When I was a child, my most profound fear was losing my grandfather.
Every time a plane crashed somewhere in the world-even if it was a charter jet in the interiors of Russia, something I rationally knew my nana would have nothing to do with and was nowhere near-I couldn’t sleep until he returned safely to our home, his peaked cap nestled on his bedside table. Each time I put on the television and the news came on, I was anxious until the sari-clad newsreader, her bindi as big and bright as the moon in the center of her forehead, moved on to sports, knowing then that there had been no plane crashes in the world that day.
And even after Nana had retired and he was always there, in the next room, the pages of his newspaper rustling in the mid-afternoon breeze, I don’t think I ever stopped worrying about him. Every time his temperature went up a few degrees, or he complained of a headache, or perhaps was afflicted by a bout of indigestion after a particularly rich meal, my thoughts would always run to the extreme: It was cancer, a brain tumor, he was about to have a stroke.
It only occurred to me much later, that the dread with which I held my nana when I thought I was about to lose him was the same dread with which I encased him when he was well and sound and happy. I feared him; I feared for him. There was, I realized, nothing about our relationship that wasn’t based on fear.
“You have to know how much he loves you,” Aunt Gaura said. We had returned to my hotel, and were seated at the coffeeshop, cups of masala chai in front of us. “You have to know that no matter what you did, there wasn’t a day when he didn’t think of you. At the same time as he was cursing you, he prayed for you.” She sighed and readjusted her headscarf. “I will never understand that man. I will go to my grave, and he to his, without ever truly knowing him.”
She paused for a moment and glanced around the coffeeshop, her eyes falling on the smartly dressed people at adjacent tables. Even in her simple light orange cotton salwar kameez she was a stunning woman, heads turning toward us when we walked in, us looking more like sisters than aunt and niece.
“You have done well,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “When I was your age, I was married with a child on the way. I would never have been able to afford even a cup of tea here, much less to stay here on my own. You have broken every rule of our family. But somehow I cannot judge you. I cannot be like the others. I fed you from my own breast when you were just days old, and I cannot kill you off in my mind like the rest have done.”
I started to cry softly, deeply moved by my aunt. She reached over and put her hand on my head, atop the Shah streak, and smiled at me softly.
“If I really think about it, I guess I can understand why Nana is the way he is,” I said. “He is from another generation, after all. He is an old-timer in every sense,” I said, now laughing. “But to see the fury on my mother’s face-it shocked me. I had never seen such a thing. I had never seen much of anything on her face.” I stirred my tea, watching as the swirls of milk dissolved into the caramel-colored liquid.
“It pained me to see how she was with you,” my aunt said, her expression now sad. “I couldn’t understand how a mother couldn’t love her child.”
I thought back, for a second, to Zoe, my first roommate in Paris, the short-haired American girl who had given birth to a daughter that she had never wanted either. Perhaps it wasn’t so uncommon after all.
“When your mother saw how beautiful you were becoming, she almost turned against you,” my aunt continued. “She wanted you to be like her. She began to see you as a stranger. And when she realized how much your grandfather loved you, and how close you were to him, she put herself in the background of your life, concerning herself with whether the vegetable basket was full and that your school fees were paid on time. But she never knew how to really be a mother to you, did she?” my aunt asked, looking at me with such tenderness that I wanted to cry.
Aunt Gaura’s words were shocking to me, even though she was telling me something I think I always knew. I pushed my chair back as if I needed to stand up and go somewhere, when I really had nowhere else to go.
“Maasi, tell me something,” I asked. “My friend Nilu told me that Nana had the accident on his way to the post office, that he was going to mail something to me. What was it? Do you know?”
Aunt Gaura scooped another spoonful of sugar into her tea. She then lifted up her head and stared straight at me.
“It was a letter from your father.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Spandau Ballet was playing in the elevator as I rode up back to my room. I recognized the song from a fashion show I had done in Rome a month earlier, where the designer had resurrected the trends-and the music-of the 1980s. He had put me in a lime green jacket with big padded shoulders and a peplum waist, and had given me a tiny miniskirt to wear with shiny pantyhose and high-heeled pumps. He had crimped my hair and clasped dangling gold earrings onto my lobes. When I was ready, staring into a mirror backstage and preparing for my turn to head out to the catwalk, the young dresser whispered in my ear that I looked like a “poor Bangladeshi Ivana Trump.” I had laughed, too carefree to really be offended.
As I stood outside my room, searching for my key card, I thought back for a moment to those days when my life was an endless flurry of fittings and parties and limo rides and photographers and hundreds of hours spent in fancy airport lounges where all the food was free.
Even when I was famous, I never felt it. And now, being a lifetime away from all that, it didn’t even feel real anymore. I barely gave a thought to what had happened with Kai and his career, and Felicia and her neuroses, and Stavros and the wife he pretended he wasn’t married to. They all seemed like characters I had read about in a book long ago, part of a life I had never really sought out, and that I was now happy to leave behind.
I was just about to pull down my door handle when I heard the pleasant ring of the elevator, the upward arrow turning red, footsteps coming down the hall toward me, quicker than usual.
“You’re a hard girl to find.”
I looked up.
“Your cook told me you were staying here.” Tariq looked happy and radiant.
“What are you doing here?” I said, surprised but not displeased to see him. “I thought I asked you not to come.”
“You did indeed,” he said, still grinning. “But I was on my way to Pakistan to see my own grandfather, just as I told you. And my office wanted me to take a meeting with some financiers in Bollywood. So here I am. I went by your place hoping to see you, but got your cook instead. So it didn’t go well, then?”
“No. Quite badly, actually. But my mother’s sister, Gaura maasi, is helping me. She’s the only one in my family who understands and who actually doesn’t hate me.”
“I don’t hate you, if that makes a difference,” he said, the overhead lights bouncing off his shiny black hair, his tiny earrings trembling with the slightest of movements.
“You’ve been very kind to me,” I said. “I don’t deserve it. Right now, I can only think of my nana, of getting him to see me, to know that I dropped everything and came back for him. I’m supposed to go back later this evening, when he will hopefully be awake.”
“Sounds good,” Tariq said. “I’ve finished my meeting and don’t have to leave until the day after tomorrow. So please, let me come with you.”
This time, he was awake. This time, there was nobody to tell me I couldn’t go in, that I couldn’t touch the hand of the man who had loved me more than anybody else ever had. Aunt Gaura silenced my mother again and waited outside the bedroom door, making awkward conversation with Tariq, who clutched on to a bottle of mineral water.