“But who is she, Nana?” I asked timorously as we walked the short distance back to our apartment. I should have been whooping with delight that my grandfather was making all the arrangements for me to visit a place that had, until that day, been an inconceivable fantasy. “How come I have never heard of her before?”
Mina’s grandfather and Nana’s late wife had been step-brother and -sister, born to different mothers. After Nana had moved his family to Mumbai from Pakistan, he and his wife had lost contact with most of the other family members, many of whom had stayed in Lahore. There had been the occasional letter to share some news of celebration or tragedy, but once my grandmother had passed away and her own siblings had begun to die off, the web that had once conjoined the family had slowly disintegrated.
But Nana, being a man of the world, comparatively speaking, chose to do his bit to keep up relations by always having their phone numbers listed in his favorite old diary, even if he did not speak to or see some of these relatives for years at a time.
“She is a widow, and deserves all the respect accorded to one,” he said, marching at a brisk pace, his hand still around my upper arm.
“She has lived in Paris for many years, but is Muslim at heart. She has agreed to allow you to stay with her while you indulge this madness of yours. But,” he said, turning to me again as we entered our home, “make no mistake, Tanaya. In our day, we did not have the luxury of meeting our spouses before the wedding. I am only permitting this because I have already agreed to the marriage. Do you understand?”
Nana’s frown lines were suddenly deep and dark, reminding me of grooves in a muddy road. Then, with the slight force of his hand on my back, he pushed me into our apartment and slammed shut the door behind us.
Chapter Three
Compared to Mumbai’s dry, dusty heat, the Paris air felt chilly on my face.
I stood outside the terminal, clutching a small purse into which I had stuffed one hundred euros and change, converted from Indian rupees. It was a small fortune for my grandfather, and he had given it to me grudgingly, but even though he didn’t want me to come to Paris, he certainly didn’t want me to starve here.
I had known there would be nobody at the airport to greet me, so Nilu had figured out that the best and cheapest way for me to get from Charles de Gaulle Airport to my aunt’s house was on the airport bus.
As I waited for it to appear, with exact change in my hand for the ticket, I stared at a loose leaf of paper that was dancing in the wind, pirouetting on the pavement. I knew there was so much else to see if I would only look up, straight ahead of me. But it was precisely because there was so much to see that I couldn’t. I was overwhelmed. I had never before been among so many foreigners, alone in a strange place. Now that I was finally here, even I was beginning to question my grandfather’s decision to send me. It was mid-morning and glorious, and I was surrounded by people. Yet I was as scared as if I were in a dark alley alone at night.
The back of the bus was empty, so I pulled my small trolley bag and brown suitcase down the aisle, shielding my face as I went with my scarf. There I pressed my face against the glass window pane. Some Asian tourists in front of me already had their cameras out, clicking shots of the skyline with its succession of planes taking off and landing. I realized then that I had completely forgotten to bring a camera, and nobody at home had thought to remind me. I was certain that if I had suggested it, my grandfather would have pointed out sternly that I was “not on some jolly vacation.”
I smiled as I thought of him, then remembered my coat pocket. I fished inside it and found the piece of paper that he had shoved into my hand just as I was about to board the plane. On it, written very clearly in Nana’s dark-blue fountain-pen ink, were Tariq Khan’s phone numbers at work and at home. Nana had instructed me to call Tariq as soon as I arrived in Paris, aware that Tariq wouldn’t call me, as that was against protocol. His grandfather had made the first overture to mine, and it was for us-as the family of the supposed bride-to make every effort from then on.
But I didn’t want to think about any of that. I wanted instead to keep staring out of the window, anxious for the driver to start his engine, impatient to begin the journey that I had only dreamed about.
More than an hour passed before we arrived on the street where my aunt lived, and I followed the directions she had conveyed to my grandfather and found myself standing in front of a low building that stood behind an old, dry, stone fountain. There was a tiny elevator into which I just about managed to squeeze myself and my luggage, the smell of which, oddly, reminded me of home. My aunt’s apartment was only one of three that were crowded onto a narrow floor, suddenly dashing my visions of grand halls and curved, polished wooden staircases.
I knocked lightly, and I heard a slow shuffling inside. The door opened, and there she was, the aunt I had never known, dressed in a thick sweater shrugged over a salwar kameez, beige-colored socks on her shoeless feet. She looked as if she had just woken up, her hair uncombed, her face weary. Beneath it all though, if I stared hard enough, I could see that she too was probably once very beautiful.
“Hah, you have come,” she said, stepping aside to let me in. I reached over to hug her, but instead she forced a smile, patted my back, and turned around.
“Your room is there,” she said, pointing to a door halfway down a hallway. “I’m making lunch. Come and eat.”
After a meal of lentils and rice, during which Aunt Mina asked me a few cursory questions about my grandfather, I requested her permission to take a shower.
“OK, but quick one,” she said. “Water bill comes very high.”
Despite my new exotic environment, I dressed the way I always did in India, in a salwar kameez, this time with a mismatched shawl covering my head. I pulled a few euros out of my purse and went out, finding a bench at the end of Aunt Mina’s street. I sat there for two hours, gazing at the foreign-looking people as they rushed by, on their way to somewhere important, newspapers folded under their arms, a cigarette between long fingers. Then I walked around the block, careful to note the little landmarks I was passing, scared that I might get lost. When I grew familiar with that one street, I walked onto another, then another. I stayed out for five hours, even after I grew hungry and thirsty from all the walking and gawking. But I did not have the courage to enter a store and buy a bottle of water, not knowing how to ask for what I needed, and worried about every euro I would have to spend.
For the next three days, that was all I did. Each day, I went a little farther, marveling at the pretty lace things I would see in a shop window or smelling freshly baked breads outside a bakery, trying to catch even one isolated word from the blurred conversations around me. Three days after arriving, I finally found the courage to walk into a store and buy a bottle of orange juice, drinking in the pulpy sweetness as a silent, solitary toast.
That night, when I returned home, Aunt Mina chastised me for being out of the house.
“Again you are roaming-roaming,” she said, not looking up at me from the television, on which a videotape of a Hindi soap opera was playing. “You have come here for a reason, and I’m not understanding why you are spending all your days and money just roaming.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped.
“I am not well,” she continued, this time turning to look at me. “May Allah help me. Doctor says bad blood pressure, maybe clot is coming. Heart attack. Stroke even. Shazia is arriving tomorrow to care for me. I will need the spare room for my daughter. You can sleep on couch in the meantime, but please, now, you just finish your matter and go back home.”