THE PERFUMIST OF PARIS
Author: Alka Joshi
ISBN: 9780778386148
Publication Date: March
28, 2023
Publisher: MIRA
Books
BOOK SUMMARY:
"A stunning portrait of a woman blossoming into her
full power…this is Alka Joshi's best book yet!” —Kate Quinn, New
York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye
From the author of Reese's Book Club Pick The Henna Artist, the
final chapter in Alka Joshi’s New York Times bestselling
Jaipur trilogy takes readers to 1970s Paris, where Radha’s budding career as a
perfumer must compete with the demands of her family and the secrets of her
past.
Paris, 1974. Radha is now living in Paris with her husband, Pierre,
and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years
ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her
daughters, and she’s finally found her passion—the treasure trove of scents.
She has an exciting and challenging position working for a master perfumer,
helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her
career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her
need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can’t give up this thing that
drives her.
Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists
the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra—women who
use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She’s on the cusp
of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about
is heading to Paris to find her—upending her carefully managed world and
threatening to destroy a vulnerable marriage.
The Jaipur Trilogy
Book 1: The Henna Artist
Book 2: The Secret Keeper of Jaipur
Book 3: The Perfumist of Paris
Paris
September 2, 1974
I pick up on the first ring; I know it’s going to be her.
She always calls on his birthday. Not to remind me of the day he came into this
world but to let me know I’m not alone in my remembrance.
“Jiji?” I keep my voice low. I don’t want to wake Pierre and
the girls.
“Kaisa ho, choti behen?” my sister says. I hear the smile in
her voice, and I respond with my own. It’s lovely to hear Lakshmi’s gentle
Hindi here in my Paris apartment four thousand miles away. I’d always called her
Jiji—big sister—but she hadn’t always called me choti behen. It was Malik who
addressed me as little sister when I first met him in Jaipur eighteen years
ago, and he wasn’t even related to Jiji and me by blood. He was simply her
apprentice. My sister started calling me choti behen later, after everything in
Jaipur turned topsy-turvy, forcing us to make a new home in Shimla.
Today, my sister will talk about everything except the
reason she’s calling. It’s the only way she’s found to make sure I get out of bed
on this particular date, to prevent me from spiraling into darkness every year
on the second of September, the day my son, Niki, was born.
She started the tradition the first year I was separated
from him, in 1957. I was just fourteen. Jiji arrived at my boarding school with
a picnic, having arranged for the headmistress to excuse me from classes. We
had recently moved from Jaipur to Shimla, and I was still getting used to our
new home. I think Malik was the only one of us who adjusted easily to the cooler
temperatures and thinner air of the Himalayan mountains, but I saw less of him
now that he was busy with activities at his own school, Bishop Cotton.
I was in history class when Jiji appeared at the door and
beckoned me with a smile. As I stepped outside the room, she said, “It’s such a
beautiful day, Radha. Shall we take a hike?” I looked down at my wool blazer
and skirt, my stiff patent leather shoes, and wondered what had gotten into
her. She laughed and told me I could change into the clothes I wore for nature
camp, the one our athletics teacher scheduled every month. I’d woken with a
heaviness in my chest, and I wanted to say no, but one look at her eager face
told me I couldn’t deny her. She’d cooked my favorite foods for the picnic.
Makki ki roti dripping with ghee. Palak paneer so creamy I always had to take a
second helping. Vegetable korma. And chole, the garbanzo bean curry with plenty
of fresh cilantro.
That day, we hiked Jakhu Hill. I told her how I hated math
but loved my sweet old teacher. How my roommate, Mathilde, whistled in her
sleep. Jiji told me that Madho Singh, Malik’s talking parakeet, was starting to
learn Punjabi words. She’d begun taking him to the Community Clinic to amuse
the patients while they waited to be seen by her and Dr. Jay. “The hill people
have been teaching him the words they use to herd their sheep, and he’s using
those same words now to corral patients in the waiting area!” She laughed, and
it made me feel lighter. I’ve always loved her laugh; it’s like the temple bells
that worshippers ring to receive blessings from Bhagwan.
When we reached the temple at the top of the trail, we
stopped to eat and watched the monkeys frolicking in the trees. A few of the
bolder macaques eyed our lunch from just a few feet away. As I started to tell
her a story about the Shakespeare play we were rehearsing after school, I
stopped abruptly, remembering the plays Ravi and I used to rehearse together,
the prelude to our lovemaking. When I froze, she knew it was time to steer the
conversation into less dangerous territory, and she smoothly transitioned to
how many times she’d beat Dr. Jay at backgammon.
“I let Jay think he’s winning until he realizes he isn’t,”
Lakshmi grinned.
I liked Dr. Kumar (Dr. Jay to Malik and me), the doctor who
looked after me when I was pregnant with Niki—here in Shimla. I’d been the
first to notice that he couldn’t take his eyes off Lakshmi, but she’d dismissed
it; she merely considered the two of them to be good friends. And here he and
my sister have been married now for ten years! He’s been good for her—better
than her ex-husband was. He taught her to ride horses. In the beginning, she
was scared to be high off the ground (secretly, I think she was afraid of
losing control), but now she can’t imagine her life without her favorite
gelding, Chandra.
So lost am I in memories of the sharp scents of Shimla’s
pines, the fresh hay Chandra enjoys, the fragrance of lime aftershave and
antiseptic coming off Dr. Jay’s coat, that I don’t hear Lakshmi’s question. She
asks again. My sister knows how to exercise infinite patience—she had to do it
often enough with those society ladies in Jaipur whose bodies she spent hours
decorating with henna paste.
I look at the clock on my living room wall. “Well, in
another hour, I’ll get the girls up and make their breakfast.” I move to the
balcony windows to draw back the drapes. It’s overcast today, but a little
warmer than yesterday. Down below, a moped winds its way among parked cars on
our street. An older gentleman, keys jingling in his palm, unlocks his shop
door a few feet from the entrance to our apartment building. “The girls and I
may walk a ways before we get on the Métro.”
“Won’t the nanny be taking them to school?”
Turning from the window, I explain to Jiji that we had to
let our nanny go quite suddenly and the task of taking my daughters to the
International School has fallen to me.
“What happened?”
It’s a good thing Jiji can’t see the color rise in my
cheeks. It’s embarrassing to admit that Shanti, my nine-year-old daughter, struck
her nanny on the arm, and Yasmin did what she would have done to one of her
children back in Algeria: she slapped Shanti. Even as I say it, I feel
pinpricks of guilt stab the tender skin just under my belly button. What kind
of mother raises a child who attacks others? Have I not taught her right from
wrong? Is it because I’m neglecting her, preferring the comfort of work to
raising a girl who is presenting challenges I’m not sure I can handle? Isn’t
that what Pierre has been insinuating? I can almost hear him say, “This is what
happens when a mother puts her work before family.” I put a hand on my
forehead. Oh, why did he fire Yasmin before talking to me? I didn’t even have a
chance to understand what transpired, and now my husband expects me to find a
replacement. Why am I the one who must find the solution to a problem I didn’t
cause?
My sister asks how my work is going. This is safer ground.
My discomfort gives way to excitement. “I’ve been working on a formula for
Delphine that she thinks is going to be next season’s favorite fragrance. I’m
on round three of the iteration. The way she just knows how to pull back on one
ingredient and add barely a drop of another to make the fragrance a success is
remarkable, Jiji.”
I can talk forever about fragrances. When I’m mixing a
formula, hours can pass before I stop to look around, stretch my neck or step
outside the lab for a glass of water and a chat with Celeste, Delphine’s
secretary. It’s Celeste who often reminds me that it’s time for me to pick up
the girls from school when I’m between nannies. And when I do have someone to
look after the girls, Celeste casually asks what I’m serving for dinner,
reminding me that I need to stop work and get home in time to feed them. On the
days Pierre cooks, I’m only too happy to stay an extra hour before finishing
work for the day. It’s peaceful in the lab. And quiet. And the scents—honey and
clove and vetiver and jasmine and cedar and myrrh and gardenia and musk—are
such comforting companions. They ask nothing of me except the freedom to
envelop another world with their essence. My sister understands. She told me
once that when she skated a reed dipped in henna paste across the palm, thigh
or belly of a client to draw a Turkish fig or a boteh leaf or a sleeping baby, everything
fell away—time, responsibilities, worries.
My daughter Asha’s birthday is coming up. She’s turning
seven, but I know Jiji won’t bring it up. Today, my sister will refrain from
any mention of birthdays, babies or pregnancies because she knows these
subjects will inflame my bruised memories. Lakshmi knows how hard I’ve worked
to block out the existence of my firstborn, the baby I had to give up for
adoption. I’d barely finished grade eight when Jiji told me why my breasts were
tender, why I felt vaguely nauseous. I wanted to share the good news with Ravi:
we were going to have a baby! I’d been so sure he would marry me when he found
out he was going to be a father. But before I could tell him, his parents
whisked him away to England to finish high school. I haven’t laid eyes on him
since. Did he know we’d had a son? Or that our baby’s name is Nikhil?
I wanted so much to keep my baby, but Jiji said I needed to
finish school. At thirteen, I was too young to be a mother. What a relief it
was when my sister’s closest friends, Kanta and Manu, agreed to raise the baby
as their own and then offered to keep me as his nanny, his ayah. They had the
means, the desire and an empty nursery. I could be with Niki all day, rock him,
sing him to sleep, kiss his peppercorn toes, pretend he was all mine. It took
me only four months to realize that I was doing more harm than good, hurting
Kanta and Manu by wanting Niki to love only me.
When I was first separated from my son, I thought about him
every hour of every day. The curl on one side of his head that refused to
settle down. The way his belly button stuck out. How eagerly his fat fingers
grasped the milk bottle I wasn’t supposed to give him. Having lost her own
baby, Kanta was happy to feed Niki from her own breast. And that made me
jealous—and furious. Why did she get to nurse my baby and pretend he was hers?
I knew it was better for him to accept her as his new mother, but still. I
hated her for it.
I knew that as long as I stayed in Kanta’s house, I would
keep Niki from loving the woman who wanted to nurture him and was capable of
caring for him in the long run. Lakshmi saw it, too. But she left the decision
to me. So I made the only choice I could. I left him. And I tried my best to
pretend he never existed. If I could convince myself that the hours Ravi Singh
and I spent rehearsing Shakespeare—coiling our bodies around each other as
Othello and Desdemona, devouring each other into exhaustion—had been a dream,
surely I could convince myself our baby had been a dream, too.
And it worked. On every day but the second of September.
Ever since I left Jaipur, Kanta has been sending envelopes
so thick I know what they contain without opening them: photos of Niki the
baby, the toddler, the boy. I return each one, unopened, safe in the knowledge
that the past can’t touch me, can’t splice my heart, can’t leave me bleeding.
The last time I saw Jiji in Shimla, she showed me a similar
envelope addressed to her. I recognized the blue paper, Kanta’s elegant
handwriting—letters like g and y looping gracefully—and shook my head. “When
you’re ready, we can look at the photos together,” Jiji said.
But I knew I never would.
Today, I’ll make it through Niki’s seventeenth birthday in a
haze, as I always do. I know tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow, I’ll be able to
do what I couldn’t today. I’ll seal that memory of my firstborn as tightly as
if I were securing the lid of a steel tiffin for my lunch, making sure that not
a drop of the masala dal can escape.
Excerpted from The
Perfumist of Paris by Alka Joshi © 2023 by Alka Joshi, used with
permission from HarperCollins/MIRA Books.
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BIO:
Born in India and raised in the U.S. since she was nine,
Alka Joshi has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College
of Arts. Joshi's debut novel, The Henna Artist, immediately
became a NYT bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub pick, was Longlisted for
the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, & is in development as a TV
series. Her second novel, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (2021), is
followed by The Perfumist of Paris (2023). Find her online at www.alkajoshi.com.
SOCIAL:
Author Website: www.alkajoshi.com
TWITTER: @alkajoshi
FB: @alkajoshi2019
Insta: @thealkajoshi
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18257842.Alka_Joshi
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