Salaam, Paris - By Kavita Daswani Page 0,2

that day on, I will have to admit, I started looking at myself in the mirror quite differently: as an image of my aunts and all the other attractive women in my family who had gone before me.

Even when I started to realize my own beauty, I never saw my mother as anything less than perfect. She was forlorn, yes, but how could she not be, with a husband who had left her two months after their wedding and seven months before I was born? For most of my childhood, she had been placid, as if nothing vibrant or wild had ever lived behind those deadened eyes, as if in taking away his love, the father I had never known also took away my mother’s very life. It seemed that nothing ever aroused her, excited her, or even saddened her. She was a nebulous character, always in the background of my life, serving no greater purpose than making sure that I ate what was on my plate and that I read the books I brought home from school.

She was this way for every night of my childhood except for one. It had been a grim and rainy day at the height of monsoon season in hot and humid July, and the afternoon had been given over to magazines and television and napping. She was agitated, displaying more emotion than usual, but none of it any use to a bored eight-year-old. At nine o’clock at night, she told me to put on my pajamas and get into bed. I changed into a blue velour pair with a white eyelet lace collar. I lay next to my mother on the bed I shared with her and proceeded to continue reading an Indian comic book—an illustrated tale about a magic monkey that lived in the mountains. She asked me again and again to turn off the light and go to sleep, and again and again I told her that I had just a few more pages to get through. Then, without warning, she reached over to my side of the bed, swiped up the comic book, and flung it across the room onto the speckled pink tile floor. I looked over at her astonished and scared, and saw her hand, its fingers short and thick, coming straight for my face. I felt the sting of the slap, the blood rushing to my right cheek, shocked at the biting sensation in my face. Then she ordered me not to cry, then slapped me again, on the other side. The more I cried and begged her to stop, the more she hit me, until I was crouching in a corner, staring at the black flecks on the rose-colored tiles, my head in my hands. She towered above me, hitting me on both arms, bombarding me with slow punches for what seemed like an eternity. And then, as suddenly as she had started, she stopped, stepping back, wisps of frizzy hair loosened from her braid, her face flush, her mouth agape. She stared for a minute at her two hands, back and front. Then she bent down till she was at my level and put her hand to my cheek again, but this time to stroke it gently.

“Nahin rohna,” she said, asking me not to cry. “Mujhe maaf karo.” She was asking me for forgiveness. I reached over and collapsed on her arm, my drool from crying spilling out onto her printed polyester top. I was suddenly unsure about whether I knew who this woman was. She led me to bed then, laying me down onto starched cotton sheets, her hand on the top of my head. We both lay in the dark, not a sound in the room except for the whirring of a fan standing in the corner. But somewhere in my sobbing and shuddering body, I knew that her accumulated fury at a lost and wasted life was, if nothing else, finally spent.

By the next morning, it was all forgotten—and never mentioned again. After that, I continued, as I had always done, to pay no heed to the hecklers who teased her about her pockmarked skin and pudgy features, instead always rising to defend her. She had been born with a small dark mark that stretched across her right eyebrow, which family superstition had put down to the fact that my grandmother had gazed too long at a funeral procession when she was carrying my mother, and that the sight of so much