Free Salaam, Paris by Kavita Daswani Page B

mother.
     
    Your grandfather asked if there was anything I wanted to send you, as my way to say good-bye. I could think only of this photo, which always seems to have meant something to you. I am crying as I write this, because I am seeing that of all the tragedies and disappointments in my life, you, my Tanaya, are the greatest.

Chapter Twelve

    There should have been something more to her voice, a sympathetic tone, a shared sense of loss and regret.
    But instead, Shazia just sounded like herself: defiant and devil-may-care.
    I had been crying for most of the thirty minutes that I had been on the phone with her, grateful at least that she had called me and not the other way around.
    “Up until yesterday, I really thought that when I went back home, they would forgive me and take me back in,” I sobbed. “But this, what they have done, it is so final.” I envisioned my grandfather, his white kurta clinging to his lean frame, out in the street in front of our building, disposing of all the things they had chosen not to send me: my old schoolbooks, my hair barrettes, some bottles of nail polish I had bought right before leaving for Paris and had inadvertently left behind—all the things I had hoped, someday, to go back to.
    But Shazia seemed to understand none of this, instead telling me that I was “better off without them,” that if they chose not to accept my choices, then they didn’t deserve to have me in the family. To me, she was talking nonsense. She kept wanting to change the subject, to ask me about what else I had been up to in Paris, and would no doubt have shrieked in delight had I told her about my foray on a fashion catwalk just a couple of weeks earlier. Family had been everything to me, and I was blaming Shazia.
    “It’s easy for you to say it doesn’t matter,” I said, bitterness filling my voice. “You might only understand how I’m feeling if your mother had turned her back on you, telling you that you may as well be dead.”
    There was a pause before Shazia quietly said: “She did.”
    “What?”
    “I never told you this, but once I left Paris to come to live in L.A., my mother eventually sent me everything I’d left behind, and a note telling me never to return home. It seems melodrama runs in the family,” she said, laughing weakly.
    “So what happened?” I asked. “What made her change her mind?”
    “Fear. She found out she was sick, and I was the first person she called. There’s nothing like death to make you long for someone you suddenly think you can’t live without. So you see, Tanaya, I do know what it’s like. Being disowned is not always an absolute. It may feel like the end of the world now. But believe me, when the time is right, you’ll be one big happy family again.”
    It wasn’t until I was emptying out my handbag the next morning that I found his name card. Until I saw it again, lodged in the bottom of my bag and entangled in an empty cellophane sandwich wrapper, I had forgotten about the well-dressed gentleman who had approached me on the street that Sunday, who seemed to think that I had more to offer the world of modeling than a minute on a catwalk in a darkened nightclub, done under duress. I also pulled out from my bag the copy of the newspaper that had my photograph in it, the one that had Mathias all excited until he realized that nobody would ever see it. I glanced at Dimitri’s name card and realized that, for the first time in my life, I truly had nothing to lose.
     
    Just to be sure I was in the right place, I looked up at the numbers atop the building in front of me and matched them to the address on the card. It didn’t seem to fit. The card was heavy and formal, the letters on it thick and embossed, like some of the wedding invitations that would arrive at Nana’s house when I was still living there, signaling occasions that were grand and regal.
    I had expected the same from Dimitri’s offices based on the quality of his name card, so was