ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Linno does not disagree. Anju is all of these things, but if fish pickle is responsible, Linno wonders what her own fetal diet was like. Perhaps plain, harmless foods like rice and yogurt, okra, a sensible gruel here and there …

  The phone shrieks. Linno lunges for it.

  On the other line, a woman’s voice says: “Linno Vallara?”

  “Yes?”

  “Aha. Linno.” The woman pauses, rallying her emotion. “Now you listen to me. I understand that you’re having a tough time these days, but you had your chance with him. What business do you have breaking up a home?”

  “Who is this?” Linno asks.

  “There is a right way to do things, and the right way is to have the blessings of family and God, which we have. And you? You want to go sneaking behind my back, allay? Well, no one goes sneaking behind my back and certainly not God’s back either!”

  “Who is it?” Ammachi whispers loudly.

  “What is this?” Linno asks. “Who are you talking about?”

  “I mean my Kuku. I asked him why you called for him, twice, but he refuses to tell me the truth. He says this is private business.”

  “Whose Kuku? Who is this?”

  “This is Jincy.” In English, perhaps to elevate her threat level, she adds: “His finance. You und-a-stan? His soon-to-be vife.”

  · · ·

  “I WASN’T SURE how to tell you,” Alice says.

  Linno and Alice are sitting across from each other at the drafting table. Alice taps her spoon on the rim of a mug—plink, plink—and watches the instant Bru whirl into a pasty cloud. She pushes the mug toward Linno, who ignores the offering and instead carves a spiral into a piece of paper. She listens to the hum of the printer chugging and spitting its majestic announcements.

  “More sugar?” Alice asks.

  Linno scrapes her blade around and around. “It’s a patient man who can love a woman like that.”

  “Who said anything about love? They are getting married.”

  “When?”

  “Next month. You know how it goes. Fast fast, before anyone changes their minds.”

  Alice watches as Linno pulls up on the center of the spiral, so that a perfect spring rises out of the table. In this, the negative space is as vital as the paper shape itself, a harmony between the tangible and intangible. She feels an idea bucking against the walls of her mind until she notices Alice staring at her with a troubled expression.

  “I didn’t realize you cared so much,” Alice said.

  “Hm? No, I was thinking about the design—”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you just yet, but maybe this will lift your spirits.” Alice leans forward to whisper, though Prince is at the other end of the shop, taking inventory. “About your sister—Kuku seems to have found a solution.”

  Linno drops the spiral and sits up.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because he was trying to contact someone about some logistical thing …”

  But Linno is already off her stool, zipping up her purse. “I only hope his fiancée won’t be there.”

  LINNO’S MIND IS FLYING faster than the auto-rickshaw wallah can take them. Scooters zip past, including one straddled by a woman in a salwar, the end of her orange shawl flickering flamelike amid the smells of gasoline and dust. It is still a strange sight to see a woman driving a scooter, as just a few years back women only rode sidesaddle, perched behind their husbands, watching the road fly by. The scooter woman speeds ahead, a shrinking dab of orange in the distance. Stuck behind a bus, Linno’s driver swabs the sweat off the back of his prickly neck with a kerchief that looks exhausted by its purpose.

  “We’ll get there,” Alice says.

  Linno glances at her reflection in the round sideview mirror. Who is this person—so demanding, so tense and terrified? She keeps her fingers curled around the partition bar, within a tantalizing few feet of the steering wheel.

  2.

  HEY ALL HAVE THEIR SOLUTIONS. Ammachi has prayer, Linno has Kuku, and Melvin has a connection.

  While Linno’s auto-rickshaw is beetling down Good Shepherd Road, Melvin is hurrying to meet a friend of a friend of a friend. This friend thrice removed goes by a single initial: G. Melvin wonders if he should call him Mr. G, but decides that people who go by single initials probably prefer as much brevity as possible.

  G runs a secret currency exchange counter in the back of his tobacco store, where visitors can get a good exchange rate on American dollars, several rupees more than what is offered by the bank. In the late nineties, he thrived behind his clandestine counter, living off the fat of the illegal liquor market and giving a good exchange for hundred-dollar bills. But since the recent arrival of competition, he has branched out into another side business, this one more secret than the first.

  What Melvin assumed was a bathroom turns out to be the heart of the side business, a small, windowless room furnished with a card table and a bare bulb that sheds an unsparing light on G’s face, which is scarred not so much by brutal fights but by a skirmish with puberty. Acne has left pocks and craters of a depth that make Melvin want to look away and scrub his own cheeks clean. But he does not. He heard somewhere that two dogs at odds would continue to growl until one surrendered by looking away. Melvin will not be the latter dog.

  “I’m considering you as a client,” G says, “only because Berchmans could vouch for you.”

  With unabashed sincerity and eye contact, Melvin says thank you.

  G shows Melvin two identical visas—one real and one fake—though only G can distinguish one from the other. It is clear from G’s craftsmanship that he is not so much a visa counterfeiter as a connoisseur of fraud, and he handles his work with all the love of a father handling his baby girl. Not allowed to touch, Melvin squints at the sophistication in the doctoring of a signature, in the digital replication of a seal. G must have taken infinite care to produce a stamp identical to that issued by the Chennai consulate, at such a perfectly careless slant.

  First they discuss fees, or rather, G gives a figure that Melvin has no choice but to accept. “This is not a sari shop,” G says. “No haggling here. One lakh.”

  One hundred thousand rupees. A dizzying string of zeroes, but what price can Melvin put on his own daughter? What sum just to pass by her doorway and see her lima bean shape in the bed as it always was, as it was meant to be, if not for his relentless pushing?

  Melvin agrees to the sum. Loans will have to be taken from places seedier than this, from persons with scars that imply worse than G’s.

  “Also you should know that I invest in protection. So if you tell anyone, there will be …” G hesitates, uncomfortable with this part of the presentation. “Consequences. You know what I mean.”

  Melvin doesn’t, but nods unconvincingly. With an impatient sigh, G adds, “You ruin my business, I ruin you. Okay? Broken legs are only the beginning.”

  Melvin is not sure what to say after that. The bulb flickers as G busies himself with his visas.

  “Would you be the one to … ruin me?” Melvin asks.

  “Oh no no no,” G says reassuringly, waving his doughy hands in the air, as if declining a second serving of food. “I don’t have the heart for all that.”

  THE NEXT DAY, Melvin drives Abraham’s entire family all the way to Ernakulam in order to buy kurta pyjamas at Jayalakshmi, a tall, palatial store that offers air-conditioned comfort to its visitors and sweltering chaos for the drivers trying to park around it. A man in a nondescript uniform shrills his whistle at the entering cars that slant this way and that. Beggars weave in the spaces between, specifically aiming their palms at the sunglassed patrons. A plaid-panted man passes coolly around an auto-rickshaw, but when the fingers of a beggar graze his shoulder, he recoils like an affronted turtle into the collar of his polo, crying out: “He touched me!” No one comes to his rescue.

  At last Melvin drives the family back home. Abraham sits in front, his thick arm hanging out the open wind
ow, embracing his Ambassador. Mrs. Chandy and her twin sons, Shine and Sheen, are pressed against each other in the back, among plastic bags that hold far more than what they had planned to plunder. At nineteen, the boys share their father’s physique, muscled and broad, but lack his ambition. Shine is always draped across a couch or dazed before the television, while Sheen prefers to loiter outside the girls’ college, making eyes at the exiting students. At the moment, both boys are wearing earphones plugged into a music device about as big as a credit card. Melvin can hear the faint electronic pulsing of music that sounds American, but could be Bollywood just the same. Gone are the tablas and chendas of his youth, the songs that he could call his own, displaced by lyrics like “I love ice cream” and “Hey you sexy sexy,” songs that seem neither East nor West but fall through the divide.

  Before sundown, Abraham tells Melvin to pull over at a restaurant. Abraham stays in the car a moment, telling his wife and sons that he and Melvin will follow shortly.

  Melvin rests his hands on the bottom of the leather-covered steering wheel, unsure of what to do with them at this juncture. He loves these old cars, their British elegance, like round-eyed gentlemen in seal grays and dove whites, loves them with the sadness of watching something slowly disappear, chased away by smaller cars, bland in their global uniformity. He ponders this so as not to appear too uncomfortable in the silence of the car, unspoken words pressing in on all sides. How terrible about Anju. He has been hearing this sentence quite a lot lately, and he hates the sound of it, the morbid finality, the acceptance.

  “Anju reminds me of Gracie in many ways,” Abraham says finally. “She has a certain vision of her life.”

  This, a discussion of Melvin’s dead wife and Abraham’s betrothed, is not what Melvin was expecting. He keeps his eyes on a scrawny yellow puppy leaning against the trunk of a diseased tree. The puppy seems possessed of a world-weariness beyond its quaint size.

  “People like that do not run off without a clear plan,” Abraham says. “It’s not in their nature. They may take risks, but these are measured risks.”

  “I suppose,” Melvin says. When he was small, he beckoned to a stray puppy from the other side of a street. It hesitated, then sauntered toward him just as a lorry was hurtling down the road. Melvin never told anyone of that day, not his mother or his cousins. He had never been saddled with a story that hurt too much to tell, that required a strength beyond his means to simply open his mouth and begin. And now seeing this puppy, he thinks of the one he killed, a hot and trembling pile on the road that God must have forgotten.

  “I’m trying to say that she will be all right, Melvin. You will find her, and until then, she will be all right.”

  Though Melvin means to say thank you, the only sound he can muster is an affirmative grunt. He is reminded of the time he misspoke the name for XO. Yeksho, Yeksho, the mistake had clung to him all that day and for months afterward, despite the graceful way in which Abraham passed over it. If only he shared Abraham’s self-possession. If only he, too, had all the right words that lined themselves up when a situation demanded it.

  Up ahead, they watch the point where the road meets the sky, that thin gray line vibrating metallic in the heat. For now, they are simply two men. Not driver and employer, but perhaps, momentarily, friends.

  Once inside the restaurant, however, when Mrs. Chandy invites Melvin to sit at their table, he declines and sits alone. This is partly why Melvin is considered a good driver. Quietly, he abides by the old way. He knows his place. He comforts them with the knowledge that even if the entire country is changing, the important things are not.

  AFTER WORK, Melvin visits Gracie’s thicket of teak trees. The trunks rise to five times his height, slender and old, shades of their fragrance borne on the breeze. The leaves cluster thickly but allow the sun to filter in pieces, casting a mosaic of light on the ground. Here in solitude, Melvin finds all the aging gravitas of a library.

  He rarely visits, feeling uncomfortable around these trees. They seem to carry something ancestral and disapproving in their postures despite the fact that he never sold them, not even during the jobless times. He used to look forward to the day when he would give the land to his daughters, for their dowries, happily leaving him with nothing more than the knowledge that his final job as father was done.

  He remembers when Anju, then a little girl, asked him if he regretted having had no sons. Anju’s classmate Naresh had informed her that “daughters drain their Appa’s finances.”

  He paused to think. It was important to say the right thing.

  “I have excellent finances,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about your mother’s teak trees? Dozens of them. I could marry you off several times over.”

  To which Anju said, in a small voice, “Oh.”

  What he meant to say was this: he has never felt anything but the most engulfing love for each child, before the infant was declared boy or girl, before it was neither he nor she but ours, a love that turned nearly fierce at each baptism, especially at the moment when the priest took the baby and sat her vulnerable bum in a cold basin of water, chanting, oblivious to her torrential screams. From a very early age, Linno demanded to dress herself, and Melvin was quite sure that the sacrament of baptism had something to do with it.

  He thrived in his flat of women, not least among them Gracie. She was smarter than he was, a fact that other husbands might have found irritating, but he enjoyed. When he read a political cartoon or editorial in the newspaper, one that he actually understood, he wanted to tell her about it, not to impress her with his learning but to hear what she might say.

  And what would she say at a time like this? That these trees mean nothing, that money itself loses all value if it cannot be spent on their children.

  He has thought it all out; he has staked each step of the plan. With this money, he will buy a fake visa for himself under a false, non-Islamic name. (He is still trying to come up with the name, but something plain and pronounceable. No gaping vowels and absolutely no z‘s.) He will secure himself a two-week passage to New York, find Anju, bring her back, and they will slip right back into their lives as if nothing at all has changed. It is exactly Linno’s plan, but illegal and therefore much more efficient.

  As for Ammachi’s plan, fat lot of good will come from praying to a saint, aloft on its pedestal, its crescent-eyed gaze fixed on a realm beyond the earthly one. Lately Melvin has begun to wonder if God is not a thing that can be seen through so clear a glass as Anthony Achen offers. He still feels the pull of his faith, but he prefers the fogginess that he read of in a Tagore poem as a boy: “… and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.” He was made to recite it from memory in front of the class, an exercise that he mostly failed except for the one line that, to this day, tolls with all the depth and truth of a church bell through his mind.

  Melvin was not always so unsure. As a child, he was devout, granting particular adoration to St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, patron saint of confession, whose expression seemed somehow more benevolent than the others. But things began to change when Ammachi told him a story about her father’s miraculous encounter with the saint.

  Ammachi’s family used to attend the northern church of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, as opposed to the southern church of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos. Though built by entirely different denominations, both churches honored the martyred Czechoslovakian priest who, according to lore, refused to reveal to the reigning king the details of the queen’s confessions. For this, the king cut off the priest’s tongue and drowned him in a river. Though a little-known saint, Yohannan Nepumocianos was also the patron saint of floods, which won him the worship of two churches in Kumarakom, a land beholden to the mercy of the rainy seasons. Every year, both his churches held their annual Perunal in his honor, each festival full of competitive pomp and vigor.

  One night, after a raucous Perunal at the southern church, the day before the Perunal at the northern one, Ammachi’s father went stumbling home
with a friend, trudging along the banks of the river. At some point, through their drunken mists, they felt the growing pound of hooves along the ground as sure as the thump of their heartbeats. And then, out of the black it appeared: a white horse galloping toward them, a robed man astride its back. As the horse passed, it struck them both so hard across the heads that the men fell unconscious. When they awoke—they found themselves on the other side of the river!

  Clear to them then: that horseman was the spirit of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, on his way from one Perunal to another. Others had seen him, too, in earlier years. And of course it made sense that he would be traveling overnight. How else could he be expected to attend both festivals?

  Ammachi had meant for the story to strengthen her son’s faith, but instead it filled the small Melvin with dread for every time he had to attend church and face the statue of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos. Thus far, he had operated on the belief that saints looked on from a kindly distance and did not kick mortals around on their way home from a party. To this day, he grows uncomfortable bringing his petitions to stone-cut saints and their irisless eyes. For many reasons, it seems more sensible to bargain with the living rather than the dead.

  EASIER SAID THAN DONE when living with a mother like his own. Melvin is sitting on the front steps beneath a mulberry-colored sky, smoking a bidi that he found in the pocket of his shirt, the first small mercy of the week. The mosquitoes veer about but rarely bite him, bored with local blood. He listens to the thrum of winged things, the rustle of tiny lives and deaths, and wonders what it would be like to struggle as everything else in the world struggles, without sense of past or future, without regret or foreboding. But the mango trees look reproachful tonight, shimmering their leaves, in agreement with his mother’s belief that they too suffer pain. He remembers how, when he found himself in trouble, Ammachi would snap a branch from the tamarind tree out back, apologizing to the tree for doing so (I’m sorry, it hurts you, I know it hurts you). With that branch, she proceeded to whip her wayward son without a trace of her arboreal empathy.