ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Though Anju has seen it only once, she is well aware of Four Corners, named for four female hosts who debate various news topics and trends, from foreign policy to flattering swimsuit cover-ups. On the one episode that Anju watched, Mrs. Solanki was introducing the practice of Ayurveda to the studio audience. “Ayurveda,” she said, “abides by the principle that anything that enters our bodies can have three possible effects—as food, as medicine, or as poison—which is why I refuse to eat anything with high-fructose corn syrup.” Her usual antagonist, the spunky and highlighted Young Creationist, facetiously argued on behalf of Little Debbie snack cakes (of which she could “literally inhale a dozen”), earning applause from some members of the audience. As was her wont, Mrs. Solanki laughed and lauded the Young Creationist’s tiny waist: “If only we could all have your genes.”

  “Levi’s Low Rise!” the Creationist replied.

  Mrs. Solanki gave another desiccated laugh.

  On the way to the Solankis, Anju notices a blond, wind-whipped head leaning out the passenger window of a car, possibly a tourist like her, a thought that inspires a comforting sense of fellowship. Squinting, she realizes that the head belongs to a dog. It calmly surveys the puckered water, the elegant cluster of skyscrapers on the horizon. Anju has read of these buildings. During the three months she spent waiting for her visa, she scoured a library book called America Today to bring herself up to speed on the nation’s recent history and politics, in case her schoolmates might want to talk history and politics. (She read somewhere that New Yorkers routinely quote Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.) According to the book, “The world’s first skyscrapers were built by Bethlehem Steel, a company also responsible for laying the nation’s first railroad track and supplying steel for the Golden Gate Bridge.” The book went on to mention the bankruptcy of Bethlehem Steel in 2001, but failed to name the new transnational titans, the Tatas and Mittals who had run them out of their own country. (This was a fact that Anju’s former history teacher, a spirited nationalist, had proclaimed to the class with a victorious double pump of his fist.) And despite Anju’s own sense of patriotism, both of these things—the death of Bethlehem Steel and the skyline whose incompleteness she will never fully know—fill her with a sudden gray nostalgia for a country not her own.

  Lost in the undulations of power lines, she stops paying attention to the large green signs that indicate unfamiliar cities. The besuited man is driving fast but no faster than the cars around her, each one carrying a person lulled into a similar spell, the boundless speed somehow slowing time. A jet has drawn a chalky scrawl across the sky but seems to move no further. Dozy yet anxious, she focuses on the wisdoms plastered on the bumpers of passing cars, particularly one that leaves her with the militant order to LIVE LARGER, DRIVE SMALLER! NOT EVERYONE NEEDS AN SUV!

  THE SOLANKIS LIVE in a vanilla cake. Anju has seen nothing of such spotless grandeur, a colossus with carved accents and curls along its corners, surrounded by a shiny iron gate with the stern, bearded bust of a Roman general impaled at every post. Morning light blushes the windows, whose sills are spiked so as to ward away incontinent pigeons. The driveway circles the front like a smile.

  Gold block letters spell THE MONARCH over the revolving glass doors, which usher her onto a red velvet carpet leading past an oasis of plants and fountains, beneath a series of chandeliers like bright, brass octopi, to the front desk. Upon hearing Anju’s name, a man in a black suit asks her how she is doing in a way that seems earnestly invested in her answer. “Very good,” she says. He tells her to go on up; her bags will arrive shortly.

  Alone in the elevator, she finds a bench with a deep green leather cushion. She sits down. The ground rises up. Sitting has never seemed so luxurious.

  The elevator deposits her before an open door made of rich, dark wood. Shoes off or on? Her first impression seems to hinge on this decision. Out of respect for tradition: off.

  “Hello?” she calls. Hesitating, she steps inside. Her feet are greeted by cold marble, white with wisps of gray.

  The living room is full of beautiful clutter, organized to keep the gaze traveling from one piece to the next. A stained-glass window on the far wall first captures her attention, a geometric design built in brilliant wedges and disks of red, yellow, and green. Niches are carved into the walls to house sculptures and vases, like the leaping salmon of glass or the bust of a brass ram with two black, curling horns. And though the Solankis might refrain from cow, they seem to take pleasure in other piecemeal animals. An elephant foot with tough, scalloped toenails supports the round glass top of a side table. Beneath the piano, the skins of two zebra lie next to each other, arms benignly overlapping. Anju catches her foot in the smiling maw of a bear.

  “Happens to people all the time,” a man says, stepping on the bear’s back. In anguish, she notes his cashew-colored shoe next to the nudity of her foot.

  Once she is freed, the man shakes her hand and introduces himself as Varun. Around his mouth is a neat, black wreath of facial hair.

  And then, the clean click-click of heels as a woman calls out from some upper, unseen level, “Is that Anju?” Mrs. Solanki appears in the hollow of a Spanish-looking arch. Overall, she gives the impression of shininess, from the satin tunic she wears over her pants to the laminated look of her bobbed hairstyle.

  “Hello, Auntie.” Anju makes a small, awkward bow with folded hands. “Uncle.”

  “No need for that.” Mrs. Solanki descends the stairs with minimal trembling of her bob. “You can call me Sonia.”

  Sonia and Varun. Using these names makes Anju feel as if she is trying to hug her host parents prematurely. Mr. and Mrs. will do.

  “How many times have I said to get rid of that thing, Varun?” Mrs. Solanki shakes her head at the bear rug. “My mother is scared to open the door because of it.”

  “Maybe we should get one for all the doors,” Mr. Solanki says.

  Dismissing him with an elegant wave, Mrs. Solanki enfolds Anju into a well of spicy perfume.

  ANJU SITS ON the slippery edge of a sofa that, like all the chairs in the living room, is heaped with filigreed, loaflike cushions. Mrs. Solanki places a dish of tiny beef samosas on the coffee table, as well as another one of raw carrots and broccoli which she calls “organic.” Anju partakes from the samosa plate, only after watching Mr. Solanki plunge two into his mouth.

  “My family is from Bombay,” Mr. Solanki says. “You’ve been there?”

  “I was born there,” Anju says. “We moved back to Kerala when I was small. To a village called Kumarakom.”

  “Such different places.” Mr. Solanki smiles. Like Mrs. Solanki’s, his skin is smooth and taut, as though it has been surgically stretched, like canvas, at the corners of his eyes. “Have you heard of my family home, Solanki Villa? On Solanki Way? Pappa wanted to call it The Solanki Villa, but Mumma said, ‘How many Solanki Villas are there?’”

  She marvels at his accent, slightly Indian with a British prissiness to it, like the Bollywood actor boasting of his succulent salad.

  “You and your family,” Mrs. Solanki says, “you are Keralans?”

  “Yes, we are Keralites.”

  “Ah yes. Kera-lights.”

  They are strangers, and for the next ten months, they will be living together. This fact becomes suddenly, bluntly apparent, dragging the conversation to a stop. Mr. Solanki stuffs another samosa in his mouth, and for a moment there is only the sound of diligent chewing.

  “You have a son, I think,” Anju says.

  Enlivened, Mrs. Solanki reaches for the picture frame on the elephant-ankle tabletop. The photo features a bored-looking boy in cap and gown, holding his diploma as he would a lunch tray. Mr. Solanki’s hand rests on his shoulder, and Mrs. Solanki is smiling so hard that her expression seems almost bestial in its baring of teeth.

  “That was Rohit’s high school graduation,” Mr. Solanki says. “He was attending Princeton—”

  “He is still attending Princeton,” Mrs. Solanki corrects.
“He is simply taking a year off.”

  “To study at another place?” Anju asks.

  “No, it is the fashion with children here, taking time off. As they say, to ‘find’ themselves.” Using her fingers, Mrs. Solanki makes peace signs around the word “find.”

  With nothing else to break the silence, Anju replies, “Okay, yes.” And with her left hand, adds a peace sign of her own.

  LATER, Anju attempts to use a telephone that seems to belong on its own pedestal, all pearly enamel and brass buttons. She carefully dials the numbers on her phone card, more fearful of harming the phone than fumbling the digits, but Mrs. Solanki waves the card away and tells her to dial regularly. “We have an excellent global plan.”

  No crackling phone lines, no curt operators. After three beeps, Anju hears the faint trail of Melvin’s voice: “Hallome?”

  “Chachen?”

  She can hear and see him perfectly, his hands, thick-knuckled, trying to squeeze her voice from the brown plastic receiver.

  “IS IT ANJU? HALLO, ANJU? ANJU MOL!”

  “It’s me! I hear you! You don’t have to shout!” It is a suprising relief, speaking in Malayalam rather than navigating the consonants and quicksand vowels of English.

  “What’s this?” Melvin says. “So clear! Like you’re across the street.”

  “They have a good connection.”

  “You reached there safely, Anju? Are you eating well? How is your stomach feeling?”

  “I ate, I ate. How are Ammachi and Linno?”

  She hears Melvin pause, his speech muffled, probably trying to persuade Linno to pick up the phone. “Linno is taking a bath. Did you give them those dolls?”

  Anju looks at the sculpture within the niche next to her, a crystal bird magically infused with swirls of indigo and fuschia ink within its outstretched wings.

  “Anju? The dolls?”

  “Yes, Chachen, they loved them.”

  LIKE A WELCOMING COMMITTEE, Anju’s two suitcases are awaiting her in the guest room, an awkward pair of plastic visitors in the pulled-silk surroundings. The measurements of the bed are a mystery to her, expansive enough for three adults but no higher than her shin, a height that seems customized for a child. The dresser, bookshelf, and desk are all a glossy dark brown, and marigold curtains collect in pools on the carpet.

  Mrs. Solanki drapes a thick white towel over the back of a chair and a smaller towel on top of this, both stitched with the letter S. “Over there is your private bathroom,” Mrs. Solanki says, “and you’ll love the showerhead. It has the best water pressure in the whole house.”

  In the shower, Anju finds herself endlessly shocked by needles of water so fierce and hot that she is forced to shield her breasts with her arms and turn her back against the onslaught. At home she bathed with bucket and cup, savoring the slow fall of fresh water as it seeped across her scalp and over her shoulders. Here, the showerhead treats her as though she is a grease-grimed pan; the scouring leaves her skin a surprised pink. But the soap is beautiful, a translucent ovoid of green, striped with blades of deeper green within. She inhales and inhales its kiwi sweetness. On impulse, she licks the soap, then vigorously wipes the chemical taint from her tongue. For all her achievements, she sometimes feels like a person of unparalleled stupidity.

  Entrenched between tasseled bed cushions, she lies wide awake. Is it lunchtime back home? She pictures a pair of hands washing beneath the wobbly pump at the side of the house, rinsing the street from one’s chappals and feet before stepping inside. Back home. But they are not back, her family, they are moving forward, on another orbit, divided from her not only by miles but by time.

  Anju rises from bed and sits by her open suitcase as she unpacks her belongings. From a cloth bag embossed with the words PRINCESS TAILOR SHOP, she withdraws a red sketchbook, its spine coming loose within beige cloth tape, its corners worn.

  Along the inside of the cover is signed L. Vallara.

  The writing is precise and sharp, and instantly Anju remembers her sister at thirteen years old, her right arm under the table, her tongue between her teeth, her left hand laboring to bring the alphabet to paper. Lines she had mastered for years, unraveling in a hand that would not obey.

  Anju fingers the pages that crackle upon turning; she has memorized the sketches on each side. Beginning at the end, she finds a few studies of diapered babies squatting, crawling, sitting, all wearing oversized bifocals. At the bottom of the page, in thick, swirly letters: Frames & Optics. On another page, a peacock with its carnivalesque tail spread around the words Sari Palace. And above the peacock: You Are What You Wear!

  Earlier in the book, the drawings lose their words and become messier, lines more frayed, figures in movement. There is a sketch of a coconut cutter, ankles crossed around a palm trunk, a knife between his teeth as he wrestles a coconut above him. Next to this, a magnified rendering of the torso, the tense chest muscles, the strain of a single cord in the throat, a body shorn of excess. All this from the scratches of her sister’s pencil. A live current of talent runs through Linno’s body, and yet Anju never held her in awe, as it felt strange to hold her sister at a distance. Now, with so many miles between them, this book in her hands, she can and she does.

  On the first page of the book is a sketch of Anju studying, the weft of her braid tightly drawn, scattered with highlights from the gleam of a nearby lamp. Every shadow obeys the logic of light. Her arms encircle an open book on a table, her nose near the gutter, something selfish about the pose.

  Alone in my new room, she thinks, I came to a crossroads.

  Turning to Linno’s signature, Anju takes a pencil from her bag and, pressing gently, erases the L from L. Vallara.

  Which she replaces with an A.

  2.

  HE MALAYALA MANORAMA. At the Kottayam offices, the newspaper is printed and posted to homes as far away as Toronto and Singapore, Berlin and Mumbai, stuffed into mailboxes, smacked onto counters, soggied with potato peels, saved in cupboards even when the new Manorama arrives.

  Subscribers in Dubai run their fingers along the captions that tell of yet another family suicide, this one in Kollam, below a picture so underexposed the bodies look charred. Readers in Indianapolis drag pens down the marriage ads, seeking spousal security in four sentences that involve birthplace, complexion, creed, and degree. And everyone, especially those overseas, lingers in the obituary section if only to recognize the name of an old classmate, a former friend, a distant neighbor who has been pressed like an ageless leaf between the pages of a memory.

  At the time of Anju’s scholarship announcement, the newspaper reaches about nine million people worldwide. One of them is a woman by the name of Bird. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, with a rotating cast of subletters who unknowingly pay the majority of the rent. Bird used to feel guilty about bamboozling her roommates, who are usually in their twenties, pale and unfettered, wishing to dive into the fresh waters of independence. But now, at fifty, Bird reasons that she is simply transplanting an Eastern custom for the betterment of Western society. These youths should be taking care of their elders, and Bird is reaping her due.

  The current subletter, a long-haired blonde named Gwen, is an avid cook. Often she leaves a quiche Lorraine or a stockpot of chili in the fridge, the smells dangling in the air like unattainable bait. And though Gwen never shares her food, she makes Bird promise to share some of her recipes, for lack of anything else to discuss when they scoot around each other in the kitchen. “I bet you have tons of great currying secrets,” Gwen says.

  In truth, Bird weeps too easily at onions and every curry needs an onion. She loses all patience with dicing. The moat of blood leaking from a hunk of meat makes her retch. Cooking has never been her forte, and she relies heavily on Tandoori Express takeout, two blocks away. Yes, she has secrets, but none to do with currying.

  Bird has recently acquired a job not far from her apartment, as a full-time assistant at the law offices of Rajiv
Tandon, an immigration attorney. She photocopies papers, answers phones, and tells people to wait until Mr. Tandon is ready to see them. Usually, the visitors are new immigrants from all parts of the South Asian subcontinent, all of them anxious, hopeful, lurching at the sound of Mr. Tandon’s voice as it comes rumbling through his office walls. They are used to a bureaucracy that has proven as inconstant as a cloud. They blame and love Mr. Tandon in the same way that metereologists are held responsible for interpreting the weather.

  She won the position six months ago, when she took down the number from a poster that read: NEED A JOB? SPEAK ENGLISH + HINDI?

  At the interview, she found Mr. Tandon as well groomed as he was well educated. He did not speak Hindi, he said, because his parents had wanted him to fully acclimate to his private boarding school life at St. Albans, which was, by the by, home to the sons of senators and statesmen. “But that’s a whole other era, isn’t it?” Mr. Tandon smiled. Not so long ago, it seemed to Bird. The luster of his hair suggested that he was no more than forty. Bird used to work at an Indian beauty salon, so she knew the color of true black, not the stark, bluish shade found in a box or a bottle.

  She had spent far too long at the salon, a job she took only because she knew the owner well, from the days when they traveled in the same drama troupe. Abdul Ghafoor is his name, a man whose shellacked hairstyle has not changed since he adopted it from the cinema star Amitabh Bachchan, tall on top with sturdy sideburns. Even as Amitabh’s star fell in the nineties, Ghafoor maintained the indomitable coif and was only too pleased to see Amitabh resurface as game-show host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, that enthusiastic Indian answer to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

  Equal to his love for Amitabh is Ghafoor’s love for his now defunct drama troupe, Apsara Arts Club, which also lent its name, years later, to his Apsara Salon. Bird has been a key member of both. She prefers not to dwell on her acting days, but Ghafoor prefers to think about them daily, launching into the old roles at random, particularly the lines from Kalli Pavayuda Veede, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which Ghafoor brought to the Kerala stage. Ibsen had long been championed by Malayali academics, but by the early eighties, Ghafoor was eager to free Ibsen from that stiff and distant realm. “Social realism” was a phrase of which he never tired. “What is more important than to explore the minds of ordinary people?” he asked, uninterested in answers. Taken with the central character of Nora, the repressed and rebellious wife of Torvald, Ghafoor pored over the English text for months. He turned Nora and Torvald into Neera and Tobin, finding the Malayalam words for the desperation and disillusionment that would lead Neera to leave her husband. As director, Ghafoor never had lines of his own, but he memorized some of Bird’s lines, which he still recites today while gliding a broom down the aisle, as easily as humming the tune to an old song: