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When Anjali got to the Arc de Triomphe, she looked at a Metro map and realized that it was named not for the conquest of the stars but for the way that twenty streets converged at the arch, forming a star on the map. Maybe Napoleon wasn’t so bad.
Anjali and Aasha met up at the foot of the arch and ascended. At the top, Anjali gazed triumphantly down one of the most famous streets in the world, Les Champs Élysées. City workers kept the trees along the avenue trimmed into box-like shapes. The French believed in gardening geometrically.
As she leaned on the parapet, Anjali said, “Ravi’s parents have shortened my time in Paris from a year to just three more months.” She resented these adults who couldn’t let a girl have some freedom.
“No!” Aasha said, turning from the view to look at her with concern.
“Yes, I have to go back and do the engagement ceremony in three months or they’ll find someone else.”
“That’s terrible! You just got here! You like it here. With your French Pondicherry passport, you could stay forever! What about your screenplay?”
“I don’t think I can finish writing it in three months. Not while working full time. Definitely can’t get it all critiqued by my writing group. I can only take ten pages max each time.”
The two girls walked the perimeter, then descended from the top of the arch back to the street. They found a crêperie and each girl had a crêpe with fromage et jambon and a dusting of fresh-ground pepper, no salt. Then they headed to Belleville together.
While they jostled shoulder to shoulder on line 11, they peered out at the Arts et Metiers Metro station, designed to make people feel like they were inside a copper-lined submarine. They chatted.
“How is your fiancé?” Anjali asked.
“We’re emailing every day,” Aasha said with a smile. “It’s a great way to get to know him.”
Anjali and Ravi were talking once a week. She ought to email him more, get to know him better. So far his few emails had been terse and uninformative.
“Any pressure from your parents?” Anjali asked.
“No. Sorry yours and Ravi’s are pressuring you.”
“They worry too much about what other people will think.”
“Like everybody else in India!” Aasha joked.
“This three-month business is probably the result of some auntie of Ravi planting a seed of distrust in his mother’s brain.”
“There’s always an auntie meddling in India.”
Aasha was right. And anybody could appoint themselves your auntie. Once, just before she left Mumbai, Anjali had been on a bus to work. A woman sitting next to her had sized up her age, seen no ring on her finger, and said, “When are you getting married?” In India, strangers ask when you’re getting married! You’re accountable to everybody! No wonder Indian young people felt so free when they came to the West, where no one cared what you did.
But then again, the network of kinfolk in India who would come out to help you in the middle of the night was so reassuring. Somebody would know somebody who would know somebody who would help you. Whereas in the West, even your best friends might have other plans.
Yes, in spite of having Aasha as a friend, and having her job with John, and the writers’ group, loneliness in the West could conspire with her mother’s homemade rotis to send her home early.
