For a minute, it sounded like her speech was rehearsed, as if this is what she said to every ingénue who came through her doors. But I quickly realized that she must be talking to me, because I was probably the only nineteen-year-old fashion model she had ever met who needed professional help in finding a boyfriend.

Felicia spent the next ten days looking through copies of the National Enquirer and In Style. She called other publicists and her sister-in-law’s best friend who worked at ICM in Los Angeles. She called a contact who freelanced for Entertainment Weekly and another who scouted male models for Calvin Klein. She compiled a list of prospects and, in my presence, started crossing them off one by one. The male models were a definite no, she explained to me, because they would be “too vain,” and the competition between us would be too intense. There were some rising stars on the Hollywood scene who might be worth checking out, but the cross-country commute might be a bit too taxing, unless the prospect in question had the means to fly by private jet, and George Clooney had just come out of a relationship with a model. She thought aloud, reeling off names and facts and home addresses, as if any of it really mattered to me.

“Am I expected to do sex with them?” I said, ashamed at the question.

“You mean, have sex?” she asked, laughing. “Er, yeah. That’s what an affair is primarily about.”

I put my head in my hands. To Nana’s dismay, I had yet to fully memorize the Koran. But I was certain that premarital sex was a sin. Even though, back in India, I only went to mosque once a week, walking along the plank of land that stretched into the Indian Ocean to get to the Haji Ali that lay at the end, and even though I was certain that there were plenty of Muslim girls everywhere who contravened that particular edict, I was not about to be one of them. I had done enough to disgrace my nana already.

“I’m sorry, Felicia, but I can’t. I don’t see myself lying between sheets, naked, with some white-skinned boy. I don’t want to be touched by anyone until we have been blessed by a mullah and my grandfather has blessed me with his hands on my head…,” I said, my voice trailing off as I realized that would never happen anyway. I started to cry.

Felicia stopped her strategizing, sat back in her chair, sighed, and closed her eyes.

“Don’t worry, Tanaya,” she said, reaching a sympathetic hand across her desk toward me. “We’ll think of something.”

His name was Kai. There was no last name, not even an initial. Just Kai. He had opened for Coldplay and Maroon 5 six months ago, and now a single from his just-released album had gone multiplatinum. He was British, from Birmingham, and had conquered the United Kingdom before alighting in the United States. “He’s the personification of Brit pop,” Felicia said excitedly. “It’s no longer underground, and it’s all the rage, and kids like Kai are making it big.” He was, Felicia continued to point out to me, “absolutely the hottest thing in music today. And cute, too.”

She had come over to my apartment on a Saturday afternoon as I was packing to leave for a magazine shoot on the sandy beaches of Jamaica. From her bag, she took out a folder containing press clippings and photographs of the man that I was, apparently, going to embark on my first fully fledged romantic relationship with-fake or otherwise.

He had been chosen as one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, and I had to agree with them. In the clipping she showed me, his hair was dark like mine, spiked up in the front with a smidgen of gel. He had a happy face, slightly creased around the eyes, a shadow of stubble around his mouth. He was swinging from a hammock, his hands folded behind his head, a yellow-colored shirt open to halfway down his chest, a guitar resting by his side.

“I’m telling you, he’s the one,” she said excitedly. “I came up with a reasonable excuse-something about maybe you and him getting together on his next music video. You know, to wear something sexy and dance in it. We can work all those details out,” she continued, waving her hand dismissively.

“Oh, and don’t worry about it,” she went on, watching a look of dismay cross my face. “You won’t have to stop being a good Muslim girl. The boy is gay.”

As fate would have it, Kai’s people told my people that he could drop in on my magazine shoot in Jamaica. He was, I was told, currently casting for his next few music videos and was aiming to have one of them nominated for the MTV Music Awards, so he was going all out to find the best director, best choreographer, and sexiest story line. I was no stranger to him, apparently. He had seen a ten-second clip of me on the red carpet at a movie premiere in New York I had attended recently, and told his people who told my people that I had looked “intriguing.” So he was flattered, if not a little surprised, because, as his manager told mine, Kai didn’t think I would be interested in “that kind of thing.”

Once it had been decided that Kai would meet me in Jamaica the day after I got there, Felicia and Stavros booked themselves on flights as well.

“We gotta huddle,” Felicia said as we waited at the check-in counter at JFK. “This needs to be planned perfectly. Can’t let you negotiate this on your own.”

Stavros, clutching his passport and the ticket that I knew was coming out of my paycheck, looked at me sympathetically.

Jamaica was unbearably hot. There was no way anyone could walk on the sand without sneakers on; even rubber flip-flops looked like they might melt under the strength of the sun. The water was sparkling and clear, and palm trees swayed at one end of the long beach.

In India, they would have had a sedan chair for me, a seat on two long wooden poles to carry me from the hair-and-makeup cabana to the water’s edge, where the photography was happening. But instead, two men, employees of the hotel where we were staying that owned this particular stretch of beach, hoisted me up and carried me along, setting me down where the cool, salty water softened the sand and tempered the blazing heat.

I was wearing a gold bathing suit, my hair tight and uncomfortable in cornrows. The theme of the magazine spread was “the sexiest swimsuits in movie history,” so I was being made to look like Bo Derek in 10, right before she meets Dudley Moore. Next up was Raquel Welch’s fur bikini.

The men who had carried me picked me up again, about to plop me down a few feet farther into the water, listening carefully to the instructions of the photographer, when I heard Felicia, who was wearing a hat the size of an umbrella, yelling to me from beside the cabana.

“He’s here!” she screamed out excitedly. “I see the posse approaching!”

I looked up and saw the man who was number twenty-eight on People’s list of gorgeous people, and decided that Kai should have been closer to the top. He emerged from a walkway that led from the hotel down to the beach, clad in a loud red shirt emblazoned with Gothic crosses, his hands plunged into the pockets of his denim jeans, large sunglasses covering the top half of his face. Even with all the cameras and equipment and chaos on this mild beach, he stood out like a boil. His “posse” was actually only three people, one of whom, based on sheer size alone, had to have been his bodyguard. Kai looked over in my direction and I realized to my utter horror that I still had two uniformed hotel employees holding me up, a leg each, with me squatting between them. I could only imagine how ridiculous I looked.

Kai grinned in my direction, waved, and continued to saunter my way, Felicia now affixing herself to his capsule entourage. The photographer rolled his eyes and told everyone to “take five.” We were all officially on a break.

“Good to meet you,” Kai said, extending his hand, which was soft and white in mine. His dark hair was nonchalantly swept back, revealing immaculate eyebrows, of which I was suddenly jealous.