The Book of Everlasting Things, page 23
She listened to Fahad describe the floral aroma in words more similar to Samir than she could have ever imagined. And later, when Fahad deposited two drops of the amber liquid on his fingers and rubbed it gently into the skin of her wrists, she did not hesitate. And when he reached out to graze the bones of her neck, she did not retreat. And when he removed the thick shawl from her small body, she did not reject his advances. That night, Firdaus gave herself to the likeness of Samir that she glimpsed in her husband, which led to the conception of their first and only child.
Aayat, she would name their daughter nine months later; aayat, meaning a miracle.
30
A Family of Three
Five years after his arrival in Paris, Samir was now well settled. He had enough to live and eat comfortably, pay his rent, and appreciate the stillness of his days. But sometimes, when dreams of fire crawled into his sleep and memories of home wove themselves tightly over his heart, he’d make his way to La Chapelle. Patel would cook a pot of moong dal and small round chapatis, Samir would inhale the familiar aromas of turmeric and cumin, and it would feel as close as home could be.
Apart from these rare episodes, Samir continued on day after day, determined to untether himself from the past, without any real aim or hope for the future. Until, one day, he met a woman.
* * *
Léa Clement was born in Marseilles in the unbearably hot months of 1928. During the war, she had been training at the nursing school of the French Red Cross when she was sent to serve in the field hospitals at Normandy. She remembered aircrafts flying overhead and the sound of bombs and artillery fire in the distance. But what haunted her the most were the young wounded soldiers, sometimes not much older than herself, who often cried themselves to sleep. It was there one day, at the very tail end of the war, that she came across the mangled body of her own beloved, Michel. A young man she had known since childhood, who had enlisted as a private at the outbreak of the war with the promise of marriage upon his return.
Michel’s death had shattered her, and following the war, she had returned to Marseilles to complete her studies. But unable to remain in the place that they had once shared, she moved to the largest city she could think of, a place where her sadness would dissolve into the deafening noises of the crowd. Paris. Léa Clement found work as a nurse at the Claude Bernard Hospital, and in 1953 met Samir Vij in the patient ward.
This time, there was no locking of eyes through clear glass vials; there was no intoxicating smell of rosewater and sandalwood, vanilla and soot, but something far more intense, pungent, and familiar. Earlier that morning, Léa had found an old photograph of her deceased soldier tucked away in her purse and, upon discovering it, she had cried. What Samir smelled on her then was no heavenly odor, but the furthest thing from it. It was the smell he had now come to associate with love. Samir had smelled her tears.
It was not maddening love that brought them together, but the shared experience of having lost a beloved. In those early months, Samir and Léa conversed in the language of sadness. They each took comfort in the fact that the other always understood that there had been someone else before, someone irreplaceable, whose love had gone unfulfilled. Rather than deep affection, it was deep loss that brought them together.
Finally pulling out his old suitcase, which for years had been relegated to the back of the wardrobe, Samir had looked through the treasures inside. Unknotting a thick bundle, he found a part of his mother’s trousseau that she had wrapped away during the riots. A few gold bangles, a set of meenakari bracelets, a string of pearls, and two rings passed down to her from his grandmother.
With an heirloom ring of gold and emerald, he offered Léa himself and his history. In doing so, she would become the first person to whom Samir would reveal his cavernous losses and vulnerabilities, his guilt and remorse. Already armed with the knowledge of the lover he had left behind, she now listened to the story of the uncle who had arrived in France as a soldier during the Great War, and somehow left as a perfumer. She imagined a clothing shop that had transformed into a perfume shop and then to a shop no more. She cried when he described the state of Vij Bhawan, the destruction, the smoke, and all who had perished within. She held the photograph from 1937 to her heart and listened to stories about family members she would never meet.
Léa accepted his proposal with the dream of a future they could share, and gave birth to a baby girl, Sophie, within the first year of marriage.
* * *
Fahad sat on one side of the boat with seven-year-old Aayat, and Firdaus sat on the other. The hull must have been painted bright white at one point, but its surface was now scratched enough to reveal the dusty wood beneath. The boatman sat facing them at the very front, rowing across the river Ravi. The morning was lovely and bright, with a slight chill in the air. Aayat leaned back into her father’s chest, and timidly dipped her hands into the water, watching in awe as it rippled out.
They were rowing toward a pavilion built on an island in the center of the ancient river. Listening to the rhythmic movement of the wooden oars slipping in and out of the water, Firdaus looked pensively to the far edge of the river, where the papermakers of Lahore used to produce handmade sheets and dry them flat under the sun. They, too, had a similar rhythm to their movement, a muscle memory which had been ingrained over generations. Sometimes, Altaf would bring Firdaus to the banks, and she would watch in rapture as mushy pulp was transformed into beautiful silken sheets by way of bamboo molds and screens. She was thinking about the last time she’d laid her hands on a sheet of handmade paper when Aayat flicked a bit of water at her.
“Ammi!” she squealed, and both father and daughter burst into laughter, causing Firdaus to giggle as well. She was wiping her face dry when Fahad caught her eye and smiled in a way that made the color rush to her cheeks.
* * *
When they got back home that afternoon, Aayat fell asleep almost immediately, and Fahad settled on the bed with the newspaper as Firdaus folded the pile of clean laundry. She’d barely made her way through a few kurtas when Fahad turned to look at her over the paper.
“You used to love to draw as a child,” he remarked, bringing his hand up to his chin.
“You remember that?”
“I remember you.”
Unable to meet his gaze, Firdaus smiled into the half-folded dupatta in her hands.
“Do you still draw?” he asked.
“I…” she began, unable to forget that her last subject had been Samir. “… not for a while.”
“Well … maybe you could draw me,” he suggested, folding the paper and sitting upright.
“Now?” Firdaus’s heart raced, and she looked over at Aayat, deep in slumber. Fahad shrugged playfully, as if to say, Why not? She sat with her hands still over the pile of clothes for a few seconds, contemplating what to do. Then, walking over to the metal trunk by the window, she slowly took out the tools of her trade. Sitting on the chair beside the bed, she rested her paper over a rough pad called the atlik and picked up a piece of charcoal. She was partly surprised to find her fingers grasping the ashy stick with the same intention they were trained to, for she had never held charcoal as a married woman.
Firdaus became acutely aware of her every gesture, the posture in which she sat, how her dupatta collected around her shoulders, and the deliberateness with which she now studied her subject. The distance between them seemed to have evaporated completely as she allowed her gaze to linger on the sharpness of his jaw or the small cut that ran through his right eyebrow, on the dimples that appeared when he smiled or the shape of his ears. As she rendered his features on the page, allowing muscle memory to guide her, Firdaus couldn’t deny that her husband was a handsome man, nor could she ignore the tenderness of his demeanor.
But there remained a tightness in her throat, and she couldn’t help but feel as though she were performing. Thoughts of the maghrib hour flooded her mind. The past and the present played out simultaneously, where Firdaus was both a teenager and a married woman, and her subjects were both Samir and Fahad. Drawing a sharp breath, Firdaus closed her eyes and reminded herself that she could not retrieve what had already been lost. When she opened her eyes again, she was in the present, and her husband was looking at her with concern.
“This is a very good likeness,” he said when she finally showed him the rough sketch. “You should start drawing again.” Then, after a few seconds, he suggested, “Or perhaps begin working on manuscripts with Abba jaan again. You may no longer be able to go to the studio at Wazir Khan, but the work can always be brought ho—”
“No,” she cut him off, “I don’t work on manuscripts anymore.”
Fahad bit his lip. “As a child, I recall you being your father’s shadow…”
Firdaus looked away as tears pricked her eyes. It was true that she no longer spent time with her father, but she hadn’t thought her husband would notice the rift. She turned to look at him now, her face soft and open.
“It is an old wound, between my father and me. A deep and painful wound.”
He nodded, but said nothing, and then reached out and held her charcoal-covered hand.
Fahad never brought up the subject again, nor did he find out what had happened all those years ago, on the day the fire had engulfed Shahalmi. But from that moment on, Firdaus felt the memory of the perfumer recede ever so slightly.
* * *
Following Sophie’s birth, Samir and Léa moved into a larger apartment in the same building. They continued to work at the hospital; Samir was promoted to a desk job with better pay, allowing Léa to spend more time at home with their newborn. Madame Blanchet eagerly took over the role of grandmother, indulging Sophie with fairy tales she could not yet understand in the language she would adopt as her mother tongue.
Then, for the first time in a long time, something that Samir could only describe as normalcy prevailed. He seldom indulged in the realm of perfume, and the memory of Firdaus was slowly swallowed by the passing days. She would still arrive unexpectedly—in a dream, in the petal of a rose, when he walked by the old bookbinder’s shop that smelled of paper and ink—but she was no longer ever-present. As the months passed, Lahore, too, began to exist only in memory, paving the way for other things to be consciously forgotten. English and French replaced Urdu and Punjabi, which were banished from his tongue, not to be shared with Léa or endowed to Sophie. The maroon dupatta was no longer granted the luxury of touch or smell, though Firdaus’s photograph did still remain in Samir’s wallet.
These were years that Paris saw an influx of immigrants. Now and again, people would mistake Samir for an Iranian, Algerian, or Moroccan, but this hardly bothered him. He could be from anywhere and nowhere as long as it expunged the specificities of his past, sweeping him into the wave of general migration. He never intentionally brought up his family, for he could not yet find a way to reconcile himself to their deaths, and seemed to believe that if he didn’t make any mention of them at all, then their memories would gradually fade and eventually disappear.
Sometimes on weekends, he and Léa would wheel Sophie’s stroller down streets and into little gardens, where they would eat lunch under the sun. Samir would observe this little girl who called him Papa in crisp and feathery French, rather than the rounded, sonorous Baba he had grown up with. She had inherited his olive skin, but that was the extent of their physical similarities. Their noses were different; hers was smaller, shorter, and certainly not as astute. She had vivid hazel eyes and brown hair like Léa, and in all senses of the word would be considered typically French. She was so removed from Hindustan, but that was no fault of hers. Samir never wanted Sophie to feel encumbered by the memory of a place she would not understand and likely would never encounter. Perhaps it was unfair to make that decision on behalf of his daughter, but the past was too complicated and tangled, and certainly no place for a child to go wandering in.
* * *
A week after Sophie turned three, Samir was walking past a new Iranian café near the hospital when a familiar smell wafted up to his nostrils. In the past ten years, many smells had reminded him of Lahore, but none had managed to assail his senses this way. Unable to restrain himself, he trailed the smell to a plant resting on the café windowsill. It had a hairy stem, with highly aromatic green leaves that were slightly toothed at the edges, and rows of tiny brown-purple flowers. Samir’s heart beat quicker, tears lined his eyes, and within moments, he was transported from the Paris of his adulthood to the Lahore of his childhood, for this had been the epicenter of Vij Bahwan: tulsi. The herb his grandmother had reverentially sown in the courtyard and his mother had lovingly raised till her death. Rayhan, the café owner called it, and Samir left that day with a stomachful of its tea, and a pocketful of its seeds.
Léa had a longer shift at the hospital, so once home, he cleaned, dried, and laid the seeds out on one corner of the table. Even from afar, they smelled intensely fresh, herbaceous and medicinal. In Vij Bhawan, tulsi seeds had been the most familiar and mundane thing—boiled in water for tea, chewed raw for digestion, soaked in milk until they became gelatinous, brewed as a tincture, dried, powdered, made into a paste—and yet here, in Paris, they seemed as alien as the language he had locked within himself.
Wrestling with his memories, Samir closed his eyes and allowed the scent to cocoon him. Savitri’s laughter rang in his ears so loudly that she felt almost within his grasp. Som Nath’s little temple bell chimed in the background. Samir envisioned Mohan breaking off the stems of the tulsi plant and carrying them into the prayer room. Outside the kitchen, Vivek lit the incense sticks and watched their ghostly smoke rise up in a dance. And Samir, young Samir, hardly understanding the world beyond the courtyard, ran around the holy plant, as golden sunshine encircled the entire Vij family. He dropped his nose to the table and inhaled the seeds. Again, and again, and again. He might have been unprepared, but the fragrance of the past had arrived.
* * *
When Léa reached home that night, Samir proudly presented the small pile of fragrant seeds. Their dinner was replete—for the very first time since Samir had proposed—with stories of Vij Bhawan, and Léa had witnessed a side to her husband that she never imagined she would. Samir the child, the Lahori, the nostalgist.
Léa understood why he had vowed never to return to his homeland. It pained her to think of all that he had lost, but it pained her more to see how he punished himself for it, how guilt had become a companion to loss. There were parts of her husband that no one, including himself, could access. It worried her that he practiced such a resolute forgetting, year after year after year, particularly when Sophie was born. She watched him become a person with no past, whose life began only when he set foot on French soil, and on some days, she felt as though he had erased his own shadow for fear of being engulfed by it.
Naturally then, it baffled her to see her husband surrender to a mere sprig of holy basil.
31
The Discovery
A few months after the incident with the tulsi leaves, as Samir was feeding Sophie a spoonful of her breakfast, Léa overheard him narrating to her how, as a child, he’d once cut down a sky full of kites during basant. Standing some feet away in the kitchen, she had nonchalantly continued to prepare her lunch, but found herself smiling.
As the weeks passed, more stories emerged, slowly, hesitantly, innocently tucked between the most mundane of daily activities. As she listened, Léa began to observe where her husband paused, what made him happy and when history became unbearable. Cities she had never heard of before started to enter their vocabulary. Though a full spectrum of Urdu or Punjabi was never offered, the few words and phrases Samir repeated assumed concrete shape. Léa gathered that dhoop was sunshine, and mitti was earth, and she would sprinkle them in their conversations. She memorized the words Shahalmi and Pattoki, knew of Vivek and Mohan and Savitri and Som Nath and Leela, and from the owner at the Iranian café even learned to brew tulsi tea. The realm of perfume might still have remained untouched and undivulged, but for a while, an equilibrium between past and present appeared.
* * *
One evening, as winter could be felt stealing the length of autumn days, Samir embarked on one of his longer walks. Hands nestled inside his pockets, he left home and walked just short of an hour to the banks of the river Seine, strolling leisurely to where the bouquinistes—with their rows of wooden boxes painted in a uniform wagon green—began.
According to legend, in the sixteenth century, peddlers used to wander along the banks of the river, selling books and pamphlets. In the seventeenth century, their numbers increased, and ultimately, in the nineteenth century, they were granted official rights to establish their businesses. Over time, their wares, once displayed on the railings of the quays, found homes in the iconic green boxes on the banks of the Seine. Today, they stretched from Quai du Louvre to Pont Marie on the Right Bank, and from Quai Voltaire to Quai de la Tournelle on the Left, essentially forming a bookshelf of three kilometers, selling secondhand books, antiquarian objects, maps, magazines, stamps, and even rare newspapers. Samir seldom stopped at their stalls, but today he walked along the quay as if browsing through a bazaar.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” a middle-aged bookseller greeted Samir as he strolled by. “Je peux vous aider?” He gestured to the stall, asking if he could help.
“Non, non, merci.” Samir made it clear that he was just browsing.
He peered at the selection of books, mostly in French, all displayed in neat rows, with their spines up and titles clearly visible. His fingers trailed the paperbacks and then moved onto the piles of maps. There were postcards of Gare d’Orsay, lovely etchings of Gare de l’Est and street scenes from 1900, showing the cathedral Notre-Dame and Pont Saint-Michel, or the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées, surrounded by horse-drawn carriages, women in voluminous skirts and men with top hats. Samir now turned his attention to the rack of newspapers hanging at the bottom of the stall. Yellowing, faded, even torn in places, they were dated as far back as nearly a century ago. Bending down, he brought his nose to the newsprint to find the familiarly musty, vanilla-like aroma, and browsed through them until he chanced upon a familiar image.
