“How’s your mother?” I asked, sidelining her questions completely. “And have you been back to Paris recently? I’ll be going, in a couple of months, for couture. You should meet me there,” I said, wishing immediately that I could have taken the words back.
“Oooh, I’d love it!” she squealed. “Will you get me a front-row seat? Can I come to the parties with you? Will there be gift bags? Oh my God, will Kai be there?”
I realized then that the only thing worse than being a groupie, was having one in the family.
As my “relationship” was proceeding as planned, it wasn’t too hard to stick to the terms of our agreement. By this point, Kai and I had repeated our story so many times, it had become rote. And yet we somehow both managed to sound as excited, as if it were all true. It was a story shrouded in glamour, enfolded in allure. I was on a magazine shoot in Jamaica; he was there on vacation. He had vaguely known who I was. He saw me as I emerged from the pool and watched stealthily as I wrapped myself in a pareo. He sent over a cocktail, and I turned it down because I didn’t drink. He was charmed, he said, and hooked. He played his guitar to me as we sat on a rock by the beach, under the moonlight. He sang of lost love and dashed desires, his number-one song that summer. The chemistry was unforgettable, he told everyone. By the time he was done telling the story, me blushing at his side, even I believed him.
The voice on the phone was faint at first, vaguely recognizable. She repeated my name over and over, as I stopped breathing, wondering if it could really be…
“Nilu?” I said. “Is that you?”
“Yes! Tanaya!” She sounded thrilled. “I’m in New York. I had to look you up.”
Getting my number was a long and arduous process, apparently-beginning with calling the switchboard at Blaze, a makeup line with whom I had just signed an endorsement deal. Five different connections later, she had reached Stavros, who recognized her name from my stories and had immediately passed on my number. I stood in my apartment, the phone to my ear, trembling, delighted to hear the voice of someone who knew me before all this started.
She was only in town for a few days, so we made plans to meet immediately. Her brother, a systems analyst in London, had come to New York for a job interview and had asked his sister to join him for a few days. He was making enough money to get her a visa and buy her a plane ticket, so she didn’t hesitate.
We met outside a restaurant in Greenwich Village, close to the apartment she was staying in with her brother and a friend of his. I saw her approaching, turning a corner at the far end of the street, and I ran toward her, my heels clicking along the pavement. I stood in front of her, saw my ecstatic face in those small round glasses of hers, and flung my arms around her.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you,” I whispered in her ear, trying to stifle my tears. “I can’t tell you what it’s been like not to have my friend.”
She hugged me back, tightly.
“I’m here now, Tanaya!” she said, brightly. “For a few days, anyway; it will be like old times.”
I couldn’t even wait for the menus to arrive before bar-raging her with questions-about Mahim and Mumbai and the weather and the latest movies. She told me that I had been the subject of a recent profile in the Times of India, a generally positive feature about a Mumbai Muslim who had made it big in the world of modeling.
“On our street, everyone is so proud of you,” she said, breaking off a piece of bread and wiping the crumbs away on her napkin. “The paanwalla tells me everything, that people stop by and complain about the economy and the rain, but always say, ‘Hah, but that pretty Shah girl from Ram Mahal, now she is doing very vell.’ ” “I laughed at Nilu’s rendition, but could imagine the chatter on the street, the claims to fame at the corner stall.
“Really,” Nilu said, now serious. “You’ve done something great, Tanaya. You know, I am now at Mrs. Mehra’s School of Domestics? Where else would I go? But you have escaped all that. You are doing what I knew you always could. You are making your own money and creating your own name, no more just Zakir Shah’s beautiful granddaughter from flat 1B. Do not be ashamed,” she said. “Be proud. I am very proud of you.”
I was quiet for a moment, waiting for her to answer a question I couldn’t ask.
“Yes, I saw them,” she said softly. “I went by there when I knew I was coming here, to try and maybe get your contact details. I had thought, possibly, that you wouldn’t be on speaking terms but wasn’t sure, that maybe Nana wasn’t as stern as you made him out to be. But, after I saw him, I guess I could see why you were always afraid of him.”
I chewed on my straw, scared for her to go on, but needing to hear about my family from someone who had just seen them. I had been gone almost a year, my new life unrecognizable. Some of the other models I had befriended here rarely spoke of their families, and if they did, it was usually as an afterthought. Until the day I got on that plane for Paris, in search of Sabrina, my family had been my entire existence.
“Well, it will just hurt you to hear it,” Nilu said, as she looked at my questioning face. “We should talk about other things. Your life is beautiful now. There is no need to put yourself through this.”
“No,” I said, placing my hand on top of hers. “Just tell me how they are, Nana and my mother. How they look. How their health is. What they said…,” I stammered, “when you mentioned my name.”
She looked down at her food for a minute, unsure.
“Your grandfather has always been very nice to me,” she said. “Every time I came over to see you, he would always go down to the corner and buy candy for us to share. Remember? And anytime there was a new Archie comic at the bookstall, he would bring it for us to read together.” Her face softened into a smile as she thought back.
“But when I went over there last week, as soon as he opened the door to me, his face turned so gray and angry, I swear I thought he was going to slap me then and there,” she said, the smile disappearing. “For a minute, I think he thought that it was all my fault.”
I felt the tears returning, but wiped them away. People in the restaurant had already recognized me, and I could already anticipate the headlines: SUPERMODEL BREAKS DOWN OVER LUNCH WITH MYSTERY WOMAN. My life, I could see, had become a series of newspaper captions.
“You know all this already, Tanaya. Don’t make me go on,” she said. “It’s as painful for me to tell it as it is for you to hear it.”
“I need to hear it anyway,” I said. “If that is the only thing that helps to keep my nana and mamma in my mind, then it is better than nothing.”
She sighed and stabbed her fork into some slivers of beet.
“He wasn’t happy to see me, but he invited me in anyway,” Nilu continued. “He’s always been very polite that way, no? Your mother was there, in her room, and she came out when she heard my voice, but didn’t say anything. Your servant offered me tea and biscuits, but I said no. We just stood there, the three of us, in the little corridor. I asked how they were, and they nodded but said nothing. Then Nana asked me what I wanted, and I said I was there to see if maybe he had your phone number in New York. He looked shocked. Tanaya, do they even know what part of the world you are living in?”
I felt ashamed suddenly, that I was now not so different from the other girls I had met here, the ones from Missouri and California and Alabama who had to forsake their families and their former lives for fame and free martinis in New York. I had never wanted to be one of those girls. But now, with my closest relatives not even knowing where I was, I had become one. It was apparent then that either Aunt Mina had stopped communicating with my grandfather or Shazia had finally stopped talking to her mother about me. The dusty web of family relations that my grandfather had tried so hard to keep intact no longer included me.