“Who’s the girl?” ?lise asked.
“My niece.” Nita found the lie easier to tell this second time.
“She’s going to be a stunner one day!” Simon said.
He took the remaining two canvases and placed them side by side in a more prominent center place so that passersby would not miss them. Picking back up the one of Sophie with the brush, he turned toward Nita.
“I’d like to be your first customer and buy this one,” he said.
Nita smiled at his kindness. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m not buying it because I have to.” He reached for his billfold and removed a handful of francs. “Assuming I can afford it, of course! How much would it cost to have?”
Nita shifted her gaze to the painting, to Sophie’s questioning eyes, which wondered what she had done wrong to make her mummy leave her. Had she not brushed her hair correctly, the way her mummy had showed her? And here Nita stood, again willing to give up her daughter and sell the painting to another person. She had not realized how difficult it would be to part with these canvases. Simon looked so genuine and earnest, and she knew she did not have a good excuse to refuse him. They did need money, even if it was charity from Simon.
“Forty francs?” she said, knowing Mathieu sold his for at least four times that but adjusting for her lack of experience.
Simon handed her two hundred francs and made her close her fist around the bills. “You should never undersell yourself.”
His words warmed Nita’s heart. It was facile à dire, mais difficile à faire—easy to say, but hard to do. She nearly hugged him for his kindness but refrained when she saw ?lise squeeze his hand. It was easy to see why a woman would be lucky to have Simon as her boyfriend, bad French accent and all. There was no quality more desirable than compassion.
After those initial moments of feeling a sense of loss over the painting and reminding herself that it was going to a friend and if she ever truly wanted it back, it would be easy enough to get, she felt pride and excitement. She had sold her first painting! And for two hundred francs, no less! The most surprising thing she had learned about herself since arriving in Paris was that she could survive, no matter how dire the situation seemed. She didn’t want to get ahead of herself, but if she could sell a few more at that price, she and Mathieu would be okay for a month, and maybe he would feel better and get back to his own work rather than sulking around the apartment all day.
With the drizzle turning into actual rain droplets and foot traffic stopping almost entirely, Nita decided to close the stall and share the good news with Mathieu. Even in his funk, she thought he would be able to appreciate this milestone in her artistic career.
As she walked along the river, passing other bouquinistes who were closing their shops as well, she couldn’t help but smile at each of them. Having made her first sale, she felt like she now had a silent bond with the others who trudged out daily and earned their living selling art and wares along the Seine. She was now one of them, and it felt amazing.
As she neared their apartment in the Marais, she stopped in a local wine merchant and bought a bottle of Bordeaux so she and Mathieu could celebrate. She recognized a label that Mathieu had purchased before and handed the cashier fifty-four francs from the cash she had just received. This was the first bottle of wine she had ever purchased, and she realized that she was starting to become more French. Back in India, if things had been tight with finances, it would never even have occurred to her to spend some of her money on something frivolous, like a celebratory drink. Her family was far too practical for that. But here, she focused on living in the present and didn’t worry about how the future would unfold.
She shook the rain off her coat before entering the apartment and hanging it on the hook behind their front door. She pulled the wine out of the now damp brown paper sack and could not wait to share her news with Mathieu. She heard some rustling in the bedroom, so at least she knew he was awake. That was a step in the right direction. Certainly, seeing the Bordeaux would help motivate him at least from the bed to the living area, where they could toast to her success. The French were far too civilized to drink wine in bed. She made her way to the bedroom with the bottle in hand, hoping this was going to be a turning point for them and both would focus on their art again and Mathieu would get back to being his old self.
She pushed open the bedroom door and saw Mathieu’s face buried between the legs of a tattooed blonde girl who arched her head back while she moaned in pleasure.
27
SOPHIE
2019
She arrives at Taj Palace just after five in the evening and immediately heads to the kitchen, dons an apron, and ties back her hair so it is away from her face. Today, it is only Manoj with her.
She is anxious and agitated because she would rather be at Bistro Laurent but washes her hands and then approaches him. “What can I do to help?”
Manoj barely looks up from the haricots verts he is expertly chopping into bite-size pieces, his knife moving quickly back and forth in a rocking motion. He has a deftness in his work that Sophie admires. She is finding she enjoys cooking here under Manoj’s tutelage much more than she had the cooking lessons that her fois had barked at her to prepare her for her marriage to Kiran. Those lessons had been forced, whereas these felt earned.
“You could get started on the cucumber and tomato.”
Sophie glances at the counter behind Manoj and sees a pile of cucumbers and tomatoes that need to be washed, seeded, and chopped for the kachumber salad. She has been on salad duty since Naresh Uncle hired her. Manoj kept the real cooking within his control, still not fully accepting the arrangement of having Sophie join him in the kitchen. Occasionally when Naresh Uncle was around, Manoj had her make some rotlis or naan, but even those tasks were easy to master.
“Do you ever take a night off?” Sophie asks him while she prepares the salad.
Manoj laughs. “I need to be here.”
“When do you find time to see your friends?”
“Here and there. I’m more of a loner, anyway. Growing up, we really focused on the family.” He glances over his shoulder at her in a way that makes clear he thinks of her as an outsider.
Sophie can relate to prioritizing family over friends. Papa was her world, and everything else had come second.
“Was it strange growing up here?” she asks him.
He shrugs. “No, why would it be?”
Sophie puts her knife down and turns to face him. “It’s a different country, different language. It must be strange, no?”
“Not to me. It’s the country I was born in and the language I grew up with.”
“But there are so few Indian people! It’s not odd to you?”
He shrugs again. “What would be odd to me is being around only Indian people.”
Sophie turns back to chopping the tomatoes. She wonders if Nita had felt the same way as Manoj and that’s why she decided to leave. Ahmedabad has millions of people, all of them Indian. The diversity in Ahmedabad seems based on caste alone, and other than the handful of servants that cross her path, even caste differences are not a part of her daily life. Sophie has never thought twice about it, but perhaps there are people who crave more differences in the people around them.