Salaam, Paris (22 page)

“Let them,” I said.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Whoever decided to name Mumbai’s international airport Chhatrapati Shivaji should maybe have thought about it for a bit longer. In the days when Nana journeyed in and out through the building as if it were his home, it used to be called Sahar—sweet and simple. By the time I finally got around to seeing it, it had been given a name, which while easy to say if a subcontinental dialect was your first tongue, was monstrous to enunciate if you spoke anything but.

I considered this as I heard the American flight attendant try to announce our destination over the speaker, and I smiled at her efforts. I realized then that it had been a few days since I had allowed a smile to cross my lips, so immersed had I been in anxiety over my grandfather. My biggest fear was that he would die right before I got there, which typically happened in many of the Hindi movies I had seen: The heroine makes a mad dash across crowded thoroughfares to see a long-lost and very ill relative, but life leaves him just as she’s entering the doorway.

Roll credits.

I didn’t want that to be my ending.

Of course, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting. I knew there would be no open arms to welcome me; of that I could be certain. But I was hoping that my mother would at least let me into the house and stop long enough to listen to me. And that my grandfather would be so happy to see me and would be so appreciative that I had come to him in his moment of need, he would forgive all. That he would stroke me on the head like only grandfathers can, and tell me that both he and Allah would overlook my sins.

The seat next to me was empty, so I put my bag in it and folded my legs under my haunches. I was wearing the exact same outfit I had on when I left Mumbai more than a year before. It was a thick cotton
salwar kameez
in pale yellow, printed with small green flowers. The carry-on bag next to me was the same one I had left with, made from black PVC, bought from near Crawford market while Nana was shopping for vegetables and fruit and
halal
meat. It was three days before my scheduled departure for Paris, and Nana had said that for a parting gift I could choose one thing: that bag, a pair of woven leather slippers, a lightly embroidered woolen shawl, or some silver-and-stone earrings. I had opted for the bag, drawn by the fact that I would be able to put things into it that I had never owned before: a passport, an airline ticket, a pair of sunglasses that Nilu had given me. I hadn’t even used the bag after my career began, going instead for the high-priced ones that I was so often gifted with.

An outside pocket was partly open, a piece of paper caught in the teeth of the zipper. I pried it loose and saw that it contained Tariq’s phone numbers. It was the note that Nana had shoved into my hand as I got on that plane. The digits looked faded now, the paper grimy with my own fingerprints. I started to crumple it up, to toss it into the empty teacup that sat on the tray table in front of me. I would have no use for it anymore. But instead, I folded it neatly and slid it into my wallet.

Tariq had offered to come with me. That night, at dinner, when I told him that I had decided to fly back to Mumbai to see my family, he said that he was long overdue for a trip himself and would accompany me, that he would spend a few days in Mumbai seeing friends and then would hop across the border to see his own grandfather.

“Something like this makes you realize that they can go anytime,” he said, his eyes growing wistful. “I think I should go see my elders before it’s too late. I can’t let work run my life.”

But I had told him that this was something I needed to do on my own, and he had nodded politely and paid the bill. Outside the restaurant, he had shaken my hand stiffly, wished me well, and turned around to head back to his hotel. I stared at him as he went, waiting for something, not sure what. Then, as if sensing that I was still there, he had turned around and walked toward me again. He stood in front of me, one foot away, both of us bathed in the glow of yellow light from a lamp overhead.

“I am very pleased that I finally got a chance to talk to you, and to know you,” he said. “I had wondered, all this time, what you were like. In a way, I am sorry that it had to be under these circumstances, having to share bad news with you. But I also know that if it weren’t for that news, I would have had no occasion to call you. So, strangely, I am also grateful for it.”

I was quiet for a minute, taking in what he said, charmed at his honesty.

“I can see now that my nana was right,” I said. “Without even meeting you, he knew what kind of a man you were, based simply on your grandfather’s word.”

Tariq nodded and shook my hand again. “Tell your grandfather I say hello,” he said before moving out of the yellow light and stepping back into the night.

 

It was growing dusky as we approached. Gray rivers snaked their way through barren land on the outskirts, with urban density intensifying toward the center of the city. Lights started to come on in the ramshackle buildings as the sun slowly set. The plane descended, and the slums came into view, concrete walls separating them from the airport terminal.

The aircraft landed smoothly and taxied straight up to one of the gates. I slipped my feet, now cold and a little numb from the frosty cabin air, back into the ballerina flats that lay under my seat, the only thing I had on that was from my “second life.” I picked up my things, covered my head with my shawl, and walked the short way down the aisle toward the arched, open door.

The lines at immigration were backed up down the large hallway. At the far end, there was a special section for flight crews, and I watched as the attendants from my flight, accompanied by their pilots, whizzed through. My grandfather, in his day, must have done the same.

I suddenly felt nauseated as I thought of him again. We were in the same country now, and I was standing on the same spot where I was sure thousands of times in his life he had stood. I could almost feel him near me.

When I finally got to the front of the line, the immigration officer picked up my passport, still relatively new and crisp despite its extensive use. He flicked through the pages, peering at my photograph, and then back at the various stamps that covered its pages.

“Madam, you are off-duty stewardess?” he asked, his eyes appearing red and watery through his scratched bifocals.

“No, sir,” I replied.

“But you are unmarried?”

“That is correct.”

“So how you are gallivanting to so many countries all by yourself?”

“For my work,” I said, taking the passport back and squeezing past his desk before he had a chance to ask me any more questions.

I went through at least four other checkpoints after that, each officer rubber-stamping the same stamp that the previous officer had given me, slowing down a process that shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes and making me yearn for the smooth efficiency of Zurich, the pristine airport halls of Singapore. I had barely been back thirty minutes, yet I was starting to feel frustrated. “I’m in India now,” I had to remind myself. “Get used to it.”

At customs, they barely glanced at me. It appeared as if the more affluent a person seemed, the higher the likelihood of being singled out for a full luggage inspection, the assumption being that expensive electronics and velvet pouches of jewelry were probably lurking somewhere between folds of underwear and cotton shirts. But in my average outfit, my face free of makeup, my ears and fingers and wrists unadorned, I was nobody, an uninteresting, average woman who was arriving back at her homeland as anonymously as she had left it.

 

Nilu was waiting outside, pressed against the metal railings that divided arriving passengers from the people there to greet them. She looked happy to see me, almost relieved, but she also couldn’t hide the surprise on her face.

“You made it!” she said, throwing her arms around me. “I was thrilled when you called to tell me you were coming back, but for some reason thought you might chicken out at the last minute. But,” she said haltingly, “why do you look like this?”

“Like what?” I asked, glancing down at myself. “These are my clothes.”

“Yes, I remember that outfit. You wore it when you came to my house to say good-bye the afternoon you were leaving. But I guess I thought you would return in your full regalia, you know, with the sunglasses and the high heels and those skinny-type pants and that sexy blouse you were wearing when I saw you in New York. Remember? I thought you’d come back looking like a movie star. But you look just like you.”

“I am me, Nilu,” I said softly as we maneuvered my squeaky luggage trolley through the crowds and to where rows of waiting vehicles were lined up. “Which one is your car?”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Our household, like every household in the world, had a routine. And no matter how long I’d been away, or where I might have gone, I would never forget it. There were nuances to my daily life in Mahim that seemed to remain the same day to day, year after year, times when everything would happen concurrently—phones ringing, servants shouting, radios blaring—and then again when everything was suddenly quiet. As mundane as my existence had been, there was a rhythm to it.

I glanced at my watch and worked out where, exactly, my family would be in the cycle of trivial events that made up their days. Dinner was probably over and, this being a Wednesday night, was most likely chicken cooked in
masala
spooned over saffron rice, a
dal,
a
bhaji.
In my previous life, Nana would be standing up, flicking the grains of yellow rice off his white kurta onto the table to be swept up by the servant’s wet rag, and then he would strap on his black leather sandals for a quick walk around the building.

“Good for digestion,” he would say, standing up to go. “Helps with emptying of stomach in the morning.”

Sometimes I would go with him. We would stroll around our floor first, glancing in through any doors that might be open, willing to nod and say a quick hello to any of the neighbors who might be in the middle of their own rhythm. Then we would make our way up the staircase and walk around subsequent floors, Nana repeating that climbing up and down stairs was good for the heart. Mostly, he and I would walk in silence, taking in the slow buzz of activity—of babies crying and children playing and televisions turned on too loud—that marked a day in the life of Ram Mahal, of just about any middle-class building in India that evening.

If Nana could still walk, that is exactly what he would be doing right then.

“I can tell; you’re thinking about him, right?” Nilu asked. She was sitting in the back next to me, her hand pressed into the spongy leather seat. “I haven’t been to see him since it happened. But the whole neighborhood is talking about it. It’s very good of you to come.”

“How could I not?” I asked, trying not to cry, trying to hold it all together. “Who knows when, or if, I might ever see him again?”

“It was pretty bad when it happened,” Nilu continued, although I partly wanted her to stop. “It was right there, you know, next to that electrical shop with the owner who is always drunk, opposite that place where your mother bought you the rose pink hair clips. We’ve gone past that area a million times you and I. That’s exactly where it happened. The auto-rickshaw was such a
put-put
that it just stopped, right there, in the middle of traffic. There was no way the bus could have stopped in time. The rickshaw-
wallah
died, there and then.”

“Please, Nilu, stop,” I said, now crying. “It’s too horrible to hear.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She paused. “But there’s one other thing you should probably know. After the police and ambulance came, when they were putting your nana onto a stretcher and taking him to the hospital, they were gathering his things. He had been on his way to the post office to mail a letter. Tanaya,” she said, staring at me, “the letter was addressed to you.”