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.”
Chapter Eighteen
Page Six of the New York Post is like the paan stall five buildings to the right of Ram Mahal.
There, Lakshman the paanwalla sits cross-legged atop a stained white cushion, passing on information about the neighborhood and its residents. If Mrs. Sharma from apartment 7 – D had complained to him of chest pains that morning, then by noon Mr. Bhatia of the Soldiers’ Colony down the road knew about it. If Ashok seth, the importer of towels who lived at Walia Apartments, was expecting a visit from the tax authorities next week, then Buntu, the young newspaper vendor across the street, would be happy to commiserate. Without having to leave his perch, Lakshman entertained and informed all those who stopped by his stall for a small green leaf stuffed with spiced betal nut.
The morning after the show, because of my photograph on Page Six of the New York Post, everyone knew me, even if what they thought they knew wasn’t actually true. In the first place, I wasn’t really an orphan. In the second, I had never been impoverished. Perhaps just the last word of the headline, FASHIONISTAS WOWED BY NEW MODEL-IMPOVERISHED MUSLIM ORPHAN OUTCAST, was correct.
Stavros swore to me that during his game of Chinese whispers, when he had told his seat neighbors to watch out for me, he hadn’t told them that both my parents were dead.
“I might have intimated that they weren’t around,” he said. “You know how these things spread. And the impoverished bit: well, I think everyone just assumes that if you’re from India, you’re poor.”
By the middle of that afternoon, Stavros had received six calls from other designers showing at Fashion Week, begging him to slot me into their shows, saying that they would create a spot for me even at this late stage.
“I could say yes, but I’m not going to,” he said, smiling. “You’re going to be the elusive one, the one everyone wants but nobody can have. That will be our power.”
The girl that everyone wants. It felt unnatural to even think it, that a bunch of strangers, a group of fashion designers who had, until now, no correlation at all with my life would “want” me. My own mother hadn’t wanted me. She had said as much to me a few days before I had left Mumbai, when my grandfather was asking me what I would be packing to wear to my “bride-viewing” meeting with Tariq.
“You must look nice and attractive,” my mother had said, barely lifting her eyes from the evening paper. “You must win him, and finally leave this house. Our burden will then become his.”
My four turns on Pasha’s catwalk led to lots of calls and offers, but there was only one that Stavros would accept: a four-page fashion spread in Elle-a feature showcasing fashion’s current fascination with hand-embroidered tunics and flared silk pants. They were the kind of things Bollywood stars would wear when being photographed by Stardust, although in New York they cost a hundred times the price. I heard him on the phone with Dimitri, accepting congratulations for what was happening.
“We’re aiming for the cover of Vogue and then a couple of big endorsement deals-I don’t know, maybe Revlon or L’Oréal. Something global,” Stavros said, his shirtsleeves rolled up, pacing around his office. “I know we’re shooting high, but she’s quite a commodity, this one. Best you’ve ever found. Don’t worry, I’ll reserve a few percentage points in my commission for you.”
The morning of my shoot at Elle, which was set to take place in a penthouse apartment facing Central Park West, Stavros brought a woman named Felicia to breakfast. She had an oddly rectangular face, framed by masses of curly black hair, and a mouth that seemed slightly askew to her nose, like something out of a Picasso painting. But she had a nice, warm handshake and, compared to all the skinniness around me, had some flesh on her bones, a fact I found comforting. At last, here was someone unafraid to eat.