ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you eating?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you studying?”

  “Always.”

  At times, Ammachi drops in a bit of gossip or a reference to a sermon, until her fear of raising the Solankis’ phone bill overcomes her and she announces that it is time to hang up. During his phone time, Melvin focuses on the process of acquiring a green card. He seems to entertain the naïve, infuriating notion that permanent residency can be procured in a matter of weeks, based on vague testimonies from a friend of a friend of a friend. Anju hates these blurry suspects, the way they raise reckless hopes.

  “Not everyone gets it,” Anju insists. “And it must take time to apply.”

  “Then why haven’t you started?” Melvin asks.

  How can she tell him that, for the first time, she is beginning to doubt the merits of staying here at all?

  There is something at school called the Pit, Fish has told her, a backstage section of the school auditorium where girls gather to do unspeakable and legendary things with recorders and ice cubes, pawing at each other behind the scrim of a painted shtetl used for last year’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. One girl, naked, wrapped herself in the American flag used for Student Council meetings and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” which was videotaped and posted somewhere on the Internet. Sometimes girls can be seen casually leaving the auditorium, tightening their ponytails, twisting their skirts back into place. They roll their eyes at the term “lesbian.” “I’m just so over it,” the Birthday girl said, during the Women’s Rights unit in Social Studies. “I feel like we should be postgender already.”

  These are the times when Anju feels paralyzed, caught in the eye of a stormy confusion to which she does not want to know the answers. Such things are not discussed during phone conversations with Ammachi and Melvin. Even knowing of the Pit seems a kind of sin.

  But Anju wishes her family could know something of her hardships, which are mostly hardships of the heart and therefore impossible to utter. She wants them to know her loneliness without having to say the word “lonely,” which does not fall easily from her mouth. She wants them to pity her and praise her all the same, but more, to know her nightmares, such as the one in which she lies supine on the floor of the 1 subway train as sneakers and heels trample her face and chest, leave her drained of voice and breath, while overhead a voice announces that the 1 train is not the 1 train but a new train called the Wrong Train, making no stops until Mexico.

  All this until she snorts herself awake against a goose-down pillow, swaddled in Egyptian cotton sheets.

  AS PROMISED, Anju brings the paintings to school, scrolled within a tube Miss Schimpf gave her. She arrives at her locker to find a note taped over the grating: See me to set up!!! Miss S. Beneath the three exclamation points, a smile.

  The art show is being hung in the Fine Arts Wing, a carpeted haven of crisp, conditioned air, cushy armchairs, and orange pots of polished ficus plants. Few people visit the Fine Arts Wing, usually potential donors or visiting parents, leaving its bathrooms the most civilized of the building.

  Miss Schimpf has never looked more buoyant, more alive within her small province of influence, plotting the positions of various fruit still lifes and pointillist portraits of horses. Her bangles are perpetually clattering as she directs the students, gesturing to a wall, using two fingers to draw a square in the air.

  Students are pinning up their pieces, asking one another for opinions on what looks askew. Everything looks askew. In one series, the fragments of a face are rendered in terrifying close-up, the hair sprouting in thick, snaky locks, the gaze cloudy and detached, like that of a slain animal.

  Below these pictures, on a small white card:

  ARTIST’S STATEMENT

  by Greg Pfeiffer

  I am interested in the protean nature of identity, as expressed through a multiplicity of facial distortions rendered by Xeroxing my face …

  A pair of hands clamps down on Anju’s shoulders, startling her.

  “Anju, I need you to do an artist’s statement,” Miss Schimpf says. “Just the usual I am interested in this or that idea, this inspires me, I am compelled by … Maybe you could mention commercial art in India and its overlap with calendar art or Hindu religious iconography as depicted by Raja Ravi Varma.” Noting Anju’s stricken expression, she adds, “Or just write your name.”

  Miss Schimpf leads her to a vacant section and shows her how to mount and hang the three paintings. She then hurries away, calling out the name of a student who has hung his mobile too low.

  Before unscrolling the paintings, Anju takes a blank card and writes her name in tiny letters. She pins the card to the wall, below the space where the paintings will go, and takes a step back.

  The card is a small scrap in a corkboard sea; most would not even notice it. Her card—claiming nothing, compelled by nothing—is the closest she has come to honesty in a long while. The bell chimes twice, signaling students to first period, but she cannot pull her eyes from her signature, the fine tremble in the line, as if she forged it. The n in “Melvin” trails off in a way that she meant as a flourish, but instead looks like a short bit of string that, if tugged, would quickly unspool her name.

  6.

  S A LITTLE GIRL, Linno daily passed a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the walk to and from school. She took these opportunities to channel prayers of intervention, that she be made invisible during the day’s oral exams, or that Sister Savio fall magically mute for a week. Only now, pausing before the statue, does Linno notice how years of sun have stolen the blue from the Virgin’s cloak and the blush from her cheeks. Wind and rain have whisked flecks of paint from her hands. Her arms are outstretched, but someone has made off with her thumb. Through all this, her mouth remains a ripple of patience.

  Linno touches the hot stone toes and prays for divine clarity.

  The blind suitor, so casually introduced by Rappai’s mother, has since taken center stage in Linno’s life. It began with a phone call from the man’s older sister, a woman named Alice whose voice burst so loudly through the receiver that Melvin had to hold the phone away from his face. They spoke for ten minutes, during which time Melvin mostly said “huh” and “uh-huh.” Before Melvin hung up, Linno distinctly heard Alice say “union,” a word that sounded like an alliance between tense nations.

  Melvin told Linno that the blind suitor’s family had been speaking with Rappai’s mother. They wanted to arrange an introductory meeting.

  Meeting. Alliance. Union. The near future rose before her like a steep flight of stairs.

  A WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, Linno and Ammachi visit Rappai’s mother, who hurries back and forth across her sitting room with glasses of tea in her hands, energized by the fact that she has been sought after as some kind of authority on the blind man. She smiles with what teeth she has left, both of them stained brown like a guava slice left out in the sun.

  They sit at the table where mother and son take their meals. Though only two live in the house, the table bears six blue plastic placemats, bought by Rappai’s father decades ago. Occasionally, when no one is looking, Rappai’s mother will peel up the corner of a placemat and graze her fingers over the golden rectangle left behind, proof of the table’s better days. Those were better days for her as well, when it had seemed that six people would eventually fill the table, but her first two babies died in the womb. And then there came Rappai, a sickly child from whom no one expected great things, but whom she adored simply because he survived.

  After teas are handed out, Rappai’s mother sits at the head of the table and gets down to business. There are some details that she failed to mention upon first proposing the match, namely that the blind man’s family has been derailed by a few tragedies.

  “Curses?” Ammachi asks.

  Rappai’s mother ponders this, and then decides on the word “accidents.” But first, Rappai’s mother revie
ws the factors working in the blind man’s favor:

  1. He hails from a good family, long established in the rubber plantation business. They own estates near Kasaragod, great tracts of shady land with thousands of loyal rubber trees, dribbling raw materials for which the increasingly synthetic world will always have demand. Because of this wealth,

  2. the dowry won’t have to be much, if anything at all. The blind man considers himself a modern man, and he finds this dowry business to be a corrupted tradition.

  3. The blind man is fair-skinned. Not fair in the way that parents advertise in the newspaper ads, when their children are actually the color of scrubbed potatoes. But truly fair, Rappai’s mother guarantees. “Like the color of tea. Very weak milky tea. No. Yogurt.”

  4. The blind man is not completely blind but rather blind to a favorable degree. Delicately, Rappai’s mother adds that this is a trait that works in Linno’s favor.

  “The curses, the curses,” Ammachi urges.

  “It happened like this. The mother wanted to go to Agra for her fifty-fifth birthday. To see the Taj Mahal, I suppose, or maybe to shop, I don’t know, not my business. So she and her husband took off in a plane, but they never made it to Agra. Collided.” She pauses for emphasis. “With a mountain.”

  Ammachi puts a hand to her mouth.

  “And then the sister,” Rappai’s mother whispers. “The one you spoke to on the phone? Her husband hanged himself.”

  “Aiyyo, kashtam.” Ammachi shakes her head. “Someone put the Evil Eye on them.”

  Rappai’s mother clicks her tongue dismissively. “People die when God calls.”

  “God called them into a mountain?”

  They begin arguing over the nature of curses and accidents, and at one point, Ammachi fake-spits to stave off any curses that the conversation may have attracted. Though Linno remains silent, she enjoys these discussions, how simple topics seem to take on such electricity between two old women in a dim kitchen. Until recently, she imagined that she and Anju would end their lives this way, echoing the arguments of the women who raised them. But now the world is much larger than the one she knew as a little girl.

  SAFE TO SAY that the blind suitor must have researched Linno’s history as well. Linno wonders what he has been told and by whom. Yes, she has had her traumas, one in particular that could have crushed the spirit of a lesser child. She could have grown glazed and mute, living forever in her nightmares, feeding off her grief.

  Linno has never recounted the story aloud, though she could, she is sure, if pressed. On the day Gracie died, Abraham Chandy had offered to take her and Linno and Anju on a day trip to Kovalam Beach, along with his own family. There, Linno and her mother took a walk farther down the beach, heedless of the oncoming storm that was tossing the tides. While Linno was playing by herself, her mother wandered into the waves in what was later deemed a suicide. A fisherman found Gracie’s body by morning. He told police that the beds of her fingernails were blue.

  Being the last to see her mother alive, Linno was handled gently, as though at any second she might descend into a glassy-eyed delirium. She could feel the questions swirling around her: What kind of mother would leave this child? If anyone had asked Linno directly, she would have said that Gracie was the kind of mother who made the perfect shape for sleeping next to, like a spoon in a spoon. The kind of mother who hit only with the flat of her hand, to know exactly what pain she inflicted. The kind of mother who did not hide her sadness but let it seep into a whole day, unyielding and infectious.

  Linno soon learned that the best coping tactic was one sold to her by a self-help cassette tape given to Melvin by Berchmans, urging him to “Live for the Now!” At first, she was unsure how to Live for the Now if Now had been ruined by someone who had Died in the Before. Her interpretation was to bury her mother in a well-tended corner of her mind. There, she visited her mother almost as often as she breathed, but only in brief moments, scraps of memory. Like the mole at the corner of her mother’s eye. Or the dryness of her elbows and the velvet of her ear-lobes. But Linno did not dwell. If she dwelled, she would have to apologize to her mother, and she did not know if she could survive those kinds of words. (“It is common,” said the self-help tape, as read aloud by a woman with a thick, oozy voice, “for children of the deceased to suffer a terrible sense of guilt.”)

  Technically, Ammachi said, one should not take communion without first cleansing the conscience, but what was the point of confessing everything to Anthony Achen? Whenever he listened to Linno’s stuttered string of sins, he never even deigned to ask her name. While Linno confessed to coveting a classmate’s skirt, Anthony Achen kept his eyes somewhere on the window above her, his hands curled over his armrests as if he were sitting aloft a throne. By the end, he crossed the air in front of her with his hand and sentenced her to a lengthy recitation of rosary beads to be completed on her own time. Confession was nothing special. It all seemed rather anticlimactic.

  If she were to write a self-help book dedicated to children like herself, children whose memories made each night a burden, Linno would advise that control is the key. She once read of Jain yogis who believe that the span of a man’s life is a predestined number of breaths; hence, the yogic practice of lengthening and deepening the breath cycle. Control breaths and you control life. So in a way, she decides, control is closer to divinity than confession.

  • • •

  NOT LONG AFTER the conference with Rappai’s mother, an envelope arrives in the mail, addressed to Melvin. He stands while opening the envelope and drinking a cup of chai, his hips sore from sitting behind Abraham’s steering wheel all day.

  Inside is a photograph wrapped in a sheet of paper. He knows without looking that this is the blind suitor. Initially, Melvin was elated by the blind suitor’s interest, but now that his photo has arrived in the mail, Melvin suffers a quiet terror about presenting it to Linno. Marriage, all of a sudden, has acquired the shape of a man.

  Before he views the picture, Melvin thinks of the woman he almost married, how she arrived in his hands twenty years ago, in the same flat fashion. At his parents’ suggestion, he had returned from Bombay to marry the wife they had chosen for him. But when he grabbed the girl’s photograph from Ammachi, giddy, almost breathless, and looked at their selection for the first time, his future seemed to fold.

  Eight months before, Melvin had gone to Bombay with his friend Govind, a Malayali Hindu who said that the city abounded with “civil service jobs.” What the term meant, Melvin did not know, though it seemed to mean working for the government, behind a desk, hopefully beneath a fan. But when Melvin arrived in Bombay, he learned that whole fleets of small-town boys flocked to the city in pursuit of the same dreamily vague civil service jobs, only to find that to obtain such a job, one had to be either smart or willing to pay. And, as well, the network of civil servants seemed a twisted family tree of cousins granting favors to cousins; Melvin had no relatives perched in those enviable branches.

  By luck, Govind found Melvin a job as a clerk at the Oasis Hotel. Govind knew the owner, but refused to take the job himself, arguing that a Brahmin, however unemployed and needy, should never have to work for someone of the mid-level castes, as the owner was. Telling Melvin of his plight, Govind leaned against a poster-covered wall, the sole of his chappal propped against the face of a pretty woman holding up a tube of Colgate fennel toothpaste. “Brahmins are doomed in this world,” Govind sighed. Melvin could think of a few Brahmins he knew working as cooks and cabbies, but kept silent on the assumption that Govind was simply homesick. “Where can I go but back to university?”

  “Another degree?” From Melvin’s last count, Govind already had two, neither of which he was putting to use. “You would rather be unemployed than working in a hotel?”

  “Or I could work for my father again.” Govind shrugged. “You are lucky, though, you Christians. Serve thy neighbor. Your own Jesus washes other people’s dirty feet, allay?”

  Govind le
ft a week later, while Melvin took a tiny airshaft of a flat and worked at the Oasis Hotel. Strategically positioned near the international airport, the hotel fielded a healthy amount of transcontinental clientele, many European businessmen and Indians able to travel abroad. The Oasis Hotel embodied its namesake, an island of modern, Western calm in the midst of Bombay’s shabby ruckus, where the breakfast buffet offered doughnuts and cereal alongside idli and sambar. The glass elevator was the triumph of the lobby. Gliding from height to height, it shuttled its passengers to a synthesized rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”

  Melvin didn’t mind the job, mostly hoisting people’s luggage onto carts, which he then transported to their rooms. He hated the pillbox hat he was made to wear, complete with a strap that dug a welt beneath his chin. He also hated his tendency to nod and nod like a child whenever addressed by a resident, a tendency that would follow him into old age, even when addressed by his mother.

  As he stuffed more hours into his schedule, he began to dislike Bombay, though he had seen little more of the city than his flat and the Oasis Hotel. His intention had been to climb the professional ladder through diligence and a good attitude, but the past few months had shown him that the ladder was not so much vertical as horizontal and the higher planes would be impossible to reach. Above the clerks was a supervisor who earned a higher salary, and above him, a manager who was godlike in both his power and his absence.

  And then there was the bit of Bombay that he observed: the scant villages of people that sprang up beneath bridges; the hijras who paraded in saris while Melvin watched, transfixed by their Adam’s apples; the university students protesting a raise in tuition; the scrawny children weaving through traffic and selling plates of sliced coconut like wide, white smiles. In his later years, when he pictured Bombay, it was not a place that he saw but people, tide upon teeming tide, out of which he knew no one.