ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Melvin, too, cannot relax, each bullet crack demanding an answer from the dark: How did we arrive here?

  IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS since they received the call from Miss Schimpf, who possessed little more information than what was contained in the note that Anju left:

  Dear Auntie, Uncle, Miss Schimpf, et al.,

  Due to a recent event, I am resigning from school. Please do not worry or come for me as I know several good and God-fearing friends who can give me suitable living facilities.

  I am sorry I caused trouble. I promise I did not mean for it. Please tell my family (esp. my father) not to worry. I will see them soon. They will still worry but please explain them this note and tell them I am not in a cult or a gang. Thank you.

  All the best,

  Anju Melvin

  Linno pictured a crumpled paper thick with smudges and misspelled words. She wanted to touch the note herself, as if clues to Anju’s whereabouts would rise to her fingertips, but she assumed that the police would need it. She had always ascribed a mechanized efficiency to American police departments, believing that Anju’s exact location could be found by analyzing the DNA in an errant hair she left behind. As it happened, the police had no time for Anju at all, at least not until seventy-two hours had gone by. “They get a lot of cases like these,” Miss Schimpf explained. “They said that most runaways return in a few days.” She added that Anju’s statistics had been provided to the National Crime Information Center, an entity that sounded to Linno as large as the very country in which her sister was lost.

  Mrs. Solanki also called each day, if only to reiterate her sense of helplessness. Her voice was drenched in sympathy, but there was an elegance to her teariness. “She was such a quiet, composed girl, but with the scholarship mess … Well, I think it was too much.”

  Perhaps Mrs. Solanki knew of Linno’s complicity, and of her family’s knowledge as well. Linno swallowed, unsure of her English. “Who is ‘good and God-fearing people’? Was Anju having friends at school?”

  “I don’t think so. Certain students have been questioned, but she was a bit of a lonely type, you know?”

  “Yes,” Linno said. “I know.”

  Time and again, Melvin and Ammachi asked Linno to explain her sister’s behavior. They seemed to think that Linno would know, believing that the mind of one sister was a mirror image unto the other. She wanted to tell them that in every person, there are private regions of the mind, infinite and troubling, that are known only to the self. Beyond the reach of sisters, friends, and fathers, these are the innermost spaces that can persuade a seventeen-year-old girl to wake up one day and walk out on her life.

  Over the course of seventy-two hours, the frenzy caused by Miss Schimpf’s phone call began to ferment to helplessness. Each evening, Melvin, Ammachi, and Linno took their places in the sitting room and watched the phone as if it might, in a blink, convulse to life. There were no such miracles, large or small. Miss Schimpf said she was still in contact with the police department and would call them with more news, as soon as she received it.

  Because the police seemed slow in their own interrogations, Melvin, Ammachi, and Linno gently interrogated one another. They did not pose the terrifying questions, but minor ones, the kind that would not crush them in the asking.

  Ammachi sat up suddenly. “Do you think she has socks?”

  “Did she pack them?” Linno asked.

  “I told her it gets cold there, but she is so stubborn. I had to beg her to take Jilu’s coat …” As she scratched her knee, Ammachi’s voice tapered to a surrendering “Ah.”

  Linno stroked Ammachi’s hand. Her skin was pale and slack between the tendons like the loose skin hanging from the throat of sickly cattle. Her finger had shrunken from its wedding ring, so that the band slipped easily up to the knuckle.

  Melvin tried to assure them that Anju would be back in a few days. “I know that child. She needs people around, people she knows.” Melvin nodded to himself. “I know her.”

  TO THE NEIGHBORS, they act as though life is proceeding as always. Melvin goes to work but leaves his heart by the phone. Sometimes he can hear the phone ringing as he walks away from the house, causing him to stop and turn an ear skyward, as if straining to hear an angelic whisper.

  It is Linno who answers the phone every evening, crestfallen at the sound of Miss Schimpf’s voice. Though Miss Schimpf feels partially responsible for Anju’s flight, Linno will not absolve her guilt so long as it keeps her involved in the cause. Miss Schimpf is their only link, however tenuous, to the uniformed policemen presiding over shadowy alleys, badges flashing like stars in the dark. But with all her phone calls and meetings with the police department, Miss Schimpf never bears good news.

  “I’ve tried, I promise I’ve tried,” Miss Schimpf says. Her early morning voice is a scraping sound, in dire need of moisture. “The NYPD has other things on their agenda. The list of runaways in this city is endless. Usually these cases are solved when the child comes home.”

  “What if she does not?” Linno asks. She shuts her eyes against the question.

  “Let’s just try to stay positive for the time being.”

  By the day after Christmas, all of Miss Schimpf’s promises, once confident and gilded with optimism, have withered to weak phrasings of self-defense. “We’re doing all we can … We’re trying … We’re hoping … We can only do so much.” And the “we” in which Linno once took comfort—a phalanx of people committed to bringing Anju home—seems now a word to hide behind. “We” where there is only Miss Schimpf and Principal Mitchell and Sonia Solanki.

  Growing impatient, Linno asks what she has been wondering for days—how exactly the school came to know of the fraud itself.

  Miss Schimpf hesitates. “Her classmate. A friend.”

  “This classmate. What did Anju tell her?”

  “It’s a he. Sheldon Fischer. Anju confided in him.” Miss Schimpf recounts the way in which she overheard Sheldon Fischer telling Anju’s story to another student. Miss Schimpf appears to take Linno’s silence as rage, adding gently: “I should tell you that he’s absolutely torn up by all of this. He never meant for things to escalate as they did.”

  What Miss Schimpf mistook for rage is bewilderment. Anju was never particularly talented at dealing with boys. There was her minor dalliance with that waif Sri Ram, but after him, no more. Who is this boy, and how did Anju become so intimate with him? Shell Dun Fisher. Linno repeats the name twice, as if correct pronunciation might lead her to the answer.

  After hanging up with Miss Schimpf, Linno tries to imagine her sister making or even admitting to such a confession. Highly unlikely, considering Anju’s tendency to talk her way out of any trouble.

  Except a tangle of vines.

  Dread climbing her stomach, Linno recalls the corner of her painting, where she had so artfully planted her name. There were times when she thought about mentioning this to Anju, but she had no interest in speaking to her sister over the phone. Now her failure to do so seems intentional. One betrayal for another.

  Absently, she worries a thread along the edge of her knotted sleeve until the thread comes loose. She pulls at the end, winding it around her finger, a tiny strangulation, though still she feels nothing.

  IN TOWN, people are starting to look at Linno as though an unpleasant rash has appeared on her face, and they are mustering every ounce of self-containment to leave it unmentioned. She goes to the Chantha where Valan fishermen have spread the dawn’s catch on the ground, piles of smelt, sardines, catfish, and the local favorite, karimeen. A thousand sequin eyes stare up at her, the metallic scales of the fish caught by morning light, the air laced with a briny smell. When she tries to bargain with one of the fishermen, he seems to assent to her price out of pity, he who makes barely enough to sustain his family for a few days, he whose collarbone protrudes as though his whole, hungry skeleton is threatening to escape his skin.

  So Linno is not entirely surprised when she arrives home to find
an article in a local newspaper, one of the strange side pieces that appear beside other curiosities, like the story of a woman betrothed to a tree or a boy who performed a Cesarean section on a disgraced village girl.

  SCHOLARSHIP WINNER

  STRIPPED OF HONORS; FLEES

  New York City—A Kerala exchange student who was being sponsored by a Manhattan private school fled her host family more than three months after she arrived in the United States. The whereabouts of Anju Melvin, seventeen, are unknown.

  In May of 2003, Melvin received a full scholarship from the Sitwell School in New York, which sponsored her entry from Kumarakom. Several months later, school officials found that Melvin had won the scholarship on false pretenses. When confronted with the matter, Melvin confessed, and disappeared a day later. She left behind a note explaining her intention to run away.

  Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States government has toughened the student visa process. Three of the September 11 hijackers had entered U.S. on a student visa.

  As in the old days, Linno reads the article aloud while Ammachi and Melvin listen. The words “Melvin” and “false” and “hijackers” are stones that settle in their stomachs.

  Unlike after Linno’s other newspaper readings, Ammachi rebukes no one. She sits with an air of fragile stillness.

  “Melvin? Just Melvin?” Melvin snaps. “They couldn’t write ‘Miss Melvin’?”

  “Not when you’ve done something bad,” Ammachi says. “Only when you’ve done something good do they call you Miss and Mister.”

  AT THE END OF THE WEEK, Linno phones an immigration lawyer whose number she copied from a commercial, Srikant Ramakrishnan. His silvery beard and noble bearing gave her the impression that his head and shoulders belonged inside an ornate frame. “I will not take a single paisa,” he had said, “until I win your case.”

  Linno schedules a free thirty-minute consultation in the hopes of finding a U.S. visa that is compatible with her intentions, some sort of two-week Relative Recovery Visa. She will do anything. She will wear a homing device around her neck that beeps with every step if U.S. Homeland Security thinks it necessary. Mr. Ramakrishnan has only to point her in the right direction.

  In person, Mr. Ramakrishnan seems to have aged past his televised self. His hair has surpassed its silver and begun to yellow, and his nose is as pocked and rutted as a peach pit. Linno has to repeat herself several times to explain the full story, and when she is finished, Mr. Ramakrishnan does not turn to the many tomes and texts behind him but instead scratches his nostrils, his fingers coming dangerously close to an excavation. After a sigh, he gives his prognosis with more sympathy than he might usually dole out for the free consultation.

  “You can apply for the tourist visa,” Mr. Ramakrishnan says. “But with your sister’s situation, they would let in a flock of Iraqis before they even read your name.”

  On that basis, he declines to take her case, citing his overwhelming workload, a convenient loophole for avoiding the “not one paisa” promise.

  WITH OR WITHOUT Mr. Ramakrishnan, Linno plans to apply with what money she has left from the Sweet Sixteen invitation cards. To this sum, Alice adds twenty-five thousand rupees.

  “How will I pay you back?” Linno asks.

  “It’s called a bonus,” Alice says. “No payback necessary.”

  Linno accepts the check in silence. Once in a while, Alice displays a subtle mothering quality, as when she went out to lunch and returned with a new umbrella for Bhanu because his had broken that morning. And now this check, from which Linno will not look up for fear that doing so might bring her to tears.

  Alice squeezes Linno’s arm. “But think of what the lawyer said. Putting your money in this is like dropping your coins into a wishing well. It may help with your own peace of mind, but it won’t do any good for your sister’s.”

  Linno turns away, briskly folds the check in half. What Alice does not understand is that peace of mind will come only when Anju is returned. Before that, any relief is simply a temporary shelter, a roof that will cave.

  “I just mean that we should find another way,” Alice adds gently. “The best way.”

  “From where? How?”

  “My brother.”

  “Kuku?”

  “I only have one,” Alice says, almost apologetically. “But believe me, he has friends in high places. Ministries even.”

  · · ·

  LINNO HARDLY SLEEPS during these first two weeks. Time, with its viscous consistency, both stretches and shrinks, thins and thickens, hurtling through one week or dragging across the eternity of a minute. During the day, she works on invitations, as each new order that Alice brings is a mercy to her wandering mind. She used to glower at strangers, blaming them for the troubles they seemingly lacked, but now she harbors no envy for those celebrating a golden anniversary gala or a Mughal-themed baby shower. Instead she sees the money in each invitation, a growing sum that will somehow bring her sister back, as soon as Kuku comes up with the right strategy. Her fingers are flecked with paper cuts and smudges, but she works with a steady, fevered focus until Alice draws the window shade and sends her home.

  By day, thinking feels like a kind of inefficient swimming, the way Anju used to do when she was a sunbaked little thing in knickers, kicking and kicking until she came up for a breath and noticed that she had gone just a few feet from her point of origin. At night, all Linno can do is sit at the kitchen table and try to drive the competing sounds from her mind, like the voices of Miss Schimpf and Mrs. Solanki, whose calls have grown fewer, both of them increasingly concerned with how Linno is handling everything, a question that Linno does not know how to answer. “Fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

  Somewhere, a faucet is dripping. The pots and pans, washed and laid to dry on rags, have grown mossy with shadow. When she is lucky, darkness focuses her vision, gives contour and depth to what has transpired. Anju must have fled out of shame, but she wouldn’t have left without arranging a place to go. To whom did Anju turn and can that person be trusted? Should Linno post a reward for information about Anju’s whereabouts? Terrible idea. Some broken-nosed thug might kidnap her. Tape up her mouth. Put her in the boot of a car. Brainwash her. Ransom her. In another time, in another life, Linno could be penning an episode for Sympathy, casually playing chess with imagined lives.

  GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE in seven days, and in that same space of time, Kuku George has still not come up with a plan for Linno to pursue. Or if he has, he has failed to phone her about it. For three days in a row, she calls his cell phone, and on the fourth day, a Sunday evening, she tries his home phone and leaves two urgent messages that Kuku should call her as soon as possible.

  In the meantime, Linno keeps company with the drawing tablet in her lap, trying to create an invitation for her first white client, Mrs. Judy Lambert.

  Mrs. Lambert came to them by way of her tennis partner, Mrs. Nair, who had sent her Rachna’s Sweet Sixteen invitation. Mrs. Lambert immediately phoned Mrs. Nair and inquired after the name of the invitation shop, what with her own fiftieth birthday bash coming up.

  Judy Lambert is Alice’s great white hope, the gleaming key to a pride of wealthy Episcopalian clientele who thrive on outdoing one another. She is a fashion magazine editor, opinionated, effusive, and where she treads, the pride will follow.

  But while white people seem to favor simpler designs, Mrs. Lambert has especially requested some “Asian flair” to the invitation, to complement the Oriental theme of her party. “There will be Chinese lanterns,” she gushed to Alice, “and origami cranes and folded fans and everywhere just red, red, red!”

  Linno suggested to Alice that Mrs. Lambert might have mistaken one part of Asia for another by hiring their services. “What do I know of China? And this, what about this?” Linno held up a printout of the digital file that Mrs. Lambert had sent, allegedly the Chinese symbol for harmony. “She wants me to put this in the design. How?”

  “That
is your job to know and my job to sell,” Alice said. “If this woman came to us by mistake, it’s a blessed mistake.”

  But home seems the wrong place to ponder harmony of any kind, let alone that of the Chinese variety. Linno sketches without interest, intermittently glancing at the phone. Ammachi shuffles across the room and looks over Linno’s shoulder. She scratches her hip. These days, she has taken to wandering about the house wearing a pink floral muumuu and a dreamy frown, her hair in a wilting knot.

  “Did anyone call?” Ammachi asks.

  “No.”

  “Where is Melvin?”

  “Driving Abraham Saar.” Melvin had gone despite Abraham’s suggestion that he take the day off. Melvin declined, hoping that putting himself to work would put his mind to rest.

  Ammachi eases into the plastic chair next to her. “What are you drawing a baby for?”

  “No reason,” Linno says. She crosses out her sketch of a plump, jowly head intended to be that of Mao Tse-tung.

  Ammachi gazes at the curio cabinet, absorbed by the marble plaque behind the glass. “Anju was a very round baby, like a matthangya.” Linno already knows this story but allows Ammachi to continue. “A nine-pound gourd, that’s what she was, hairy all over from sitting in the womb so long. At least that was how she looked in the picture your mother sent. I took the picture around with me, but I was too ashamed to show it to my friends. They kept asking and I kept pretending that it had gotten lost in the mail.” Ammachi looks at Linno. “The picture, not the baby.”

  Linno nods.

  “I blame your mother. She ate too much fish pickle during her pregnancy.”

  “That’s why Anju was hairy?”

  Ammachi clicks her tongue at such illogic. “That’s why Anju is the way she is. Impulsive. Unsatisfied. Constipated. Always trying to push her way through the world.”