Salaam, Paris - By Kavita Daswani Page 0,3

woe and suffering had shocked the pregnant woman to such an extent that her unborn daughter ended up paying the price for it. I was certain none of this was true—that my mother’s “black thing,” as everyone called it, was nothing but a birthmark, and that it made her unique. Where I come from, people could be cruel about such things—about the size of one’s waist or the closeness of one’s eyes. They routinely made up names to describe the neighbors and friends who perhaps had not been blessed by Allah with loveliness. The hefty woman next door was haathi—“elephant”—and the local electrician bakri—“goat,” because of his prominent jaw and the whiskers he chose to adorn it with.

When long-lost relatives from America came to visit one summer when I was nine, looking down at me and then at my mother, the uncle chuckled, saying: “No resemblance. Are you sure you didn’t find her somewhere and just bring her home?” He laughed.

My mother went into our room and shut the door. Later, after the uncle had left and my mother emerged once again, she told me that every night for the first five years of her life, my grandmother would massage her nose with a pinch of oil to shape it better. When she was six months old, her chubby little body was waxed. Every day, they slathered a paste made from chickpea flour and lemon on her face to bring out the whiteness they were convinced lay hidden somewhere in her genes.

“All this they did, and for what?” my mother said that evening, still smarting from the hurt of the relative’s remarks. “My own husband left me. But you see, my beautiful beti, none of this will happen to you. Because of how you look, you will have everything I never did—a man who will stay with you, and a big and boisterous family. If I have given you nothing else in your life, at least I have given you that.”

But in truth, a decade later, it was actually Audrey Hepburn who gave me my life.

I had ventured down to Book Nook one day, a book-cum-video library on the street adjacent to ours, and I had decided to rent Sabrina, mesmerized by the pixielike black-and-white face on the front of the video box.

I had certainly gotten my pocket money’s worth, having watched the movie seven times in six days. Unlike Sabrina, I had no fantasies about the blond beauty of David Larrabee, nor the fantastic wealth of his family. Instead, I was entranced by just one scene in the entire film, the one where Sabrina is at the end of her two years in Paris and is seated at a desk illuminated by a tasseled lamp, writing a letter to her father.

“I have learned how to live, how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch,” she wrote as I mouthed the words along with her over and over again. The doors behind her were open, and I could imagine a warm wind blowing against her soft white gown. I wanted to watch this part only, and nothing else in the movie, but the Rewind button on the machine would often get stuck, so I had no choice but to start at the beginning. But it was that one scene, the one where Sabrina is perfectly poised and peaceful, that lingered in my mind long after I had to return the tape. I immediately resonated with Sabrina’s pre-Paris naiveté, with the simple nature of her life, yet her desire for more. She yearned for love, and while I didn’t care about that, I still wanted to become what she had become. To be, as she wrote to her father, “in the world and of the world.”

I resolved that I must one day go to Paris too.

Chapter Two

Of course, I had nobody to whom to confess this profound and utterly ridiculous new desire, one that surprised even me with its pull. Up until I had met Sabrina, I would have been thrilled just to visit Goa, to rock on a fishing boat there, to sit and smell the salt in the air. So I told no one, and prayed that in some distant future our God would find it in his heart to allow a middle-class Muslim girl with a draped head and no money to become another Sabrina.

But perhaps I should not have been too surprised to have this potent longing