ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  ANJU HADN’T PAID any attention to her appearance for a full week, not since the day that she confessed to Miss Schimpf and then arrived home to find Mr. and Mrs. Solanki in the living room. Mrs. Solanki’s throat was wreathed in fat white beads like an oversized rosary that her fingers kept worrying. This time, there were no samosas on the elephant-ankle table.

  They had been apprised of the situation, Mr. Solanki told her. “And as you know from the handbook, Sitwell has a very strict interpretation of the Honor Code. As is, they are suspending you for the next three days, at the end of which time they will make a decision as to whether you should be expelled.”

  Pushed or punched?

  Stabbed or shot?

  Thrown off a roof or thrown off a cliff?

  Anju found herself nodding, her eyes lost in the carpet underfoot whose peacock blues and greens she had somehow overlooked.

  “The award money,” Mrs. Solanki said gently. “It would help if you could return it.”

  Anju swallowed hard and barely heard herself say, “I don’t have it.” The application had been filed the week before, the money now irretrievable.

  No one spoke. There was only the clicking of beads between Mrs. Solanki’s fingers. Anju could see what the Solankis assumed, that she was impoverished and distraught, that her thievery was without calculation, that poor people lacked the luxury of a moral compass. She felt small. She had brought herself low.

  Suddenly, decisively, Mrs. Solanki planted her hands on her knees. “You know what? I am going to straighten this all out. They know who I am. This will all blow over, I’m sure.”

  Yes, Anju thought. All this would blow her right over.

  DURING THE FIRST DAY of suspension, Anju condemned herself to no television, no phone, and no outdoor excursions, though with both Solankis at work, only Marta the cleaning lady was there to witness Anju’s efforts at self-flagellation. Even Marta, who mostly communicated in smiles, seemed to know of Anju’s guilt. Perhaps out of pity, Marta made lunch for her. Staring at the mustardy sandwich between her hands, Anju wondered if Marta would do what she had done. Having little other mental stimulation, Anju repeated this question several more times, inserting different names in place of Marta, like Mrs. Solanki, Miss Schimpf, Nehru, P. C. Mappilla, Bushes Senior and Junior. As she divvied up the sides, she was not proud of her team.

  Twice the phone rang for Anju, and it was Marta who conveyed the messages to her. “Is from a woman … Bird?”

  Anju assumed that Bird was calling about the application. “I will call back later,” Anju said to Marta.

  Having assumed that she could not sink any further, Anju was surprised to find that there were always new depths and sharper plunges. She learned as much on the third day of her suspension, when listening to Mrs. Solanki explain the school’s decision.

  Mrs. Solanki’s fidgeting made her furious energy seem on the brink of coming uncorked. “It appears,” she said, “that the school had a few cases last year involving cheating and plagiarism, and since then they’ve tightened up the rules. Of course, I find it quite odd that they didn’t think to tighten up the rules every other time, for far worse crimes. Oh no. Only when we’re dealing with a foreigner—”

  “Sonia, please.” Mr. Solanki turned to Anju. “They feel that the prize money is the main issue. Technically that money is owed to someone else, another winner.”

  “As if anyone else needs it.”

  Mr. Solanki clasped his hands between his knees. With head bowed, he looked as though he were the one being punished. He explained to Anju that they had tried to pay for the lost money themselves, but the school would not accept it. “The board feels that it’s important to maintain their stance. So they have decided to expel you.” Mr. Solanki visibly swallowed. His Adam’s apple moved up and down. Anju wondered why it wasn’t called Eve’s apple. Wasn’t Eve the one who lunged for it, who made the first, unforgivable mistake of wanting more than she was allowed? “They have already canceled your return ticket and are reissuing an earlier return date, at their expense, of course. And until then you can still stay with us.”

  Abruptly they lapsed into silence, a long stretch divided by the ticking of the antique grandfather clock.

  “I mean for God’s sake!” Mrs. Solanki threw up her hands, her cork burst. “That little ferret, what’s her name?”

  “Miss Schimpf,” said Mr. Solanki.

  “Schimpf!” Mrs. Solanki laughed at the very lunacy of the name itself. “She acted as though she had no idea what I was talking about! As if it is pure coincidence that an all-white institution’s first expulsion in fifty years is a penniless foreign exchange student. And when I said as much, she babbled some do-gooder nonsense about her sabbatical in India, and I said, ‘People like you think of foreign countries as places to plunder, natives as product.’”

  Mr. Solanki, having heard several thousand versions of this speech over the course of their marriage, stared at his shoes. “And what exactly was Miss Schimpf trying to plunder with the scholarship project?”

  “A feeling of inner peace. Spiritual relief. Why else do people come to India?”

  “Sonia, please don’t make this into one of your crusades. What is the point?”

  “My point is this: they trotted her out like a poor savage. But when the savage is flawed, they throw her on the fire.”

  Meanwhile, Anju was looking from one to the other, imagining an intricate web of words being built in the air above her, a web that had very little to do with her.

  “Maybe you should call your parents,” Mr. Solanki said gently.

  Anju could have laughed at this suggestion. Laughing at her terror. So this was how a person went crazy.

  Instead she nodded. Her tongue had gone dead. At that moment, the hands of the grandfather clock met, causing the clock to chime “Ode to Joy” while a blue painted bird glided out of an open door in the clock’s face, its beak opening and closing, opening and closing, before gliding back into its secret chamber whose tiny doors made her want to plunge her hand inside, like a child, and strangle the sound.

  LATER ANJU WOULD WONDER how she did it. How on the third day of her sentence, she shed no tears in bed. How she got up at two in the morning and quietly began to divide her things into what was needed and what was not. She kept her focus on the smaller decisions—two skirts or one pair of pants? The shampoo or the block of kiwi soap? Comb or brush? Bible or sketchbook?

  Run home or run away?

  She could imagine the coming months, if she went home. Ammachi would never show her face in church again. Melvin would avoid his Rajadhani Bar, perhaps preferring to drink alone. Linno would never look her sister in the eye. All of them had known of her betrayal long before Miss Schimpf’s discovery, and in their silent way, they had even condoned it. Now, after running through the muck, Anju had tracked her deception all over the house, across their names as well as her own.

  Run home or run away. Shame would follow both routes, but only one could possibly lead to a hopeful end.

  For the first time, she began to believe her father’s tales of successful immigration, people who got their green cards overnight. Someone won a lottery of sorts. Someone else found the right lawyer and in no time at all, for $2,500, Melvin said, “he took the I-L out of ‘illegal’!” Whereas once she had scorned these stories, they now attained a hopeful sheen such as can be seen only by the young or truly desperate, and she was both.

  If anyone could work such wonders, it was Rajiv Tandon. Her application was already in process, and if she were to be sent back now, the $1,000 she had spent would be all for naught. Perhaps he could speed things along. In the meantime, she would find Bird, who could show her to a temporary hostel or maybe cousins with whom she could board, for a fee. It was liberating to ruminate over the questions and options, to imagine the road ahead splitting and twisting like sinuous banyan roots rather than the dismal singular route that led home. She was free! Her world was boundless, borderless. Life had not b
egun until now. So what if her plan had holes? She did not pay them heed. People could become slaves to excessive thought. Instead she recalled Anthony Achen’s sermon on the day she left Kumarakom, railing on about the Virgin Mary and her visitation by the angel Gabriel. Did she doubt? No. Did she say, “Can I have a minute to think?” No. Did she say, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Do with me what you will?” Absolutely yes. Because when God calls, we do not think. We trust. We go. We do.

  FOR A RUNAWAY, Anju worried that she was moving a bit slowly. In fact, she was not moving at all, but hovering within the brass canopy of her brief but beautiful home, the Monarch. It was 6:30 a.m., the cold morning smudgy with mist. She watched steam ghosting out of a grate and a man in a coffee cart stacking jelly doughnuts like bricks. Nearby, two bicycles were chained to a parking sign, though the front wheel of one had been wrenched away in the night. Any minute now, the owner of the bicycle-turned-unicycle would appear and curse the city he called home.

  She would miss the vanilla cake, spired and many-storied, with its sleek banisters curled like treble clefs and uniformed doormen, all kid gloves and courtesy. From this side of the glass, the man at the desk seemed less of a concierge and more like a sentry. But she had no need for these palatial entries and marbled floors, or the gym with its lofted televisions, or the indoor pool quavering with filaments of light, or the fountain and its constellations of copper coins, as if the residents of this building needed more luck than they already had.

  Anju left a note on her pillow saying that she was spending the night at a friend’s house and would be back by tomorrow afternoon. She wondered if the Solankis would think her ill-behaved. She wondered if they would be surprised by the mention of a friend.

  On her way to the subway station, she dropped an envelope addressed to the Solankis in a blue mailbox, containing the note she had penned the previous night. Luckily, no one was around to see her hustling into the elevator in her sleeping bag of a coat, each pocket packed firmly with Fruit Roll-Ups, bags of almonds, and Mrs. Solanki’s Slim-Fast bars, plus a duffel bag of her most valued possessions. She had chosen the sketchbook over the Bible, a choice that seemed blasphemous but she hoped God understood. The rest, she assumed, Mrs. Solanki would send back to Kumarakom.

  As much as possible, Anju tried not to think of her family. She had struggled to write them a letter the night before, explaining her intentions, but failed to bring pen to page. Each thought of them nibbled at her courage. They would not understand the banyan tree of freedom she had imagined. Better to pretend, for the time being, that she had no family at all.

  So for now, Anju focused on the matters at hand. The 7 train or the N train? Or avoid public transportation altogether, for fear of the police? The latter was not an option. Anju envisioned her face as a criminal sketch, her nose made regrettably larger than what it was, or perhaps the school would supply her class photograph: a robotic pose in which her fist was awkwardly propping up her chin.

  The world seemed to spread so much farther than ever before, a cement veldt of strangers with collars up, hurrying away. Where Anju was going, no one would know her name. She would christen herself anew, seek a path around the muck. If it was possible anywhere, it was in this city, where the streets were already dense with sound—the squealing of buses and the grumble of trains underfoot, the flutter of fliers from a fortune teller’s hand, the sad rattle of change in a Styrofoam cup, all the harsh, accidental music of morning.

  As casually as possible, Anju descended the subway steps.

  Running away. Simple as that.

  IT IS ANJU’S FIFTH DAY of employment at the Apsara Salon. In the spirit of welcome, Anju’s coworkers have begun to speak in English when she is present while she, in turn, has learned the cast of full-timers plus a few of their distinguishing traits.

  In descending order of rank:

  GHAFOOR … The ringleader. Looks 50, but probably 55. Formidable hairstyle. Cannot pass a mirror without glancing in it. The salon is all mirrors.

  NANDI … née Nandini. 40. The best threader in the salon, she can weave subtle crests and arches from caterpillar brows. The word nandi means bull, a nickname she has earned from her heavy nasal breathing as she works on a face, the ends of the thread in her mouth, her brow furrowed in concentration.

  LIPI … Ageless and expressionless. The best blow-dryer in the salon, she yanks the curl out of the unruliest heads of hair. She is slight but tough, a Nepali who landed on the Asian side of the genetic divide, and thus blessedly lacking in facial hair. Lipi’s brother works as a sushi chef in a grocery store. “In his kimono and hat,” Lipi says proudly, “no one suspects a thing. Even a Japani lady tried to talk to him.”

  SURYA … A competent waxer, able to do everything though she refuses to excel at anything in particular. She is studying to be an engineer and plans to quit in a few weeks.

  POWDER … Surya’s younger sister, age 27 (24 according to her online dating profiles), with bovine hips and unhealthily pale skin. She ascribes her pallor to her mother’s complexion, though by no small coincidence, she specializes in facials and bleaching regimens.

  Sometimes, when Nandi is threading a client, Anju strategically sweeps near her station, in order to study her technique. At first, Nandi’s methods are swift but simple to follow—unraveling the thread, biting off the end, winding it around her fingers into some sort of web with one end still in her mouth. Her client lies back on the seat. “Hold,” Nandi commands through clenched teeth, and the client’s fingers pull the skin taut on each side of the eyebrow. Her regular clients always know where to hold.

  But as soon as Nandi bends over her client, the process dissolves into miracle. Impossible to deconstruct how an eyebrow can be thinned by merely the crossing of threads, plucking hair by hair. The only noise is the zipping of threads and, of course, Nandi’s heavy nasal breathing, periodically interrupted by her command to hold somewhere else. At the end, she mows the space between the eyebrows, scrutinizes her work, then gives the hand mirror to her client, who always responds with a satisfied nod. Nandi pats the pinkening skin with a soothing aloe gel and talcum powder, and sends the client back into the world with eyebrows that the client’s husband or boyfriend will never notice. “You don’t want people to notice,” Nandi always says. “That is the key to good eyebrow.”

  But the key to threading remains beyond Anju’s reach. She asks Bird, but Bird has no idea of the technique. Her eyebrows, fat and feathery, betray as much.

  Lately Anju has been sweeping and wiping what is already clean, trying to seem more useful than she is. If she does not find a way to make herself useful, perhaps by becoming a threader, Ghafoor might suggest that she find a dirtier floor to sweep and wipe. She spots Bird at the cash register, counting out bills, chatting with the ladies in the waiting room with all the casual comfort of one who owns this place. Maybe Anju will not be fired, not with Bird on her side.

  For Bird to care so unsparingly for a stranger, it is almost an act of sainthood. Over the past two weeks that she has lived with Bird, Anju has come to feel both guilt and gratitude for the only friend she has left in this city. Gratitude that Bird has taken her in, and guilt that Anju persuaded her to do so only by spinning another lie.

  UPON RUNNING AWAY from the Monarch, Anju took the 7 train to Jackson Heights. When she emerged from the subway, the Technicolor intensity of certain signs offered at least a visual relief. She walked the route that she knew by heart, past landmarks that she recalled from her first trip, signs declaring BOLLYMUSIC WORLD and BANANA LEAF CAFé, past the boxes of fruits and vegetables kept behind a plastic drape to protect them from the chill. Yesterday it had seemed nearly impossible to venture out in the world with one’s entire life crammed into a single bag, but at least now Anju was moving with purpose. There was promise in the air.

  And yet she could not remember the exact location of Mr. Tandon’s office. She stood in the lobby of the building that she had thought was his, surveying the list of la
wyers that hung on the wall, each name next to a room number. Rajiv Tandon was not listed. A uniformed black man sat behind a podium, signing in each visitor with a deliberate hand, no matter how they huffed or glanced at their watches.

  She hurried in and out of every building on that block and the next, dizzy with the tiny white letters she read on each wall, none of them meeting to form Mr. Tandon’s name. When finally she returned to the first building, she was sweating within the plump confines of her coat.

  Noticing her distress, the guard asked, “Who you looking for?”

  “Rajiv Tandon,” she said, and was going to give more information about Mr. Tandon’s height, his coloring, his nationality, but upon hearing the name, the guard raised his eyebrows. Not in a way that boded well.

  “That guy? What do you want with him?”

  It occurred to her that men of good standing were not referred to as “that guy.” She felt a stirring in the pit of her stomach. “I have come about business.”

  The guard scratched the bristle of his unshaved cheek. “Well, the only business he’ll be doing is from the corner of a jail cell.”

  SOMEHOW SHE FOUND her way out into the cold. Her legs carried her down one block and then another, but her mind lagged behind, taking note of the unlit Christmas lights creeping vinelike around the trunks of skinny trees, the signs bearing greetings of HAPPY DIWALI and EID MUBARAK. It was a wonder that she finally noticed a pay phone.

  She found the scrap of paper in her purse, worth more than the twenty-dollar bill she had stuffed next to it. Following the directions on the pay phone, she inserted a quarter, dialed the numbers, and waited. When Bird answered the phone, a sudden clot of tears rose at the back of Anju’s throat, but she did not have enough quarters to cry on paid time. She said, “This is Anju.”

  “Anju?” There was a pause. “Where are you? Where have you been? I have been calling and calling….”

  Anju looked around for the nearest street sign. “Kalpana Chawla Way.”