ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  IT IS THE FIRST SUNDAY of February, and Judy Lambert’s invitations are finally finished. Alone at the office, Linno examines each card before nestling it into a white box filled with red tissue paper. On her way home, she delivers the box to Alice’s house for a final review.

  A servant girl shows Linno into the living room, where Kuku is seated in a plush brown chair, his face canted upward, receiving the bland murmur of the evening news. He turns the television off and apologizes for Alice, who is upstairs bathing. Linno would have been happy to leave the box of invitations on the coffee table, but Kuku invites her to have lemon water with him on what he calls the patio. Before Linno responds, Kuku says to the servant girl: “Janaki—lemon water on the patio.” Janaki hurries away on her mission.

  Linno follows him outside, through the veranda that wraps all the way around the house in the old, wealthy style, like a moat of white-gray marble. The tip of his cane taps with every two steps. The patio turns out to be a wider part of the veranda set up with rattan chairs and a wealth of sprawling houseplants—ferns, aloes, spider plants, baby banana trees, birds of paradise in orange pots. Janaki sets a pitcher and two glasses on a small table with intricately carved legs. Linno settles into a chair while Janaki fills each glass, then guides one into Kuku’s raised hand.

  “So you are finished with the Madhamma’s cards,” Kuku says. “May I see one?”

  “How?” Linno says too soon. She bites her lower lip. “I am sorry. I mean …” She clears her throat, trying to think of a better phrasing for “How?”

  Kuku seems unfazed. “I’m not fully blind. I can see some colors, light and dark. I can see only what is ahead of me but nothing from the corners of my eyes. I can see most colors, except red. So many important things are red,” he says sadly. “I would gladly trade yellow for red.”

  “Oh.” She gazes into her chilled glass, at the residue of lemon and sugar on the bottom. She tries to imagine his vision, the watery depths and luminous obscurities. “And you were always this way?”

  Kuku nods. “When I was a baby, my eyes were rolling around in my head. My mother thought I was possessed. But my uncle was a doctor, and he found a name for my problem. Optic nerve hypoplasia.” Kuku takes a casual sip. “It’s a mild form, compared to most.”

  It is strange and slightly welcoming to speak of his disease in terms of fact and detail, rather than curse and misfortune.

  He motions to her. “Show me an invitation.”

  Opening the box, she removes the top invitation from the stack, the best one, and fits it into his hands.

  “Red,” she says.

  “I see,” he sighs. “And what is this? A ribbon?” Linno unties the card for him and guides his fingers up the right side of the triangular roof.

  “This is the pagoda,” she says.

  Their fingers drift down the left side of the roof. And in a maneuver that she hardly noticed, it is now his fingers guiding hers down the wall of the pagoda and across the two steps.

  “Steps,” he says.

  She disentangles her fingers and closes the card. “We don’t want to touch too much. Because of the oils, you know. From our fingers.”

  As she returns the invitation to the box, Kuku seems energized by the mention of oils. “Do you know what the pagoda represents? It is a place of aesthetic beauty, of spiritual shelter.”

  No, Linno says, she did not know that. She does know, however, the gist of what Kuku is continuing to say. It is like watching a person trip, in slow motion, and being too far away to break his tumble.

  “I have always thought of you,” he says, “as my pagoda.”

  A moment passes before she finds her voice. “I think your wife should serve that purpose.”

  “Well, she has the shape of a pagoda, that much I can tell.” Kuku’s frown is almost a pout. “I may not be able to see, but I am not stupid. All she wants is my money. All she wants is this house. And all my uncles want is to see me married so that they can believe that my parents are resting in peace. You think she likes me? Every minute she spends with me, she must be in the company of five, ten aunts.”

  “You are a grown man. If you don’t want to marry her, then don’t.”

  “Oh, Linno, please.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, as if being harrassed by a child. “People like you and me cannot venture into the world without so much as a backup plan. I am going to marry her and that is that, unless you are somewhat interested in giving your hand to me.” He hesitates with a shake of his head. “You know what I mean.”

  She crosses her arms over her chest, a defensive stance that she has not taken in a while, not that she forgot how different she is from everyone else, but having forgotten that everyone else notices. “Did I ever give you any reason to think that I would want to marry you?”

  “Most women would jump from a bridge before they dropped a hint of interest. So prudish, people here. But you were bold enough to draw me a picture at our very first meeting. Alice described it to me.”

  “That wasn’t for you. That was because I was bored.”

  Kuku begins to say something, but falters. She watches his face transform from confidence to confusion, then finally and unpleasantly, to shame. “That I did not realize.”

  He leans forward and places his glass of lemon water on the table. She puts hers next to his and, rising, says: “Thank you for the lemon water.”

  “What if you took some time to think?” he blurts. “A day or two?”

  Looking up at her, Kuku appears shrunken in his chair. There is a piece of lint on his shoulder, and she wishes she could brush it away. But he would probably misunderstand the gesture just as he has misunderstood everything else, so she remains where she is and says as gently as she can, “I am sorry, Kuku, but I will never be your pagoda.”

  THAT SAME MONTH, Kuku and Jincy are married.

  Jincy wears a puff-sleeved white sari, her throat choked with gold. Kuku wears Ray-Ban shades, a sleek gray suit, and a smile as plastic as Jincy’s diamond tiara. All throughout the Mass, Linno tugs at her salwar, wary of the sweat pond at the small of her back. Ammachi wears an expression of wistful sorrow that gradually melts into a frown, her singing not unlike a hoarse lament.

  Before Anju’s absence, Ammachi used to thrive on social minglings, deriving some maternal power from the ever-widening circle of her acquaintance. There is tall, two-faced Sally Markose, who will hug you with one hand and cut off your braid with the other. Across the aisle from her is Oommen George, whose cancer last year whisked away his lush head of hair, ushering in a series of ladylike wigs in its wake. In front of him is Abraham Saar, straight and imposing as a pillar. His hands are clasped behind his back, causing his chest to lift, his chin raised to receive the sermon. Here is the kind of man that Linno would marry were he twenty-five years younger, a man who held the respect of a whole room with his quiet self-possession. Linno rarely spoke to him directly, harboring a deep deference for the man who had swooped into her family’s life and, by giving Melvin a job, saved them from uncertainty.

  Like all the fanciest receptions, this one takes place on the lawn of the Windsor Castle Hotel, beneath a sprawling lily white tent. Two great bronze bowls, filled with water and scattered with red rose petals, flank the entrance through which the newlyweds glide, like king and queen, to sit on an elevated platform. Kuku appears happy, though Linno can hardly tell what lies behind those black lenses. Since their last meeting, they have not seen each other.

  After Alice serves the ceremonial tea to the new couple, Jincy’s nine-year-old niece lip-synchs a Bollywood-inspired dance number, complete with pouts and blown kisses, while her mother—an older, squatter Jincy—looks on from beside the stereo with frigid intensity. The audience members solemnly watch, as if they have mistaken the evening’s entertainment for a form of punishment, but Jincy joyfully claps along. After the nine-year-old strikes her final pose (hip thrown to the right, hands over heart), she bows and bows to the tepid applause, hoping for an en
core that never comes.

  5.

  N THE BATHTUB, Bird keeps a bucket and plastic cup whose purpose is a mystery to her roommate, though Gwen never mentions it, assuming that doing so might be a cultural impertinence. In a similar spirit, Gwen welcomes the new tenant without reservation. Bird later hears her speaking to her boyfriend over the phone. “God no, I’m not going to ask for a reduction in the rent…. Because she’s her niece, Brian…. It’s cultural, you know? The close familial bonds? I respect that.”

  Initially, it was a bond of desperation. On the first morning that Bird left for work without Anju, she detected the faint anxiety in Anju’s eyes, her hand clamped over the house key. Anju clamored after her with questions: “Should I answer the door?” “What about the phone?” “But what if it’s you?” It was obvious that the girl had never been home alone.

  “We have an answering machine,” Bird said. “If you hear me, pick up.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  Bird was startled by the girl’s nervousness, an anxiety that was also endearing. “You are welcome to call me at work,” Bird told her, before leaving. “If you need anything.”

  “No, no. I’m fine.”

  Bird put her hand on the doorknob, then abruptly turned around. She wanted to say something but, reconsidering, she said good-bye and left.

  Lately, Bird has begun to feel a simmering impulse to reveal to Anju the source of their connection. Sometimes she thinks that doing so might strengthen their bond, and other times the past seems heavy enough to crush whatever tenuous relation they may have formed. Telling now, it seems, would be premature. For the time being, Bird is content to simply prepare extra meals, to add another pillow to the bed, to ask Anju a question as if addressing the face she tried for so long to forget is the most natural thing in the world. As if time itself is a collapsible thing.

  IN THE SEVENTIES, Bird’s father was a character actor in the B-movie industry, mostly Malayalam films but a few Tamil films as well. Time after time, he played to type—a lovable, gullible, sweet buffoon—all the things that her father, in life, was not. As a child, she was confused by these two fathers, the one she preferred, lofted on a movie screen, and the other she feared and avoided.

  Much later, a lover would try to convince her that her coldness stemmed from her fraught relations with her father. She was nineteen at the time and thought that they would marry, having just succumbed to the singular act that, her lover had claimed, would bind them to each other in deeply spiritual, revelatory ways. But lying in a motel bed with her supposed future husband, Bird felt nauseated by it all, the linearity of life that seemed to lead in a direction that no longer held her interest, and she was sure that she could not live with a man who occasionally gifted her with his psychiatric diagnosis. “The problem is not my father,” she told him. “The problem is that I was expecting a full-length play and you barely made it through the first act.”

  It was surprising, that sureness, that rage—where did it come from? She had thought herself like most women, muddling prettily through her late teens, but from that moment on, she was intoxicated with the possibilities of taking a solid, solitary step into the world.

  So she auditioned for her father’s next film, against his wishes. “It’s not a fit job for a proper woman,” he said. “No one wants an actress for a wife.” Bird won the part; she played the confidante of the lead actress and though she had very few lines, she delivered them in a way that must have impressed the producers, as they expanded her role as filming went on, to her father’s dismay. When the film was released, it seemed from her fan mail that quite a few men wouldn’t have minded an actress for a wife, but at the peak of her popularity, her father kicked her out of the house. His disapproval had more to do with competition than propriety.

  Soon after, she took a room at a women’s hostel in Madras and never spoke to her father again. Through a connection, she found work as a costumer’s assistant on a Tamil film, and by sleeping with the director, she won her next role as a backup dancer in a mobster film that required her to wear glittery plastic pants. The director was adamant that the love scene in his film should not surpass a heated embrace, so as not to alarm the Censor Board, but where his own morals and vices were concerned, he cared nothing for ratings. Bird had thought that treading this line between sex and money would sicken her, but the nights were nothing extraordinary. The weight of a man seemed the same every time, slightly pleasant, slightly crushing; they always seemed to carry that aura of sweat and smoke and need.

  By the time she was twenty-four, she was fed up with the weight. One producer, full of love and rum, slapped her clean across the face when she demanded an end to things, and then collapsed and wept into her skirt. Holding her cheek with one hand, stroking his hair with the other, she decided that this was enough.

  So when Ghafoor, an old cinema acquaintance, invited her to join his drama troupe, she readily agreed. In the Apsara Arts Club there were sixteen members in total—actors, stagehands, plus technicians for music, lighting, and sound, all financed by the deep and generous pocket of Ghafoor’s friend, Rani Chandrasekhar, a retired film actress who had long dreamed of being a patroness of the arts. It was Rani who selected the name Apsara Arts Club, after the bedazzling Hindu nymphs whom some said she resembled in her youth. She had withdrawn from public life years before, due to a disease that she blamed on a curse from her sister. She tried to issue a retaliatory curse, which flopped, so she resigned herself to an occasional insult. (“Always jealous, that kushumbi,” she often sighed.) Rani Chandrasekhar, who used to command the silence of thousands, could no longer command her own hands to stop trembling, the onset of a lifelong earthquake that would gradually consume her body.

  Rani offered one of her sprawling homes in Kochi to serve as a base for the troupe. Those who lived nearby commuted from their homes, but Bird stayed in one of the bedrooms. Being one of only three women in the troupe, Bird was forced to put up with the faint, fluting snores of Anita and Binal, the two other actresses whom she privately termed the Woodwinds. There was a veranda, a spacious living room, and a dining room with a long table at which they all met for meetings and meals. After two months of rehearsal, the troupe dove into the season, two hundred shows, sometimes two or three in one night. They traveled by van, slept in hotels and houses, and awoke in a new village almost every morning. It was a rare relief to return to the comforts of the Kochi house.

  Bird had had her misgivings about such a lifestyle but found it fit her rootlessness. From her days in the hostel, she was used to living in close quarters with the patchwork family that came of traveling and working together, all the gentle bickering and comfort that accompanied it. The troupe was small enough for a degree of intimacy but large enough not to care when she wanted to be left alone, and no one took offense at her stretches of silence.

  She discarded all her hopes of rising to Bollywood status, having grown bored of staring at the back of each starlet’s head. And though she had never acted in a play before, she thrilled to the immediate energy of the audience, their rapt silence as loud as any applause. Regardless of her age, their appreciation remained taut and unconditional, so much so that Bird was able to renegotiate her contract with Ghafoor, increasing her advance as well as her salary to one thousand rupees per show, except for the first and the seventh shows, whose profits went to the company’s upkeep. Fan mail began to follow Bird again, most often from men who tried to smother her with feeling, calling her eyes the color of brandy, loading her arms with bouquets and cakes, peering over their gifts with exquisite pain and ardor. She was used to such shows of affection after a performance, but in the heat, the flowers withered quickly, and with them, her interest.

  HALFWAY THROUGH THE SEASON, the Apsara Arts Club suffered a setback at the hands of Vishwas, an actor who often played comic relief in the form of an undesirable woman. Though he never complained about being cast as a woman, it seemed to inspire in him a latent belligerence when drunk. On thi
s particular evening, he got into a brawl at a local tavern, which sent him to the hospital with a broken leg. To replace him, Ghafoor brought to rehearsal a nineteen-year-old girl named Gracie. “Boy, girl, no matter,” he said. “What matters is the acting.”

  Gracie was a mechanical actress. She had come to rehearsals with her part memorized, but Bird could see the lines passing through her mind before she uttered them, like ill-timed subtitles. She also had a terrible habit of leaning into someone else’s words, as if waiting to pounce on her own. But she was from a wealthy family, vacationing with her aunt in Kochi, and Ghafoor had promised the aunt that he would grant the girl a small part, that of a servant boy. It was a strategic move, as doing so would insure a small patronage from the aunt, but it irritated Bird to think that someday, perhaps three years hence, she would be replaced by just such a girl for whom life was as smooth and innocent as the ribbons in her hair.

  Her first few lines were opposite Bird. “A strange lady is waiting at the door,” Gracie said. She paused for Bird to fill the silence.

  Bird stared at the girl, her confidence, her ribbons, then addressed Ghafoor, who was nodding with encouragement. “Aren’t you going to correct her?”

  Gracie hesitated. “Did I lose my place?”

  Bird spoke before Ghafoor could interrupt. “Your line is this: ‘A lady is waiting at the door. A stranger.’ Not ‘a strange lady.’”

  “Yes, okay, thank you, Bird,” said Ghafoor.

  Bird ignored him. “You have to think when you speak. The lines come from your thoughts, not your memory. And you should be here, in this moment, not thinking two steps ahead—”

  Ghafoor intervened by clapping his hands. “Okay, lesson over. Well done. Time for lunch.”

  THAT EVENING, the new girl claimed the only remaining bed in Rani’s house, next to the Woodwinds. Upon Ghafoor’s insistence, Bird found her to apologize. “Gracie Kuruvilla is the daughter of a donor,” Ghafoor had said. “Not your protégée. And you, Bird, are not some guru of the dramatic arts! May I remind you that your last film was called Boy Friend?”