exotic new look that might be perfect for your fall collection runway.”

Pasha was ignoring Stavros and instead approached me directly. He gazed at me up and down, circling me as if I were a car in a showroom. When he stood behind me, I felt his eyes move from the nape of my neck down to my behind, and I was suddenly appreciative of the coverage that ultra-traditional Muslim women had on their bodies. At least they wouldn’t have to contend with this gawking and mental undressing.

“Well, let’s try her on for size, shall we?” he said to Stavros, a sly smile returning to his lips.

In another room, one of the girls handed over one of Pasha’s creations, and I gasped at the beauty of it: fluid chiffon pants and a long tunic, covered with a heftily embroidered waistcoat, which the girl told me had been made in India. I lifted it up to my face, the wooden beads and sparkly sequins pressing into my skin, just to see if I could detect a scent of my country, perhaps a micro-drop of sweat from one of the workers who had toiled on it or a whiff of dust from the factory in which it was made. I held up the flowing, extravagant ensemble, and said to the girl, smiling: “Now this I can wear.”

Pasha booked me for his next catwalk show based on seeing me in that outfit alone. But as a jubilant Stavros and I were about to leave Pasha’s office, he whispered something into Stavros’s ear. In the elevator, I pressed my agent to tell me what Pasha had said.

“He needs you to lose weight,” Stavros said, eyes on the floor. “Ten pounds at least. Oh, and the gray hair thing? He thinks it’s a gimmick; says it has to go, that you’ll look too different from the other girls on the runway.”

Chapter Seventeen

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.