I returned to my seat, picked up my bag, and walked out.

I was surprised to hear Stavros’s voice on the other end of the line. It had been three days since I called him to let him know that I didn’t want to be Honey. I had explained to him that after attending a couple of acting classes, it had become patently clear to me that while other models could try their hand at acting, I wasn’t equipped to do so. I told him that it would take self-confidence and grit and being naked in the truest sense, being prepared to be devastatingly bad at something and have a dozen crew members on a film set snicker behind your back as a result. It would also require having an ego. And, if I’d discovered one thing about myself, it was that behind the klieg lights and the limousines and the private jets, I still didn’t have an ego.

The following seventy-two hours, as a result, were spent doing what Felicia frenetically described as “damage frigging control.” Dimitri and Stavros had been working on extricating me from my contract with Werner and Max and dealing with lawyers. I realized that Tariq must have been among them, but elected to think no further about it. Felicia had calls in to her contacts at Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and of course Page Six, all of whom had announced my decision to make a foray into film, and who now would be faced with the prospect of announcing my withdrawal.

“We don’t want you to be seen as flaky,” said Felicia, her cell phone, as always, pressed to her ear.

“No, God forbid,” I replied.

So Stavros’s voice was an immediate comfort to me, an indication that he was no longer upset. The line was faint, his voice far away. In the background I could hear a woman’s voice announcing flight arrivals in French.

“Where are you?” I asked him.

“I’m here, in New York. But there’s someone on the phone for you. He called me looking for you, so I’ve patched you in. Sir, go ahead,” he said, replacing the receiver at his end and telling me he’d call me back later.

“Hello, yes?” I said.

“Tanaya? It’s Tariq. Tariq Khan.”

I gripped the phone tighter and released the handful of M &Ms I had been munching on, which had now left a rainbow of colors on my palm.

“Hello, Tariq,” I said, trepidation in my voice. “It’s very nice to hear from you.”

“I don’t have time for small talk,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have a plane to catch. I’m on my way to New York, actually. I have a conference there tomorrow. But, if you don’t mind, I need to speak to you about something quite urgent. May I call you when I arrive?”

“Is this about the movie? If so, there’s nothing really to discuss. I know they are your clients, but it was really stupid and I didn’t want any part of it and-”

“It’s not about the movie.” His voice was suddenly softer. “I shouldn’t say this, but I’m glad you dropped out. I thought it was ludicrous from the beginning, but they had the cash, and I was just doing my job. It’s about something else, much more important. Give me your number, and I’ll call you when I get in, OK?”

In a corner of the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, Tariq was next to me on a couch, his little gold earrings glinting in the soft shine of the tableside lamp on his right. He was as handsome as I remembered-sturdy and strong and kind. In another age, I would have been graced indeed to have been his wife.

But Tariq looked at me as if he were my parent and I was a child who had broken a brand-new toy. He had wanted to see me because he had wanted to tell me, in person, that my nana was crippled, near death. He had been riding in the back of an auto-rickshaw, on his way to post a letter, and a bus had veered through a red light and smashed into the vehicle he was in. He was lucky to be alive at all, Tariq told me, repeating exactly what he had heard from his grandfather. It had happened three weeks ago, but it had taken this long for the news to travel from Ram Mahal in Mahim to Tariq’s grandfather in Pakistan to Tariq in Paris, and finally to me, in the Four Seasons in New York, jazz playing softly in the background.

All I could think of was what my mother had said a decade ago, when a conversation turned to surviving loss. My mother’s sister Sohalia, one of the beautiful ones, had asked her one time how she had managed to remain so resilient in the wake of being abandoned by a husband when two months pregnant, how she had not descended into bitterness and endless, raging fury.

I was eleven when I had overheard the question. Aunt Sohalia was visiting from Karachi, and she and my mother were shelling peas at our dining table, their heads covered, their hands busy, their eyes on the slimy green pods in front of them. I was sitting close by, reading a comic book, waiting for my Nana to come home from one of his flights. I don’t recall how the subject arose, only that my aunt had been angry with her own husband about something and had, in a moment of extreme pique, even considered leaving him. Of course, we all knew she would never do it. She was, after all, a gorgeous and dependent woman, and he was a rich and powerful man, and thus it would always remain.

But the question caused my mother to drop her pea pods for a minute, and to lift her eyes and cast them out toward the balcony.

“It’s easy,” she said. “You just think of everything you hated about them. You just focus on the absolute worst in their personalities, the most disgusting habits, the things that irritated you to the point of insanity. I was only with Mr. Hassan Bhatt for two months. But there was so much about him I hated. I might have loved him too, but I have forced out of my mind and heart every recollection as to why. I only remember the hatred. That way, I don’t feel the pain.” Then she calmly shoved her hands back into the white plastic colander and continued shelling.

My mother had rarely been right about things, but she was right about this. I supposed that if I closed my eyes tight and thought about all the things I disliked about Nana-his constant and unforgiving sternness, the gruff way in which he bid me good morning, his habit of pulling out with his bare fingers bits of sticky white rice that lay impacted in his molars-that if I concentrated only on these things and on nothing else, then maybe this feeling of complete devastation wouldn’t overcome me, that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t die from guilt.

“What do you want to do?” Tariq asked as we stood outside his hotel fifteen minutes later, the crush of New Yorkers getting off work gathering around us.

“I don’t know,” I said, still too dazed to think. “Maybe go back… but how? They hate me.” I looked down at my snakeskin-tipped shoes.

“Look, I have a meeting now, but it should be over in a couple of hours. Why don’t you come back here and we’ll go out to dinner. That is, if it’s OK with your boyfriend,” he said, lowering his voice at the last word as if he were uttering some profanity. “Let’s try and figure something out. You need to see your grandfather. You can’t ignore this, you know.”

“I know,” I said, shaking his hand meekly and walking down the street, where I dialed Kai’s number and explained my situation.

“What the crap do you mean you can’t come? The whole goddamn world is going to be there!

“This is bleeding crap, you know that?” he bellowed. I had promised him that I would be there, front and center, at a performance he was giving that night at Chimera, a hot new club in SoHo. He was the star attraction and I, apparently, was a nice little extra inducement. In exchange for him showing up and giving an “impromptu” performance, the owner of the club-a media mogul who was branching out into nightlife-would reward Kai with a Louis Vuitton suitcase and just about anything he could fill it with from up and down Madison Avenue. After Kai’s gig I was to go up, kiss him, beam at him, and then at the photographers who would be hovering in the background. It had all been planned, and my dress had been laid out. But now, something more important had come up.