Salaam, Paris - By Kavita Daswani Page 0,1

notice that I looked a little different compared to other girls my age. I was taller than everyone else in my class; and even without the benefit of braces, regular skin-whitening treatments, or eyebrow threading sessions, none of which my grandfather—my nana—would ever agree to pay for, people always stared at me, men sometimes longingly. Around then, my nana stopped putting his arm around me as we watched TV on the couch or holding my hand when we went out to buy sticky pink candy from the street vendors or helping me brush my hair at night. When I turned thirteen and my breasts started to blossom and hair appeared in the unlikeliest places, I stopped being my nana’s little girl.

It was at about this time that the first sign of my hereditary signature began to appear. All the women in my family, with the exception of my mother, were known for their “Shah streak,” a swath of silver-gray across the hairline. It looked like the stripe on a raccoon’s tail, a brush of moonlight against a dark night sky. It was, singularly, what had defined almost all of my maternal ancestors—a quirk of nature that graced us virtually without exception, leaving only my mother out. On me, it sprouted tentatively initially, then bloomed. When the first strand came, my aunt Gaura kissed me on the cheek, telling me that in our family, it was considered a mother’s blessing, and the more it grew, the more munificent the maternal goodwill. Being that as it may, I had hoped, somewhat naively, that with the appearance of the streak my mother might finally love me a little more.

As my Shah streak grew in and my breasts developed and my stature altered, I was, at fifteen, now as tall and slender as my aunts. My grandfather forbade me from using the public bus to go back and forth from school, knowing about the body-grazing and flesh-pinching that most of the women aboard had to submit to. Whenever he could, he would come by auto-rickshaw to drop and fetch me, rarely letting me out of his sight.

“You are a young woman now,” he said to me when I was sixteen. “You have nothing else to offer except the face that Allah has blessed you with. Men of poor moral standing will start to think things when they see you. I believe it is time to settle your mind on the only role you have in this world: a pretty and quiet wife and a devoted mother. Remember that, and you will always be happy.”

And I had had no reason not to believe him.

Every teenage girl has a turning point, a time when she realizes that she is more than just the sum of the expectations of her. I finally reached that point two days shy of my nineteenth birthday.

My friend Nilu, who always read copies of Teen Cosmo that her brother in London would send her and that she would keep hidden beneath her mattress, would often invite me over to flick through the pages of her latest arrival, to laugh as we scratched and sniffed the fragrant folds of paper with their free perfume samples. On that day, we both stared at the cover of the June issue, on which was a photo of a strikingly skinny girl with long brown hair that seemed to have been partly painted gold. A wind from somewhere blew open her white shirt, revealing a bright pink bra, a tiny diamond sparkling in her belly button. She had her thumbs in her jeans pockets, a glossy pout on her lips, eyes painted silvery purple. She was beautiful, and, from what Nilu and I read of her inside the pages, she was rich and famous, too—a young actress in Hollywood, the words on the page calling her “the next Julia Roberts.”

“Why? Where did the old one go?” Nilu asked, looking up at me as I shrugged.

“You know, Tanaya, you are as pretty as this girl,” Nilu said, sitting up on her bed and crossing her legs. “In fact, prettier I think. There is nothing she has that you don’t—except maybe a jewel in your stomach.” She laughed and pushed her glasses, which were sliding down her nose, back up to her eyes. “I don’t see why you can’t do this,” she said, pointing to the pouting girl again.

“Stop being silly, Nilu,” I said, getting off the bed.

I finished the last of my cola and headed home. But from