ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “I’m sorry if I was rude,” Bird said to Gracie, taking a seat at the foot of her bed. Gracie was sitting on the floor before her narrow suitcase, sorting through her clothes. “I get carried away when I meet such young talent.”

  Gracie gave her a sly, skeptical look. Her irises were as bright as new coins. “We both know I was terrible.”

  “You were nervous. You’ll improve.”

  Distracted, Gracie slowed her folding of an underskirt. “I always thought that an actor steps outside of himself to play a character, but I watched you today. You were yourself and someone else, both, entirely.” She made one final fold, pressing the underskirt tight as a package, and looked up. “It takes compassion to be that woman.”

  Over the years, Bird had earned her share of fawning remarks, but none so earnest as this. After first reading Kalli Pavayuda Veede, Bird could not believe in a woman like Neera, no matter how many times Ghafoor had proclaimed her to be “real.” Bird had never known a woman to do what Neera had done, to renounce her own children, to leave an upstanding husband who was not an alcoholic or a gambler or a wife-beater. But that was the fresh thrill of acting, to descend inward to some common space from which she could understand a total stranger.

  “Hah, what do I know,” Gracie said. “All I know is I’m no good.”

  “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “No, no. I need the adventure. Life with my aunt is too boring, and by this time next year, I will be married.”

  “You are engaged?”

  Gracie quickly shook her head.

  “Then how do you know you’ll be married?” Bird asked.

  “My father says eighteen, nineteen, this is a normal age for marrying.”

  “Hm.” Bird nodded. “Then I am not so normal, am I?”

  “No,” Gracie said, shuffling through her clothes. “You are lucky.”

  With a slow smile, Gracie unearthed an album from her suitcase and held it with both hands. She stared at the cover, her face filled with light. “Now we both are lucky.”

  Gracie handed the album to Bird. To her, it did not look lucky but old, the corners worn, heavy with the weight of two records. On the cover was a circular symbol of two angels praying, and above this, a title that made Bird frown: Jesus Christ Superstar.

  “Are you one of those Pentecostals?” Bird was annoyed. They had only just met and here the girl was trying to convert her.

  “No,” Gracie said, puzzled. “Are you?”

  “My mother was Hindu. My father was godless. It’s the only thing he and I have in common.”

  Gracie raised her eyebrows. “You believe in nothing?”

  “I believe I will not like this music.”

  “Listen, I found it on a bookseller’s table. Usually they sell religious music but maybe the cover fooled them. Just as it’s fooled you.” She rose, pulling Bird up by the elbow. “I saw there was a record player downstairs.”

  Bird began to protest that she had other things to do, though nothing specific came to mind. Promising just one song, Gracie led her along, already moving as if she knew the whole house. Bird followed her to the sitting room with its wall full of Reader’s Digest books, the abridged versions of legendary novels whose maroon and blue spines colored an otherwise muted room.

  Just as Gracie claimed, there was a record player in the corner, beneath a sprawling spider plant. Gracie put the plant aside and opened the lid. She skimmed the dust from the record player with a velvet roller the size of a lipstick tube. When she was finished, she took the first record from Bird, keeping her fingers to the edges, and slid it onto the spool.

  The machine hummed. The album began to spin. Gracie dropped the needle and sat in the armchair across from Bird.

  They listened to both records from beginning to end, each song building upon the next, so that even if Bird could not understand all the words, she could glean the path of the story and its players, the voices that worshipped and fought, that loved in secret and died in disgrace. Sometimes, to Bird, the men sounded like yowling cats, but Jesus and Judas sang from a plane above the others, seething with frustration. The songs were often electronic and explosive; Bird did not enjoy them all. And yet there was one that held her as soon as the woman began to sing. Mary Magdalene was her name.

  The voice poured through the speaker and swept through the room like a foreign wind, growing around Bird, gathering her up to the very heart of its lament. The woman seemed to bleed as she sang, as if singing were the last act before surrender. There were times when, in a spectacular throe, the voice rent itself with a wail and then continued on, this tearing and welding greater than the body from which it came, miraculous, invincible: Should I bring him down? Should I scream and shout? Should I speak of love, let my feelings out …

  Eventually, Bird’s gaze came to rest on Gracie, who had folded her legs beneath her. She was staring at the floor with her copperbright eyes, and it seemed to Bird that this was not the first time Gracie had sat with this song, almost leaning into the sounds, as if the music were a wall she could rest against. The album spun and the world spun with it, but between the two of them was a precious stillness that Bird had never felt in the presence of anyone else.

  JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR became a household favorite, particularly Mary Magdalene’s song. Worried that the record would be ruined from overuse, Gracie made another trip to the book stall and returned with The Sound of Music, whose angelic Julie Andrews the housemates preferred. Bird and Gracie still favored Mary Magdalene, so they saved her for rare occasions.

  At dinner, Gracie always made sure to sit by Bird, though other actors did most of the talking. Chummar, with his ridiculous stories of the elephant who fell in love with his animal trainer. Raman, who claimed to have had a secret affair with Zeenat Aman that went awry because he was Hindu and she Muslim. At times Bird thought it tiring, listening to people who never seemed to leave the stage behind.

  Some troupe members began to call Gracie “Bird’s understudy,” knowing well that if talent did not keep Gracie from a dramatic career, her father would. Such was the way with “good girls,” they said, citing a goodness that had more to do with wealth than virtue. Ghafoor encouraged the friendship wholeheartedly, as if Bird’s befriending of Gracie were simply part of the larger strategy to gain her father’s favor. “Keep it up!” he said. “Who knows what he’ll donate by the time we reach Kottayam!”

  But Bird would never drop the hints that Ghafoor wanted her to drop. She had no such designs on her friend, whom she secretly felt was far better than herself, though not because of her wealthy father or her pedigreed mother. In fact, Gracie readily admitted her dislike for her family, especially her father, who had refused to pay her college fees because the education of women was something he considered a waste. A generous dowry he would supply, but not tuition. She had wanted to study nursing, which could have taken her to Dubai or London or even New York. Like Bird, Gracie had always wanted to travel. But her father had looked down on the nursing profession and the women who daily studied and touched the ailing bodies of naked men. Sometimes Gracie said things that surprised Bird altogether, as when she added: “He has no problem studying and touching his secretary.”

  In spite of her parents, Gracie was confident in a way that did not apologize for itself or exact humility from others, wholly unlike any woman that Bird had ever met. She rarely wore saris, claiming that they limited her stride. She kept her toenails and fingernails a bright, raw red. She rejected the gold bangles her mother gave her in favor of a rose-embroidered ribbon or a length of lace that she pinned around her wrist. None of these details alone made Gracie beautiful; it was the easy, elegant manner in which they were carried out.

  And her openness encouraged the same in Bird, who told of her early days in the industry, which to most people held a dark allure. Nothing Bird revealed from her past was shocking or repulsive to Gracie, not the motel rooms or the promotions that followed. That Bird had made her own way filled Gr
acie with admiration.

  Sometimes they pushed their beds together to talk in the evenings. Gracie had improved her English through movies and magazines that she had collected from various booksellers, hoping one day to use the language in Europe or America. She showed Bird two copies of Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem, one in English and the other in Malayalam, which they studied side by side. Gracie even memorized some of the simpler lines, whispering each word in the dark: “And sometimes God sends you a plain, ordinary passenger, the lively sort that likes to talk. And talk. And talk.” And so they did through the warm, unraveling night.

  Slowly Bird began to believe in the broader reaches of love. Romantic love or physical love, these were small provinces in a boundless terrain, and the love between women friends was no less than any other. There were some loves that put a period to the end of one’s life, which from then on was lived primarily for the benefit of others. But Bird’s was a love that thrilled her with what lay ahead, even if she could not see very far.

  IN THE APARTMENT, Bird encourages Anju to hang things on the wall, so as to make the place her own as well. But Anju has nothing to hang, unless she were to take some of the sketches from Linno’s sketchbook, an act that, despite her previous takings, would feel now like tearing pages from a Bible. Her favorite is an ink-pen drawing of the annual Vallankali races—two long peapod boats filled with dozens of rowers, their oars digging water beneath a sun that radiates spokes of light. Though Anju loved the boat races, her exhilaration always seemed somehow incomplete, as if she would never quite reach the nucleus of all that excitement and fervor. From the shores she watched along with thousands of onlookers, the shiny backs and curved spines of rowers, working men in their daily lives now heroes for the day, singing and plowing the water:

  Kuttanadan punchyile, kochupenne kuyilale,

  (Little girl, cuckoo bird of the Kuttanadan paddyfields,)

  Kottu venam!

  (We need drums!)

  Kolu venam!

  (We need drumsticks!)

  Kurava venam!

  (We need horns!)

  There were always one or two slower boats of women in white saris, thick arms and black buns, but Anju always imagined herself the cuckoo bird of Kuttanadu, a whole boat serenading her in passing while she watched from the shore, her nose attracting a sunburn.

  If then she felt close to some center of importance, now she feels a world away. Back home, she had assumed that one’s very presence in New York would have a levitating effect on the spirit, but her feet drag in her heavy shoes. Perhaps this is what it means to be homesick, though she resolutely believes that such a sickness should be hidden, especially if Bird is to treat her like an adult.

  Anju tries to think of her future methodically and mechanically, mapping the coming months. Bird recommends that she complete her high school degree through an online course. “No use in stopping your learning. A high school diploma will probably help when you apply for a green card. It will make you look like …” She tries to remember one of Rajiv Tandon’s English phrasings. “An attractive applicant.”

  “But who will give me a diploma after I was expelled from school?” Anju asks.

  Bird waves away her concerns. “Even a convicted felon can get a degree so long as he studies hard and pays the fees.”

  Unused to having felons for peers, Anju hesitates. “But the tuition …”

  “That I will pay for. You never would have messed with that Tandon if not for me. It’s the least I can do.”

  Quietly, Anju thanks her.

  “It’s nothing. But don’t say anything to your father. He will feel the need to pay me back.”

  At five o’clock the next morning, Bird accompanies Anju to the Apsara Salon, where they use Ghafoor’s computer before his arrival. It is a clandestine operation that requires noting the mouse’s position on the mousepad before and after use. “He doesn’t allow anyone to touch his precious machine,” Bird says. “As if we all have hooves instead of hands.”

  Compared to the handheld gizmos people use on the subway, Ghafoor’s computer is a fat, gray hulk, leading Anju to make the correlation that the fatter the machine, the more primitive. But as promised, Anju treats the hulk with all the care and fear of one who has never owned a computer herself. In school, she excelled in computer classes and could type faster than all her peers, but she was never good at understanding the inner logic of the computer itself. If a program threw a fit, she never knew how to pacify it and usually ended up pressing her palms to the warm monitor, frantic, like the mother of a feverish child, and finally, despairingly, shutting the whole thing down.

  Bird has brought a piece of paper with the website of an online high school course that came recommended by a friend. Though intangible, the institution sounds respectable enough: James Madison High School Online. From that day on, Anju spends the morning on Ghafoor’s computer, scribbling notes that she can study later at home. No matter how early the hour, Bird sits nearby, paging through a newspaper and clipping coupons, most of which will live long past their expiration dates in her wallet.

  Not once does Bird try to hurry Anju along. Bird’s patience is limitless, and she mothers Anju with a care usually reserved for family, perhaps to fill some void of her own. Anju wants to know how Bird came to be so alone, but asking might be an insult. She simply assumes that Bird’s story is the usual tragedy, a woman who missed marriage as one might miss a good song on the radio, by changing the station too many times in search of a better tune.

  At first, Anju feels quite pleased with this analogy, as if she just made an incisive comment in class. But most of the debate and discovery goes on in her head, where there is no Miss Schimpf or Mrs. Loignon to nod as if the world revolves around her words, no circle of minor philosophers in which every answer holds the truth. There is only Correct and Incorrect and Final Score.

  THROUGHOUT FEBRUARY, Anju lives mostly between two destinations—Bird’s apartment and the salon. One day, while walking to work, Anju bumps into Linno, causing Linno to spill her armload of books. So struck by the impossibility of it all, Anju does not kneel to help Linno gather her books, but simply stands there, staring down at Linno, who is not Linno at all. It was the braid that deceived her. Like Linno’s, this woman’s braid is loosely woven.

  Angered by Anju’s refusal to help, the Not-Linno rises with her books and says, “Move.”

  The woman’s face is petite and pretty and repulsively nothing like Linno’s. Nevertheless, Anju watches her walk away and disappear into the grocery store.

  In this same way, Anju happens upon Melvin from time to time, strolling along with a plastic bag swinging from his hand, or rustling through a box of oranges in front of the grocery store. She never spots Ammachi, whose look and voice are too singular to mistake. Anju learns not to approach these faux Melvins and Linnos, knows to wait and watch as their faces turn into those of strangers. Even if given the choice, she would not wish to see them in person, not yet. But still it is a painful thing what guilt and longing will do, over and over again, to the mind.

  BY THE END OF THE MONTH, Anju receives a letter from the headmaster of James Madison High School Online, congratulating her for passing her high school exams “with flying colors!” She took them the week before and found the questions disturbingly easy, so easy that she wondered if she were mistaking their underlying complexity. She missed only a single question about a dangling participle, which she would have contested were there a warm-blooded teacher with whom to argue.

  Bird insists on photocopying the letter and sending it to Anju’s father. Obediently, Anju accepts the photocopy and later slides it into the bottom of her duffel bag.

  To celebrate, Bird suggests that they go to a movie. At first, Anju protests against the expense, as every envelope of cash she receives from Ghafoor goes directly into a Folgers canister in the corner of Bird’s closet. “We could rent a video,” Anju says.

  But Bird insists on going to the movie theate
r. “My treat.”

  At the kitchen table, Anju scans the Movies section of the newspaper when Bird says abruptly: “I used to be an actor.”

  Anju stares at her. “In films?”

  “Mostly Tamil films.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Durga … Rajaraja Cholan … Idhaya Veenai. Your father would know them. But no need to tell him,” she adds with a short laugh. “They make me sound old.”

  Anju nods, saying nothing, which is always the case when Bird mentions the unwritten letters.

  “Those movies were long before your time anyway.” Bird goes to the sink and refolds a dishtowel. “Back then, as soon as a girl married, her husband would start making demands. This role, not that role. I didn’t want that.” A moment passes in silence before she adds, “In case you were wondering why I am alone.”

  “I never wondered.”

  “But I am not alone, allay?” Bird turns to Anju with a smile that makes Anju wonder what she did to deserve it. “Now read aloud the movie titles.”

  On Bird’s recommendation, they go to a Charlie Chaplin film called Modern Times that is showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Throughout the entire bus ride, Anju keeps her arms folded tight over her chest, her gaze averted from strangers. Since her arrival in Jackson Heights, this is her first time taking public transportation. In her attempt to seem inconspicuous, she catches her reflection in the window and finds that she looks thoroughly irritated with the world.

  But when the lights darken in the theater, she forgets everything. Who is this small man in his shrunken coat and clownish shoes ambling from accident to catastrophe, none too great to defeat him? At the outset of the film, he takes a job at a factory that eventually drives him to a nervous breakdown. When Chaplin inadvertently gets dragged into the guts of a machine, his body slithering up and around the giant cogs and spools, she almost cries with so much laughter. And not far from her laughter is her pity for this man, running after a world that advances without him. Once in a while, she and Mrs. Solanki used to watch comedic movies in the home theater, but Anju never knew why and when to laugh. Sometimes she understood the jokes, but they were too dry and sharp, too sarcastic for her taste.