“Have you eaten enough?” Anjali Auntie asks as she gestures toward Sophie’s now empty plate.
She nods, surprised by how quickly she devoured her food, and sits patiently as her companions finish their meals. Like the diners around them, Uncle and Auntie don’t seem rushed as they break off morsels of baguette to soak up the buttery sauce left on their plates the same way she would have torn a piece of rotli to get the last bits of her dal and rice from her thali. The temperature begins to descend for the night, and they are grateful that the restaurant has switched on the outdoor heaters. When the check arrives, Sophie tries to contribute, but Saumil Uncle waves her off. She hesitantly accepts and vows to do something kind for them before they part ways. Finding them was a true stroke of luck for her. Bhagwan found a way to smile upon her when she hadn’t felt favored in a while.
“Which of your relatives are you meeting?” Anjali Auntie asks as they sip on their tea after their meal.
Sophie swallows the liquid, letting the warmth radiate inside of her. She can’t bring herself to utter the word Papa without tears, so she knows she cannot say that. Instead, she says, “I’m meeting my mummy here.” It isn’t a lie. It is why she has come, and she hopes it will be true.
“You are brave to come by yourself,” Saumil Uncle says. “You have no brother or sister to join you?”
Sophie shakes her head. “We have a small family.” True as well.
Anjali Auntie glances at her left hand. Sophie is wearing the engagement ring that Kiran’s family had given her a couple days earlier, a yellow gold band with twenty-five small diamonds embedded into a square on the top. “Your husband could not join?”
Sophie pulls her hand back modestly. “No. He had to work.” Kiran probably does have to work, so this could be the truth as well.
Each technical “truth” is getting easier than the one before it. Even though she feels Uncle and Auntie are harmless, Papa raised her to be cautious with personal information, and it is a difficult habit to break. Personal matters and truths are hardly spoken of in India out of a sense of privacy and unwillingness to show any weakness to others outside of the home. Sophie prefers things that way because it also means that people don’t ask her private things, like where her mummy is, and she never has to explain about her mummy’s passing. Sophie now wonders how many people had avoided asking about Nita because they already knew the truth that Sophie is just learning.
That night, after Uncle and Auntie fall asleep, Sophie creeps out of the hotel room with her stack of letters and heads to the computer terminal in the reception area. The night clerk is a middle-aged man who gives her a disinterested nod before turning back to his book, the pages yellowed from time and the cover worn from use. She had put the letters in chronological order, hoping she could use the details as clues to help find Nita.
On the outside of one, Sophie sees a return address referencing Le Canard Volant. It’s been twenty-two years since the date of the letter, and the writing is a feminine scrawl but doesn’t appear to be Nita’s, so Sophie can only hope that whatever that place was will still be around. She types in the name, and, instantly, there are numerous links to pictures and videos of ducks in flight, and eventually, toward the bottom of the page, there is a link to a one-star hostel. Her heart races as she clicks on it. She forces herself to calm down. It’s not as if the link is going to transport her to her mummy, she reasons.
She jots down the address and sees on a map that it is in the fifth arrondissement. She has no idea where that is. She zooms out on the map and sees she is on the other side of the river from it. She’s starting to plot a route for her to get there when she feels a hand on her shoulder.
8
NITA
1998
Nita spun around, quickly swallowing the bite of bread she had been chewing and hoping she didn’t have crumbs littering her clothes but did not look because she was too self-conscious to show how self-conscious she was.
“Bonjour,” she said.
The blue-eyed man sipped coffee from a paper cup while staring intently at her.
“You remember me,” Nita said, looking away shyly.
“Bien s?r.” He moved past her to his stall and put his coffee on the stone ledge behind it. He leaned against his chair in a way that was both carefree and enchanting. “What is your name?” he asked.
“Nita.”
He nodded, as if filing it away so he could retrieve it later.
“And yours?” she asked.
“Mathieu. What do you do here?” he asked, looking directly at her with those penetrating eyes.
She boiled under his stare. In India men looked from afar, and when they made eye contact, it was different, more an observation and possible judgment. Mathieu stared at her as if he was intrigued. She glanced at the canvases around them. She could not tell this man with so much talent that she was a painter. It would have been like comparing herself to Chagall.
“I’m looking for a job,” she responded instead.
“People always talk about work, work, work.” He moved closer to her, and she froze, not sure whether to step out of the way. Then he knelt and readjusted some of the canvases near her feet, the heat from his arm radiating through her clothing just a few centimeters away. “Life is about passion.” He met her gaze again from his stooped position.
“Passion comes at a price.” The words slipped out before she could stop them.
He looked at her, amused, and stood up. “En effet, Mademoiselle. Vous avez raison.”
She moved away from him, fingering the canvases as she took a few steps back. “I hope one day to live a life where I have a stall along the river as well. But I am not as far along in my work as you.”
He smiled the half smile she had seen when she first met him. “You are an artist, then. I see.”
She shook her head. “I am a woman who needs to work so she can learn more about her craft to one day become an artist.”
“But you don’t aspire to be a successful one?” he asked.
She was taken aback by his comment and felt her face falter.
“I only mean that you aspire to be a bouquiniste,” he said. “People aspire toward fancy galleries and museums”—he gestured around him—“not to wooden, green boxes along a river. You must dream more grand, Mademoiselle.”
She chewed her bottom lip. “It is hard to think of something such as that. It’s a life I could not even begin to plan for.”
“Planning can be quite tedious.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Sometimes it is better to just do what you feel.”
Nita thought about how she had acted on emotion to get to Paris in the first place. Given where things were now, she had serious doubts about whether she had made the right decision. But anytime she thought of calling Rajiv, of going home, the shame put her back on her path. He would have received her letter by now telling him not to come back to Paris and look for her. There is no going back after what I have done, she kept telling herself, because she needed to believe that in order to move forward in this new life.
“If only life could be that simple,” she said.
“You don’t think it can be?”
She shook her head. “There is so much pressure. So many people to consider. Being selfish is a luxury many do not have.”