ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  A few days later, she heard a radio personality explain why the suicide rate in Kerala was so high. “This is the paradox: in a region of such excellent educational standards, we see high unemployment, lack of social mobility, and incomplete families due to fathers or mothers working elsewhere. These conditions have an extremely negative effect on Malayali society, which values the concepts of honor and pride, so when this honor is made vulnerable, suicide appears to be the only option.” She flicked off the power switch with such force that the radio fell onto its back. What honor had Reji lost? And didn’t they share the same honor? Was she to follow him into the flame? No thank you. This was 2001. The other day, she had climbed onto a bus to find a thick-armed woman behind the steering wheel. When Alice paused to stare at her, the driver said, “On or off?” and thrilled by her authority, Alice hurried down the aisle to a window seat.

  Her inner rally died down when she learned that Eastern Invites was falling apart. Nights she spent poring over wrinkled, swollen ledgers, dragging her finger across the lines of falling numbers. Loss, loss, loss, finally punctuated by human loss. New invitation businesses had sprung up across India. Most of them were doing a great proportion of merchandising on the Internet, catering to the masses of migrated Indians who held fast to their fancy scrolled invitations and stone-studded envelopes, even when their children were marrying white or Chinese or Jewish or atheist. Indian invitations were in high demand. The market was going global, the globe was going digital, and Eastern Invites was going nowhere. She remembered Reji’s ridiculous belief in the loyalty of customers who would continue doing business with him out of guilt, if nothing else. “What kind of guilt travels across countries?” she had argued. “They might not see you for years. Why should they be loyal, then?”

  “Relax,” said Reji, with the blind smile of the eternally faithful.

  There were other failures as well, like the multicolor printing machine that had broken long ago, leaving the necessary parts, from Germany, never to be replaced. At the time, Reji happily lost himself in the manual labor of screen printing, which accounted for only a third of their sales. He loved the fresh chemical smell of the ink, the pressing of joyful announcements onto a piece of textured paper. But while other shops employed whole R&D departments to produce a new crop of designs each month, Reji’s invitations remained the same.

  Output slowed, business stalled. And there was the loan that was never repaid. And the rent that was two months past due. And the employee who had been steadily siphoning money until his recent departure. This must have been what finally tore Reji’s glossy belief in loyalty. Alice pictured a boy in the back of a train, gazing out the window at the passing scenery, fanning himself with a sheaf of bills, in blissful oblivion. That image left her with a recurring dream for months after Reji’s passing: Reji by the train window, fanning himself with the sheaf of bills, her beside him, sharing the moneyed breeze.

  ALL THIS, even the dream, Alice relates while tearing off pieces of idli without a hint of discomfort. Linno feels smothered with someone else’s secrets, an unpleasant experience, much in the same way that a stranger’s body odor always smells far more repulsive than one’s own. In Linno’s home, and in the home of every other person she knows, families are stabilized by the preservation of secrets, the family honor maintained.

  But the meal is free, the idlis plump and spongy. The waiter appears every so often with a sweaty steel jug of water or a golden bowl of sambar, spicy and sweetened with jaggery. Honor or no honor, why leave a plate unfinished?

  “I sold the house and the car to pay off the debts,” Alice says. “I moved back home with Kuku. All this to keep the business running, but now I want it to grow.”

  She has been evaluating her competition and found the flaws in their construction, the recurrence of mistakes, the poor advertising, the bland and identical websites, and worst of all, the lack of diversity in design. Ganesha this, Ganesha that. Same trunk and tusks on every card, same golds and reds and saffrons. Alice has retained half of her employees, a few salesmen to staff the shop and fifteen workers in the adjoining production house.

  What she needs now is a visionary designer who won’t mind working for less than a visionary’s fees. She wants a breadth of designs to supply the Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, Baha’i, mixed-marriage, secular, and fusion markets with equal appeal. The difference between her company and every other will be the personal touches, the innovative aesthetic.

  And she has other ideas. Independent global vendors, like satellite salesmen, hawking their wares in the farthest wilds of Montana. Complimentary bridal packages, customized designs. Recycled paper invitations for the earthy types. Room to grow? Of course. The only way is up.

  Linno watches Alice pause to draw a deep sip from her water. Where is Montana? Would she be sent there? If ever there were a time for the bathroom-excuse escape, it is now. But she thinks of the dull army of women she has yet to paint, ideal and identical and emblazoned across every window, causing her to say, with rare impulsiveness: “Where do we begin?”

  THEY BEGIN with a rudimentary education.

  At the production house, Alice guides Linno around three chugging machines that descend in size, introducing them with a wave of her hand. “These are the Heidelbergs. Appa, Amma, and Baby.” Alice pats the largest one, a sprawling thing that steals a sheet from one side and spits another out the other, faster than Linno can blink. “Papa cost the most. Fifty lakhs, but he can print fifteen hundred pages per minute. Multicolor offset, fully automatic, and includes foil stamping as well.”

  Linno puts her hand to Papa, feels the raging pulse worth five million rupees.

  Alice shows her the screen-printing machine, where a man is spreading black ink across a negative, and near this, a small table where two women are pasting gems to envelopes. “Kundan work,” Alice calls it. Then comes the die embossing machine, the die cutting machine, the stock of mill and handmade papers, before Alice leads her out the front door of the production house and into the back door of the shop.

  The shop is much smaller than the production house, and the wall shelves are nearly buckling from the weight of all the albums they support, each bulging with outmoded designs and samples from previous events. Streamers and tinsel festoon the fluorescent lights, dangling over velvet benches, where a mother and daughter are seated before a sample album. A clerk stands on the other side of the counter, slowly flipping each page and explaining the designs, to which the mother says, “We’ve seen that one before.” The daughter dismissively nods along.

  In a low voice, Alice points out the two clerks. “Prince is the one showing the album. Always wanted to be on the radio and has the voice for it too. Talks quick, scatters some English phrases here and there. None of them sound right to me, but he always persuades the customer.”

  At the moment, Prince is refuting the mother’s claim. Animated and incredulous, he taps the invitation in the album and addresses the daughter in English: “Not possible, sista! This one is a hotcake. Very touchy, groovy card.”

  “Bhanu,” Alice continues, nodding at the other clerk, who is staring at a computer screen. “He was fifteen when we hired him. That boy who stole from us, he offered Bhanu half the money to come along, but Bhanu said no and reported him immediately.” Bhanu scratches his chest. His button-down shirt hangs limply on his narrow frame, the fabric worn thin enough to show the exact shape of his undershirt.

  Alice turns to Linno. “So. Your introduction. What do you think?”

  Anxiety causes Linno to go momentarily mute. How will she ever remember all this? How will she rise to Alice’s expectations? She swallows, tries to compose herself. “Will I be tested?”

  “Of course not,” Alice says. “But you do have homework.”

  LINNO’S FIRST ASSIGNMENT is the Sweet Sixteen birthday party for the daughter of a plastic surgeon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an old college friend of Alice’s father. The girl wrote Alice an email in advance, t
o express her vision for the invitation.

  From: Nair, Rachna

  To: Alice

  Subject: My Card

  Dear Alice,

  Hi! I’m psyched that you’ll be doing my invitations. My mom said I should email you about what I’m looking for in my card.

  I think the card should be both mature and fun, and should symbolize my transition from girlhood into womanhood, without being gross or lame. I think it should also be sort of fusiony, with Indian and American motifs. Maybe like 65% Indian and 35% American because that’s how I’d divide myself. Nothing religious because I don’t consider myself religious, just spiritual (it’s complicated). I want the invitation to represent me. Like I want people to look at it and say, “That is so Rachna.” Or “I wish I had an invitation like that.” Or “I wish I was Rachna.” LOL. J/k.

  I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

  Thanks so much,

  Rachna

  After reviewing the email four times, the first thing that enters Linno’s mind is a magazine article that she once read, about a team of Indian scientists investigating an aboriginal tribe in the Andaman Islands. Indians investigating Indians. According to Alice, this Rachna is Malayali, and her grandparents live in Kollam, not forty miles from Kottayam. And yet, in the space of one generation, Rachna speaks a strain of English nearly opaque to Linno, who can read Newsweek and India Today without much difficulty.

  After dinner, Linno remains at the table with the printout of the email before her. She underlines the percentages. Her knees begin to tremble the way they did during math exams. She looks up at the light filtering through the dusty windowpane, and somehow it calms her, the milkiness of the light, the skein of dust, the fact that she is needed to wipe the window. She prefers this, the honest work of making the home, work that proffers sure results.

  “Why are you thinking so much?” Melvin asks, lugging a plastic bucket of pump water into the kitchen. Linno rises to relieve him, but Melvin shoos her away. “I know how to heat water. You go do your homework.”

  She would like him to put on a shirt, in case Alice stops by, but these days, he seems too listless for shirts. Ever since her rejection of Kuku, Melvin has gone around the house in a torpor, a white towel over his shoulder. She stops herself from considering her father’s mental state any further and opens to a fresh page in the drawing tablet that Alice gave her. Melvin’s doubts, on top of her own, are too much to handle. She thinks instead of her painted windows as proof of higher possibility, their colors blossoming with light.

  IN THE KITCHEN, Melvin stands before the hearth and listens to the quick downpour of rain on the broad banana leaves. These sudden rains have always sounded to him like the crumpling of paper, here and then gone before one manages to open one’s umbrella. The wet, misty smell freshens his lungs.

  Melvin strikes a match to the kindling and watches the embers glow beneath the blackened pot. The other day, he heard Ammachi asking Linno, over and over, what was wrong with Kuku. Exasperated, Linno finally answered, “I didn’t feel … a spark.” It was a line that he recalled from a woman’s magazine, Vanitha, lying open on Linno’s desk the day before. Vanitha is certainly not Melvin’s domain, but in an effort to understand his daughter, he read the article carefully, treating it as some sort of scholarly text. The sentiments were awkwardly worded, filled with the kind of vocabulary that made singlehood sound like an elite club. “Today’s woman has no need to settle against her dreams…. Love you first!” The picture showed a self-loving woman in a tank top, running through a field of red poppies, holding the ends of a red sari that billowed behind her like a windswept sail.

  He watches Linno at the kitchen table, a familiar sight, her head propped against her knotted wrist, her left hand drifting a pencil over paper. Her ankles are locked, one heel twitching against the other. He sighs at the folly of youth, to think that hardships are the bricks that build a better life, to invite struggle when one could so easily wake well after dawn with eager servants preparing tea, or retire to bed after a peg of XO (not Yeksho) to sweeten one’s dreams. To Melvin’s mind, this is what it would mean to be Mrs. Kuku George. And if the marriage would require Linno to surrender her notion of a spark, so be it. What Vanitha calls “settling,” Melvin calls compromise. He thought that Linno was wise enough to know as much, to recognize that the world does not abide by Vanitha‘s definitions.

  If Melvin were the father he wanted to be, he would express the ways of marriage through metaphor, using not a spark but a houseplant, explaining how love can flower when the marriage is well watered, how steady love thrives best when other factors are in place—healthy soil, good sunlight, proper fertilizer, and a well-sized pot. He imagines himself imparting reams of vague metaphorical wisdoms, the kind that are clearly based on his own experience, without having to delve too deeply into the mistakes of his past.

  Linno’s face, deep in contemplation, resembles her mother’s. Melvin can see all her thoughts converging to a single point, like sunlight captured through a magnifying glass to kindle a piercing flame. Even if he were divulging all his secrets, she would not lift her head.

  11.

  T ANJU’S SUNDAY SCHOOL, the Kapyar used to teach the Adam and Eve story in broad strokes of dark and light, serpent and heel, Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life. The Kapyar could eulogize at length about the Garden of Eden, improvising a fanciful version filled with papaya and guava and lemon-drop trees, rivers of sweet, limitless milk, and glass bowls of Cadbury chocolates. What he never dwelled upon, however, was the moment when Adam and Eve acknowledged their nakedness and were ashamed. Even he who wrote the Book of Genesis, whom Anju pictured with a silvery beard and aeons of time on his hands, seemed embarrassed by the moment, as he spent half a sentence on it before hustling the story along.

  Only now does Anju understand the shifting of feet, the averting of eyes, when you have seen too much of another. She wonders how long it took for Adam and Eve to recover from that first gust of too much truth, if they went through a period of sidling around each other when reaching for the papaya.

  Such is her feeling about Fish.

  HE HAS STOPPED frequenting her locker, compelled by his mother to join the golf team in order to fatten up his résumé, particularly the blank space under athletics. Every day after school, Fish hefts a giant quiver of golf clubs down the hall, rattling in the opposite direction of most students as they hurry for the double doors. He smiles less these days. He speaks up in class. He bows under the weight of all those clubs, all those swings that he will never quite master. He winces at the name of his mother’s favorite golfer, the one black man she seems to love, the one that Fish will never want to be. Eventually the coach agrees to make him manager of the team, which is an equal investment of time but a lesser loss of pride.

  More and more, when Anju asks him how he is doing, he simply replies, “Busy.” And he is busy, undeniably so, due to what he calls his mother’s “crackdown.” But this is the kind of answer that glazes over another.

  They still sit together at lunch most of the time, at least when he is not meeting with the several clubs that he has recently joined, such as Physics Club or Glee Club or Multicultural Club. He invites her to join the latter, but she declines, sure that he is inviting her out of pity or obligation. She also fears that they will make her wear a bindi or a salwar to school. But he has made another friend in the Multicultural Club, a ponytailed girl named Yu Zhou who keeps all her pens, pencils, and erasers in separate Ziploc bags.

  It is not so terrible, Anju tells herself, sitting alone at lunch with an open notebook at her elbow. She used to feign study by moving her eyes over the words and turning the page at intervals, but she soon learned that her peers possess an extremely limited peripheral vision. She could be doing jumping jacks on the table, and lunch would go on.

  UNTIL THE FOLLOWING WEEK.

  All the students gather in the gymnasium for the morning a
ssembly, where Principal Mitchell is to announce the winner of the George de Brigard Award. Microphone in hand, he stands with feet planted upon the eyes of the painted unicorn, before the rising bleachers of wilted students. The unicorn is a permanent chip on the shoulder of the school. Ten years before, the Sitwell School had partaken in a lottery with seven other schools, all of whom had declared themselves members of the high school Ivy League, to decide on mascots. Tigers, Wildcats, and Wolverines went to the more fortunate schools, while Sitwell, coming in last place, was dealt the fantastical equine. The Sitwell artist made every effort to render the unicorn with beady-eyed fury, bared jowls, a thick lingum of a horn—as much machismo as could be mustered for a magical pony.

  Standing next to Principal Mitchell is a man in a seersucker suit, introduced as George de Brigard. His face is cheery and wrinkled from tanning, his clay-colored hands clapping at the mention of his own name. Taking the microphone, George de Brigard addresses the unasked question of what it takes to be an artist. Mostly he seems to be talking about himself: “… passion, honesty, discipline, drive, a high tolerance for bouts of regret, and the carapace with which to withstand the criticism of others that keeps coming and coming and coming. But still, my advice to you all is this: Caution to the wind. Carpe diem. Seize”—he looks from one end of the audience to the other—“the day.”

  Anju is sitting all the way at the end of the first bleacher, tranquilized by the sounds of George de Brigard, until he clears his throat.

  “The winner,” he continues, “embodies this attitude in every way. His name is … Andrew Melvin!”