Salaam, Paris by Kavita Daswani Page A

yet, have you?”
    I shook my head, disconsolate, but now feeling embarrassed by my delusion.
    “You can’t leave here until you feel what you said you wanted to feel,” Shazia said. “Not until you can show everyone you are no longer just the pretty Shah girl from Mahim.”
    I nodded, carefully folded up the sheet of paper, and rose to bid my distant cousin a final good-bye.
     
    My brown suitcase sat behind me in the cashier’s booth, waiting to be taken to its new home. It still bore half-peeled-off stickers from my grandfather’s travels—a dozen or so faded Air India tags dotted over its surface, the familiar yellow-and-red Maharajah now grimy with age.
    Another bill was brought to me, a shiny credit card placed upon it, and I swiped it through the small machine on my right, punched in a code, ripped out the resulting printout, and placed it back on the tray for the waiter to return to his customer. I had been doing this for five hours and twenty minutes, off and on, and when it was slow I leafed through the English-French dictionary that Shazia had given me before she left.
    The place was called, simply, Café Crème, because it professed to specialize in the sweet creamy drink, although as far as I could tell, so did every other café in the vicinity—or in the rest of Paris, for that matter. The owner’s name was Mathias, which took me a while to learn how to pronounce, and he was a good friend of Shazia’s, although neither one of them told me how. He was part German, was multilingual and fluent in English, which made my first day more comfortable than I had thought it might be. Like with Zoe, I knew he only had me around as a favor to Shazia, but he didn’t seem to mind it. He had a dimple on his left cheek that creased happily when he smiled, a mop of light brown hair, and slender eyes surrounded by long lashes. He seemed to do everything in the café, stepping in to take orders when it was busy, stocking the refrigerator with new supplies, even sweeping the floor at closing time, a pen constantly wedged in his mouth.
    He had greeted me one morning with a hug and a kiss on each cheek, which is certainly not the way I imagined new employees would be received at work in India. He had started speaking to me in French, shifting suddenly to English when he saw the look of alarm on my face. He had motioned to my outfit with a wave and had uttered a “très exotique” before continuing on with his instructions. My hours were eleven in the morning till seven in the evening, with an hour off for lunch and fifteen-minute breaks every other hour for, as he put it, “a coffee and a cigarette.” I would work Mondays to Fridays, but might be called upon to fill in on weekends if the other cashier didn’t show up—which, by the way he was telling it to me, seemed like a regular occurrence. He asked me how I was for cash and if I needed an advance before the end of the week, and I gratefully nodded; the money that my grandfather had sent me with was all but gone, and I had hated eating Zoe’s food and drinking her tea and not being able to pay for any of it. I wanted to wander the city again on my own, but hadn’t even been able to buy a Metro ticket.
    Halfway through my first day, I knew that I would probably hate this job. There was, indeed, nothing really in it to like—except for the niceness of Mathias and the downtime I had during which I could learn at least five new French words. Also, I didn’t have to pay for lunch, and Mathias even said he’d let me take something home for dinner every night. He had offered me, that first day, half of his sandwich—a baguette filled with thin rounds of sausage, forgetting for a moment that I was a Muslim and that pork was our poison. He quickly pulled his plate back in front of him when I pointed this out and promised it would never happen again.
    While I wanted the day to end so I could leave, I also resisted going to my new home, a place I would share with three