ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “Is it Yeksho?” Melvin asks. “I heard Yeksho is very good.”

  “Yeksho? Is that the name of a brandy?”

  Melvin nods, his conviction wilting. “From France?”

  Abraham brightens. “Oh! You mean this!” He pulls the bottle from the bag and points at the gold label that reads xo.

  Heat rises to Melvin’s cheeks, spreading around his collar.

  “Honest mistake,” says Abraham.

  Disgusted with himself, Melvin almost fails to hear Abraham explain that the bottle is for a man with a fine taste in foreign liquors. “Poor Kuku. He hardly gets out of the house. Blind, you know.”

  Melvin focuses on the auto-rickshaw in front of him, which is presently attempting to forge its own lane in the gutter of space between two lorries. “Kuku? Kuku George?”

  “Do you know him?”

  Melvin glances at Abraham, who looks surprised. “I do …,” Melvin says, wanting to adhere to the general policy of secrecy where matters of marriage are concerned. He did not even tell Berchmans the day before, after the third beer had loosened his tongue. “I don’t know him personally….”

  As Abraham directs, Melvin pulls up to the wrought-iron gate of the house, flung open so that he can ascend the steep driveway. Instead, he stalls at the gate.

  “What is it?” Abraham asks. “Why aren’t we moving?”

  “If you don’t mind too much,” Melvin says carefully, “could you walk up the driveway and I wait down here?”

  Abraham laughs. “But if I wanted to walk, I wouldn’t have hired you.”

  Melvin wraps his fingers around the steering wheel; doing so steadies his voice. “I would prefer that Kuku George and his family not see me like this. As a driver. He has shown interest in my daughter—in Linno—and the families have not yet met. We are to meet next week. I am sure he already knows that I’m a driver, but this would be … a bad first impression.”

  “Kuku?” Abraham sits forward. “Kuku showed interest in your family?”

  “In Linno, my eldest.” Now Melvin’s throat feels warm with shame. He knows very well how improbable the match must seem, as odd as a bottle of XO in a driver’s hands. He neglected to consider such things when he married Gracie, whose family was also wealthier than his own. And he would come to regret it.

  Abraham sits back, gazing out the window with a loose smile around his lips. “Well, that is wonderful news. You couldn’t ask for a better family than Kuku’s.”

  “I’m hoping it will work out….”

  “Why wouldn’t it? Melvin, this is a chance you should not pass up. Their family is very God-fearing, very well off. I’m sure you know that.” Melvin looks at the distant door frame of the house, which is all that is visible from this vantage. Passersby can see little of the property, hemmed in as it is by the gate and the pale stone wall.

  Melvin relaxes a bit. He had assumed that confiding such a thing in Abraham would have led to laughter or disdain. “I know that the Georges are of a certain class, but if Linno likes him and he likes Linno … She can be stubborn, though.”

  “Oh, stubborn nothing. Every woman can be convinced by a big house.” Abraham gets out of the car. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. And I’ll say I came by taxi.”

  KUKU AND ALICE receive Melvin and Linno on a sinister evening, a low flotilla of clouds beneath the full moon. Linno peers from under the roof of the auto-rickshaw as they go rattling up the driveway. The house stands noble and old, its cream stone faintly stained with moss. Its height surpasses the surrounding trees, a size that seems less than a blessing from this close, all those unlit rooms a reminder of the absent children and grandchildren, the generations who are not there to fill them.

  Kuku and Alice are waiting on the front step. Linno notices Alice first, the way she stands like a man in her bland brown sari, feet apart, hands clasped behind her back. Her smile has a relaxing effect on Linno, who is then returned to a state of vague anxiety upon noting Kuku’s hairstyle, a small and sturdy pompadour. His hair does not reflect well on either him or Alice, as she might have been the one to style it.

  On the porch, names are passed around:

  “Melvin? Kuku.”

  “Alice? Linno.”

  “Linno. Kuku.”

  With his eyes fixed somewhere on Linno’s forehead, Kuku extends his hand for a handshake, a gesture that Linno rarely receives. She takes Kuku’s right hand with her left and their hands go up and down twice, gently and awkwardly. If he is nervous, she cannot tell. At home, in a last-minute spasm of anxiety, she spent most of the morning trying to decide upon the flirtier of two salwars (the scalloped neckline versus the high, lacy collar) before remembering that her suitor would probably not be swayed by either.

  LEAVING THEIR SHOES at the door, they sit around a slick table of blood red wood, a color that somehow amplifies the gravity of their meeting. A small forest of such trees must have been plundered to supply the matching sofas and armchairs, coffee table and side tables, where fake snapdragons are gathered into crystal vases. In keeping with tradition, the perennial framed portrait of Jesus hangs over the front doorway, flanked by pictures of Alice and Kuku’s parents, immortalized in black and white before their hair had begun to gray.

  Alice serves chai in fine china cups ribboned in gold, along with a tray of buttery biscuits arranged like lines of fallen dominos. Linno smooths the napkin on her knee, a fine, firm linen. She imagines that this is her table, and suddenly realizes that she has never owned anything that she could not lift herself.

  At first, everyone takes turns tentatively sipping chai, never more than two sippers at once. She is drawn to the meticulous nature of Kuku’s movements, how his hand passes over the cup before grasping the handle, perhaps to feel the heat in his palm. His ways speak to a quiet sensitivity, an inner Zen.

  A Zen that does not last. Galvanized by the tea, Kuku turns into an avid conversationalist, though the only topic that seems to interest him is the U.S. visa process. He has heard of Anju from the Malayala Manorama, he says, and he possesses a wealth of knowledge about the route to U.S. citizenship.

  “What kind of visa does she have now?” Kuku asks. When Melvin says a student visa, Kuku nods. “F-i or J-i? There is a difference. You know that, don’t you?”

  His questions remind Linno of a typewriter’s noise, clattering on and on until the end of the question, punctuated by a last inquisitive eking.

  Alice, meanwhile, appears slightly uncomfortable, her smile taut as she continually urges everyone to eat more biscuits or take more tea. If this is an intersibling signal for Kuku to tone down his investigation, he seems not to notice.

  “You must declare no intent to reside permanently,” Kuku continues, “but the trick is to keep renewing. It is all very fascinating, this process, allay?”

  Beneath the table, Linno slides a pen from her purse and, as quietly as possible, clicks the tip. It all makes sense now, the reason behind Kuku’s interest to move the alliance along: Linno could be his one-way ticket to the States. A union of nations after all. Of course, Linno’s intentions to marry Kuku were no less material. She begins doodling on the napkin, politely looking up from time to time.

  “Anju told us she is going to contact a lawyer,” Melvin says. “An immigration attorney.”

  “There are lawyers,” Kuku says definitively, “who will not take their fees without winning the case.”

  Alice turns to Linno. “So are you studying still? Or are you working?”

  In a fit of self-sabotage, Linno is about to explain her stunted academic career when Melvin steps in. “She is a painter.”

  Alice raises her eyebrows, genuinely interested. “A painter?”

  “For advertisements,” Linno says.

  “You know the Princess Tailor Shoppe?” Melvin asks. “That painted window?”

  “Hah yes! That? You did that?”

  “Yes,” Linno says. Alice nods slowly, with new appreciation. Linno wishes that Alice would look away so
that she could go back to her napkin, where she has been inking the fins of an ornate fish.

  “These days you can quickly get a relative visa, once you have your own,” Kuku explains to no one in particular. He snaps his fingers to demonstrate the quickness of it all. For the first time, he turns his vague gaze on Linno. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “For some people,” Linno says.

  Doubt flickers over Kuku’s smile. “Which people? You wouldn’t want to go?”

  Melvin looks at her with slight amusement and fear for what she might say. The clink of Linno’s cup against the saucer seems to echo.

  “But why not?” Kuku asks, almost offended.

  Linno hesitates. The only reason she ever really wanted to leave was so as not to be left alone. Instead of this, she says, “I heard that in the cities, you can no longer see the stars.”

  With a short laugh, Kuku says he hasn’t seen the stars in years.

  “Ha ha,” Melvin says, as if reading his laugh aloud from a cue card.

  Beneath the table, Linno twirls and twirls her pen until it falls to the floor and rolls toward Alice’s chair. Alice retrieves the pen and hands it to Linno, but not without squinting at the scribbles on Linno’s napkin, which Linno quickly covers with her hand.

  THE AUTO-RICKSHAW LURCHES over the rutted roads, with Melvin and Linno jostling in the backseat, not a word between them. Across the sky, a sifting of grayish purple begins to darken, and the auto-rickshaw’s single headlight gives the impression of tunneling through a black cave. It seems that Linno’s own life is equally murky. There is nothing she can promise herself, fifty years from now, the way other girls do—I want a house and two children, boy and girl. For herself, she cannot see the husband or feel the rapturous weight of a baby in her arms. What does she want, then? Smooth, weighted paper. A new set of soft pencils. A room in which to draw. A window of time. She is no genius, but sometimes she entertains the thought of someone finding her sketchbook, paging through it to learn that she is more than what the limited light has thus far revealed.

  Linno searches the inside of her purse. Only a comb and a folded handkerchief. The napkin. She left behind the napkin.

  Melvin asks what is the matter. “Nothing,” Linno says.

  “Well, I am not going to force you into anything, if that is your worry.”

  Linno imagines Alice finding the napkin, showing it to Kuku. We had her to our house, and this is how she thanked us? By doodling?

  “But if I were a woman,” Melvin continues, “I would think he looks pretty good. Had a good head of hair on him, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And he doesn’t seem that blind either. I kept watching to see if he would pick up someone else’s cup by accident, but he didn’t. Not once. He always knew his cup. Berchmans told me that blind people have a very advanced sense of smell. Did you know that?”

  “I don’t think he could smell his own cup.”

  Taking her curtness as the early percolations of love, Melvin pats her on the back. “Give him time, molay. Give him a chance.”

  8.

  T SCHOOL, Anju imagines herself chugging along as if on a conveyor belt, from one destination to the next. In this way, time does not seem to pass. She forgets about Bird and the business card tucked into her assignment book, focused instead on making sense of the English class bulletin board, which displays a large cutout of a cannon on wheels, and in front of this, a dozen black cannonballs inscribed with names like MILTON and JOYCE and JAMES and CONRAD. Where homework is concerned, Anju attends to what must be done for the next day and the next, and much prefers vocab exercises to green card forms.

  For some time now, her faith in the elliptical odyssey has been lessening. This country is a puzzle in which she will never quite fit, and if she stays here too long, her own country will become a puzzle as well. Yesterday, Ammachi informed her that St. John’s Bakery would be gutted by the time she returned, to be replaced by a shoe shop. And though Anju always hated that bakery—they undercooked the fruitcake and always ran out of payasam—she grew depressed at the idea of changes taking place without her there to witness them. Of course, she knows that such erasures take place in every growing town, and newcomers arrive and settle without knowledge of the city’s antique imperfections. But a town truly belongs to those who can see the stretch marks. A town belongs to those who are there to watch it change.

  DURING THE NARROW POCKETS of time between classes, Fish leans against the locker adjacent to Anju’s and talks about his literary heroes, none of whose names have appeared on the cannonballs. They perform at Brooklyn bars and cafés, dark, classy dens to which Fish gains entry by way of a false ID and a twenty-dollar bill if the bouncer gives him a look. “You could come, too, you know.”

  “I am not twenty-one,” she says.

  He looks at her wrist. “Where’s your bandage?”

  “My wrist is not paining me for now.” In truth, the skin of her wrist had been growing paler than her hand, and she hadn’t liked the contrast. Also, it was becoming increasingly annoying to have to borrow notes and balance her lunch tray on her left arm.

  “Oh. Well anyway, about the ID, I’d get you a fake. I know tons of girls who could pass for you.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Not that there’s anyone like you exactly. Except you, of course. Obviously. Anyway.”

  No itch needs to be scratched for this long. She turns back to her locker. Lately, whenever Fish has said anything to her, his sentences have begun to trickle into sheepish, monosyllabic utterances.

  There is something unnerving about his invitation, the ease with which she could cross over into a world of smoke and illegality. She imagines a roomful of Fishes, young and quietly furious, so many eyes like slow-burning stars. She feels a thrill in her stomach, a tiny well of warmth.

  ONCE A WEEK, the English instructor is replaced by the creative writing instructor, and the students release a collective sigh. They are not expected to know dates or write essays or suffer pop quizzes. No one is forced to speak, only encouraged.

  Mrs. Loignon, the teacher, says that her name means “onion” in French. She is thin and onion-pale, with permanent crinkles around a mouth that is always working on a cough drop. She keeps an infinite supply in her purse, that fat, forlorn pouch of battered pleather, always spilling pens, empty Splenda packets, and once, in front of the whole class, a packet of Marlboro Reds. Swiftly, slightly shamed, Mrs. Loignon stuffed the Reds back inside, shocking proof of some cynicism beneath her perpetual cheer.

  The class, as a whole, has an anesthetized quality. Using his thumbs, a boy meticulously flips his eyelid inside out. A girl paints her pinky nail with a black Sharpie. In the chair next to Anju’s, another boy is drawing a cartoon of himself, in the margin of his notebook, a cannon growing from his crotch.

  Mrs. Loignon begins by reading aloud the first stanza of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” She performs with melodramatic gusto, the book held to her chest like a palette, her free hand wildly painting the air with her words. Her reading makes it impossible, and unappealing, to imagine any kind of carnal persuasion intended by the poet.

  When she reaches the second-to-last stanza, Mrs. Loignon looks at Anju. “Go for it,” she says with a smile, as if bestowing Anju with a gift.

  Anju wishes this gift came with a return receipt. She hates reading aloud. Her w‘s sound like v‘s. Her voice, stiffened into submission, takes on the lilt of nursery rhymes.

  Let us roll all owver strength and all

  Owver sweetness up into vun ball,

  And tear owver pleasures vith rough strife

  Through the i-run gates of life …

  After Anju finishes the last stanza, Mrs. Loignon asks what the speaker is proposing. In response, a mere shifting, a few pairs of eyes looking up.

  “He’s proposing to bone his coy mistress,” says the cannon cartoonist.

  Mrs. Loignon glares at him with predatorial stillness until he mut
ters an apology. She employs the silent reprimand whenever someone has broken the cardinal rule, the only rule, of creative writing class: This is a safe space. Anju hardly understands the rule, as being called upon to read aloud, in her opinion, creates an atmosphere of utmost threat.

  Toward the end of class, Mrs. Loignon collects the student poems assigned from last week and selects a few at random to read aloud. She never reveals the name of the poet, though no one in the room has mastered the art of the poker face. The poet wears one of two masks: stunned, vacantly staring into his binder, praying for the end; or the twitchy smirk, the fidgety hand, quick to claim the page as her own.

  Anju can hardly tell what is good or bad. She thinks only in terms of Pass or No Pass. Fish has told her that no one fails this class, but to write of feelings? To be given no other instruction? Facing the blank page, she is a raft at sea. She needs sails, a life jacket, an anchor, and a direction.

  So far, she has been recopying the literature poems and substituting synonyms from a thesaurus (“perambulate” instead of “walk,” for example; “mechanism for transport” rather than “chariot”). Her creations sound much more complicated, and therefore artistic, than the current selection from which Mrs. Loignon is reading aloud, entitled “Vegetarian’s Complaint”:

  O Trout, Tilapia, all ye watery prey,

  No one is spared from Fish Patty Day.

  Battered, fried beyond compare,

  A Fish is not meant to be shaped like a square.

  Mrs. Loignon pauses before reading aloud the next poem. Her eyebrows rise as she scans the lines, and at the end she utters a satisfied Mmmm.

  “‘Meditations on a Dark-Eyed Girl’”

  While Mrs. Loignon reads, Anju watches Fish out of the corner of her eye. His lips are moving just barely, perhaps along with the words though she cannot tell. His eyes are intent on the page, his pattering fingers claiming the poem as his own.