The French connection

Okay, the word Paris breathes romance. Women here are the most chic, the menu here is all arty salads with matching wines, and Frenchmen can loosen female kneecaps with just one lazy glance. People want to die and go to Paris, Hemingway calls it a moveable feast, Nietzsche found it the only home for artists in all of Europe and baby girls want to grow up into socialites called Paris. But what if - if - it's just another overrated dot on the map?

When I landed in Manchester to meet up with my temporarily student husband, he surprised me with Eurostar's underwater voyage to Paris. Being a totally low-maintenance wife, I nearly fainted at the rates that seemed exorbitant when rapidly converted into Indian rupees; I watched the down payment for a DDA flat catwalk down Parisian drains. Apparently I had once told him that no one says `I love you' in India. Then where, he had asked me, is one to say it? Paris, I had replied flippantly. So here we were, on an impulse.

It is just Pondicherry with a passport, I wailed on arrival. I was determined not to enjoy Paris. It was an unspeakably snobbish city with an unspeakable language, mispronouncing road as rue and house as chateau. Mark Twain told me in one of his books: "In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.    "I looked sour and outraged as I prepared to mime for a week. How do you trust a city that can't manage a sunset by 9 pm?

‘EEFEL TOWEL’
Travelling with small children is not conducive to sightseeing either. My younger daughter pointed every morning at 'Eefel Towel' from our hotel window while the elder one chucked baguettes at people on the ground despite being told that strangers with head injuries were not a pretty sight. Culture for them was sighting McDonald's after a pointless day at the Versailles.

When my husband gushed about the exotic architecture in general, I commented knowledgably on tile arrangements in pay-toilets. While he made eye contact with Mona Lisa at Louvre, I grappled with the exact change in Euros for an audio guide in English as it's free only in French. Imagine the chaos if we withheld English information at, say, the Taj Mahal! I'll learn French only if they learn Sanskrit, I decided then and there.

The churches had the same somber saints, tourists ringa-ringa-rosied around monuments like they did everywhere else, brinjals bulged purple like they did in Noida. That languid aura of leisure and crisp indolence I dismissed as travel-brochure hype.

Citing vertigo, I stayed down while the rest of my family went up the Eiffel Tower one evening. A man selling souvenirs came to me. 'India?' he asked. I nodded. He told me how he came here from Punjab many years ago. His neck, chest and stomach were studded with miniature landmarks of Paris, which I could pluck off him and attach to my fridge back home. So this then was his night out; unlike Shammi Kapoor shimmying down bar aisles, inviting one and all to an Eeeevening in Parees.

In Tuileries and Left Bank Luxembourg gardens, couples romanced monotonously. Passion in such profusion can look very prosaic. What about stolen kisses? Where do they conduct their illicit liaisons? These people were already in Paris; they had no paradise to dream of unlike us who will always have Paris, as declared in Casablanca.

SEINE WALK
On my last day, I left my family sleeping and took a solo walk down the Seine. True, it undulated much like any other river in the world. As a tourist, I had warned myself against vulgar curiosity, overreactions and racial prejudices. At Champs-Elysees, the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, I pretended to be a local and walked past without gawking.

I noticed artists on the pavements bowing to their sketches, open-air bistros with the smell of crumbling croissants and coffee, the subterranean Metro with its secret trains, the Gothic edifices of Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, the rose windows in a cathedral, and the clean, almost lickable, pillar by La Madeleine's chapel.

I thought of friends who fact-filed the city in their fiction. 'Paris had no tentacles, no claws, no fetid odor,' notes Susan Visvanathan in 'The Seine At Noon'. Paris pops up as the backdrop to a muse-writer relationship in Abha Dawesar's `That Summer In Paris'. In `See Paris For Me', Priti Aisola details delightful nooks and crannies just as she does art galleries and museums. I recalled Marlon Brando ferociously wooing his anonymous woman in `Last Tango in Paris' and the girl in `2 Days In Paris' suffering from a non-French boyfriend.

How vain is the backpacker, trying to decode an entire civilization on tourist visa! Standing there on empty Paris streets that early dawn, I was granted my magical moment - I forgot I was a foreigner; I felt at home.

I have pictures of myself; with the souvenir man, with a woman I met who lives out of three brown bags on a pavement and one of me openmouthed when my husband said `I love you' to me in Malayalam. (A waitress had just asked him in French what his wife wanted.)

Je t'aime in any other lingo sounds just as sweet.