ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “You asked how she was doing.”

  “Yeah, but I asked about Nirmal the person, not Nirmal the doctor.”

  Mr. Solanki stabs a cherry tomato with his fork. “I do not know about Nirmal the whatever. That you can ask Dr. Ummat yourself.”

  Mrs. Solanki grabs Rohit’s wrist. “You know who Anju has for chemistry? Mr. Haskell, remember him? He loved you.”

  Rohit swings his camera over, and Mrs. Solanki leans back in her seat a little, lacing her fingers over her plate with an air of false nonchalance. He pans over to Anju, who looks at the lens with no small degree of distrust. Videos do not allow for preparation. Only once has she seen herself on television, in the wedding video of a distant cousin wherein Anju glanced over her shoulder and then unsuccessfully attempted to stuff a gulab jamun the size of a Ping-Pong ball into her mouth.

  “Why are you doing this shooting?” she asks.

  “It’s for my current film.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Solanki said you are making home videos?”

  Mrs. Solanki stares at her greens, chewing industriously. Rohit turns his camera onto his father, then zooms in on the glass of wine that Mr. Solanki is refilling. Glancing at the camera, Mr. Solanki stops pouring and puts the bottle aside.

  Rohit sits the camera next to his plate, though the red light remains on, its eerie surveillance apparently nonexistent to him, except for the moments when he looks into the viewfinder and jimmies a ring on the lens. In the form of a well-rehearsed monologue, he explains to Anju that he first caught the film bug in the late eighties, when he borrowed his father’s Sony Mavica to re-create historical events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, as told with G.I. Joe figurines. When he arrived at Princeton, he returned to filmmaking, and now he is in the thick of another project, his most ambitious to date, a personal documentary that he started on the day he decided to take an indefinite hiatus from school.

  “What’s it about?” Rohit asks, intercepting a question that Anju had not posed. He bends over the camera and zooms in on Anju. His concentration is that of a scientist at a microscope, his focus broken only when he looks up at her. “I don’t know yet. You never know until you’re in the edit room. Loosely, it’s about my experiences as a second-generation brown man in a post-9/11 America.

  “But since we’re on the topic …” He picks up his camera, adjusts the focus ring, and scoots a candelabra closer to his father’s plate. “This footage will be kind of underexposed, but whatever; I’ll deal with it in post.”

  Rohit clears his throat. “Mom and Dad, I have something to tell you.”

  Mr. Solanki presses both hands to the table, his head slightly bowed, ready to receive the weight of this news. From beneath his well-plucked brows, he looks at his son with something between fear and stern courage.

  “Guys,” Rohit says. “I’m not going to be a doctor. I’m going to be a filmmaker.”

  Anju can hear the breath drawing in and out of Mr. Solanki’s nose, shuddering the candle flame near his plate.

  “That’s it?” Mr. Solanki says.

  Rohit says that’s it.

  Mr. Solanki looks at Mrs. Solanki. “I thought he was going to say that he’s a gay.”

  “I thought so too.” Glancing at the camera, Mrs. Solanki adds: “It’s gay, Varun. Not a gay.”

  “Wait, wait.” Rohit seems incapable of deciding which parent to focus on. “You thought I was gay? Why? I mean, what would make you think that?”

  “Don’t be angry,” Mr. Solanki says.

  “I’m not; I just find it a little shocking, or weird, that my own father doesn’t know me.”

  “Your mother too. And we didn’t even discuss it!” Mr. Solanki looks at Mrs. Solanki with amused wonder.

  By this point, Rohit is scowling at his father, the camera listing to one side.

  Mrs. Solanki squeezes her son’s shoulder. “Oh Rohit, it’s just that you said you had this big announcement, and you are a young single man, always talking about self-discovery and exploration and slim-fitting pants….”

  “Can you guys just respond to what I said? That I’m going to be a filmmaker?”

  “I work in television, darling,” Mrs. Solanki says. “I have been in the entertainment industry for fifteen years. If you wanted to rebel, you should’ve become a doctor.”

  “So is that what you want?”

  Mr. Solanki refreshes his glass of wine and looks at Rohit, who is looking into the camera. “Gay director, straight director, direct traffic for all I care. This is not a revolution, Rohit, what you are doing. Why don’t you finish this film? Or finish a degree? Finish anything. That would be a revolution.”

  Rohit’s expression seems to gather in turmoil, his forehead wrinkling as he squints into the camera, the storm of his thoughts gathering up until he cries out, “Oh man, I fucked up the focus! It’s on auto. Wait, Dad, can you say that again? That was a great line, that thing about revolution.”

  THE DINNER NEVER QUITE recovers its pleasant veneer, as both Mr. and Mrs. Solanki withdraw into lengthy silences and one-word answers to Rohit’s questions. Darting looks around the dinner table, Anju presses the tines of her fork into a pillow of spinach ravioli. She is relieved when Rohit, with a sigh of surrender, finally turns the camera off.

  There is no discussion that this family will not touch, no question unposed, no secret kept. Yet for all their honesty, all these freedoms of speech, neither Rohit nor his parents seem to know what to make of one another. They eat like strangers on a plane, eyes fastened to their plates.

  Whether this is better or worse than her own family, Anju cannot tell. Among her family, the subject of Romantic Love, for example, is never addressed, like a god who could cause retinal damage if stared at directly. Best to observe R.L. indirectly, as depicted in films or television shows. Still it would be nice, Anju thinks, to confide certain thrills and anxieties in one’s own sister. Even if they were on speaking terms, Anju would never tell Linno that someone had penned her a poem, nor that this same someone will be waiting by her locker tomorrow, expecting an answer.

  MONDAY MORNING, Anju steps delicately from class to class. She watches herself cycle through the functions of daily life while harboring epic feelings, as expressed in centuries of poetry and painting. In love, she swabs her throat with Obsession. In love, she drinks from the water fountain. In love, she puckers her Vaselined lips at the spotty bathroom mirror where in the corner someone has written in red lipstick: this is what a feminist looks like. She admires the fiery hue of the lipstick, wishes she had some of her own. Her ponytail droops and her breasts are lopsided from the cutlets, but she is loved for the sum of her imperfect parts.

  By the middle of the day, she still has not seen Fish.

  In math class, while proving the congruency of vertical angles, she deduces that shyness and sensitivity must be vital to poets. Men who regularly capture hearts have no need of writing down their intentions; they simply act on them. But men who pen poems do so to test the water, to work up a lather of emotion where there might not be any.

  She only wishes that Fish could retire his sensitivity at will and show up at her locker with an aggressive stride, a gleam of want in his eye. Though having little to no other experience with being pursued, Anju does recall that when her father wanted a job, he wooed the employer with charm, ambition, punctuality, and a freshly pressed shirt. Sometimes none of these worked, but at least he failed heroically.

  ON HER WAY TO LUNCH, Anju finds Fish in the Fine Arts Wing, staring at Linno’s paintings. His arms are crossed, and when he turns to her, his expression is much calmer than expected.

  He says hey.

  She says hey.

  He asks her what is on the cafeteria menu, a question that, Anju has learned, is the student equivalent to asking about the weather, a query posed merely to fill the time. Pork fried egg rolls. Strawberry fro yo.

  She thought that she would begin the conversation by talking about h
is poem. She planned to explain how stunned she was by his honesty, offered undistilled to a roomful of strangers and friends, and the way his eyes, after Mrs. Loignon finished reading, hid nothing. Even in dreams, she was never so brave.

  But he heads her off. An edge to his voice, he says: “Well, Saturday night sucked.”

  And then, to her dismay, he launches into a tirade against his mother, how she showed up at Solomon’s Porch and went sniffing around for a spliff from which Fish had partaken, sure, but did not possess, and all because of this, his mother dragged him out like the goddamn SWAT team. Not only this, but the bouncer confiscated his ID. Racism at work, Fish says, or if not racism, then ageism. He is already penning a poem called “Schisms.” Nodding, nodding, she feels her epic moment sliding away from her, the window of confession growing narrow, the clock run down by his aggressive babble. Not once does he glance at her propped-up bust or take a whiff of her Obsession. It is possible, she supposes, for a heroine to wrest control of her love scene, but she does not know the right words, at least none that belong in this era. All the words she knows belong to Marvell or Herrick or Roget’s Thesaurus, all florid declarations and complex phonetics. What she wants is a quick route to intimacy, a few seismic words to close the gap between them, to make him know her completely. Her insides are coiled with the potential energy of revelation, which is why, when he sighs and glances at the paintings, when he says that by the way he likes her work, she says:

  “They are not mine.”

  He looks at her, then squints at the card below the paintings. “Is there another Anju Melvin?”

  This is not the conversation for which she planned. She surprises herself with the words she utters. “I have to tell you something.”

  Such intimacy in the lowered voice. Fish leans in.

  “I have an older sister. When she was small, she had an accident.”

  Anju has never heard these words from her own mouth. They sound simple, the beginnings of a tragic fairy tale to which everyone back home has already written the end. There is fear in speaking of tragedy, as if doing so might invoke its return.

  But now, speaking feels frighteningly freeing, one sentence unraveling the next as she tells him of everything until the day she stepped on the plane. How she used to feign studying while watching Linno draw. How her father made Linno the sketchbook for her seventeenth birthday, and how in a moment of desperation, years later, Anju lunged for it.

  She goes on and on, while mashed potatoes and pork rolls are being consumed en masse. Every word keeps Fish in place as he listens, rapt, to the well-kept corners of her heart.

  10.

  INNO WAKES TO FACE Ammachi on the adjacent pillow. Without support from her dentures, Ammachi’s cheeks have sunken into hollows, and her breath comes and goes in a chainsaw snore. In Ammachi’s face, Linno sees her own reflection fifty years from now, clinging to a pillow and little else.

  Ammachi’s eyes flutter open. She smacks her lips as if trying to remember a sweet taste.

  “Mai,” Linno says. “I don’t think it will work.”

  “What work?” Ammachi mumbles, already settling back into sleep.

  “With Kuku.”

  At the name, Ammachi blinks herself awake. “You want to what with Kuku?”

  “I don’t want anything with Kuku.”

  Ammachi raises herself on an elbow. “But why?”

  Ammachi’s questions follow Linno for the rest of the day. “If not Kuku, then who?” Ammachi will be satisfied only if Linno reveals that Kuku is a former convict or suffers from a brain-stunting syndrome. Neither of these excuses being true, Linno’s reason—“I can’t explain it”—continually leads Ammachi to ask with increasing impatience, “Explain what?”

  Several days have passed since the evening of Linno and Kuku’s first meeting, and not once has Linno thought fondly of meeting again. She cannot blame her refusal on his lust for the immigrant visa and neither is his blindness all that troubling, as he seems to function with little help. But during the drive home, when Melvin told her to give Kuku time, to give Kuku a chance, Linno could not muster the slightest hope. Her husband, should she accept him, led her to feel nothing at all, and this seems reason enough to say no.

  How to explain this to a woman who was betrothed at thirteen?

  So Linno explains nothing. She issues a final statement, Not Interested, and goes on with her work, while Ammachi grumbles off to her room, reciting a verse about humility. In the meantime, Linno gathers the mung beans she scattered over a towel last night, sprinkled with water, so that by morning they have sprouted tiny shoots like piglet tails. Melvin loves to snack on the mung beans, but have they run out? Should she buy more? It is easy losing oneself in these tiny sorts of questions, immune to larger ones.

  BY WORD OF MOUTH, an unfailing form of currency in these parts, Linno is hired to paint her largest window yet, at Ninan’s Sanitations Store, a purveyor of toilets and sinks.

  Mr. Ninan maps the blank window with his hands, showing Linno exactly what he wants and where. He requests a soft-lipped nymph with peachy skin, slender in the waist, a sinuous black braid over her shoulder, a flirty twinkle to her eye, and below this, simply: NINAN’S.

  “Maybe we should include a faucet?” Linno suggests. “Maybe the woman could gesture to the faucet?”

  Ninan looks at her impatiently, tweaking the tip of his waxed mustache. He has a singular vision, and that vision is curvy, flirty, and NINAN’S.

  Linno begins the painting early in the morning, the mist circling her softly while a cuckoo bird sends out its dawning call. She chalks the same face she has done time and again, the supple cheeks, the flaring lashes. The night before, she imagined that her artistic reputation would spread across the state, the country even, and by the time Anju returned, Linno’s signature would hover in the corners of countless billboards, reducing the red sketchbook to a mere relic of her talents. But Ninan’s demands deflate her dream, reminding her that this is a business, not art, and in business, success must be replicated rather than imagined anew. Her customers privilege predictability over creativity, and in the rendering of women, clients like Ninan believe that there is no such thing as unique beauty. A woman is either beautiful or forgettable.

  Linno and Anju belong somewhere in the latter category, Anju drawing more from her mother’s features, Linno taking from her father’s nose. Still, they are similar enough so that when Linno looks in a mirror and blurs her vision, she can almost see her sister looking back.

  But today, instead of seeing her own sister in the window’s reflection, Linno sees Kuku’s sister crossing the street. Linno freezes, hoping that a state of absolute stillness will throw Alice off her scent, but noting Alice’s quickening pace, Linno prepares herself.

  “Linno!” Alice cries out.

  Linno turns and feigns shocked joy.

  “I thought it was you!” Alice says. She is wearing a mauve sari, as plain as the one she wore at their first meeting, a hefty purse at her hip. If she harbors any resentment, she does not show it, and seems elated over this encounter. Alice glances up at the window. “Another job?”

  “Yes, Ninan’s. They sell toilets. And sinks.”

  The conversation lulls, allowing a window for good-byes, but Alice lingers. “I’ve been looking for you. I thought about coming to your house, but I didn’t want your father to get the wrong impression.”

  Linno steels herself against the oncoming argument, that Kuku would make a good husband, that Linno would be a fool to ignore him. If Linno is so perfect for Kuku, where is he to tell her so? Linno feels her cheeks growing hot as her mouth takes the shape of a polite but firm no.

  Alice is rooting through her bag until finally she withdraws Linno’s napkin. She holds out the side with the fish. “You did this over tea, didn’t you?”

  Linno’s resolve plummets. She tries to laugh and apologize, muttering about nervous habits.

  “And you designed it yourself?” Alice asks.


  Weakly, Linno nods.

  Alice nods.

  Linno wonders if she should hold out her hand to take the napkin, but something about the grave wonder with which Alice is studying the fish, biting her lower lip, makes Linno wait for her to speak.

  Finally Alice looks up and asks, “Can you do it again?”

  OVER LUNCH at Leela Café, Alice unfolds her tragedies, one by one, beginning with her husband, Reji. In life, he was the owner of Eastern Invites, an invitation business that specialized in wedding cards, mostly of the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian variety. Seventy years before, his grandfather had started the business, at a time when the bride’s family still made personal visits to invite each guest to the impending event. Reji’s grandfather took over an old-fashioned printing press left behind by the British, and cranking the handle late into the night, he pushed his small community into a new era of invitations. Over time, the invitations grew gaudier and gilded, even for those who could barely afford them. For a while, with Reji at the prow, business thrived. He and Alice bought a smaller version of the family home just ten miles away, and even a cobalt blue Maruti.

  Everything was fine until two years before, when Reji began acting strangely, coming home later from work with poor excuses. He bought her an expensive turquoise bottle of perfume for no reason in particular; this from a man who bought her gifts on exactly two days per year—her birthday and their anniversary. Alice became convinced that he was having an affair. “It happens,” her aunts said, shrugging cryptically, and advised her to wait it out. Like rain, it would pass.

  Before Alice could investigate the possibility of other women, Reji died on the job. There are few safety hazards in the invitation business, unless one brings the safety hazards into the building, as in Reji’s case—a length of rope knotted from a ceiling beam. The sweeping lady found him the next morning, his tongue fat and pink between his teeth.

  From wife to widow, overnight. Alice sat at the head of his open casket as friends and relatives trudged up and down the driveway. With outward despair and longing, she looked on his body, though her thoughts were mostly congratulatory to the makeup artist, who had somehow erased the broken bluish capillaries that had spidered at Reji’s temples. Drained of fluids, cotton corked up his nose, he was already a ghost.