ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Why didn’t you come back for me? Why did you let me die alone?

  BIRD WAKES to the noise of Anju’s key in the lock, her neck stiff from laying her head on the table. It is dark outside. Eight thirty-four according to the clock above the stove, upon which the cake sits limp and overwhelmed by chocolate frosting. Bird presses her fingers to the underside of the table, composing herself while Anju hangs her coat. Best not to betray her relief, her irritation.

  “Where have you been?” Bird asks.

  “Library.”

  Bird waits for an apology, perhaps an admission of negligence. “You lost track of time?” she offers.

  There is a pause. Bird wonders if she heard. Anju leans on the door frame and Bird can see it—something angry in the girl. Her stiff posture, her jaw. Her pockets must be hiding fists.

  “Yes. Time. I lost track of time.”

  “Are you hungry?” Bird rises just as Anju interrupts.

  “I am an illegal here. Did you know that? An illegal alien.”

  Bird stops halfway to the oven. “Who said?”

  “The Internet said.”

  “How is that? Your arrival papers—”

  “It was the official website of the U.S. Immigration. I am out of status.” Anju bites her lower lip, and for a moment it seems that she might cry. Suddenly, fiercely, she rubs her face with her hands, through which her voice comes muffled. “Illegal. What would my father say?”

  “Listen, many people are illegal here…. No one will send you away unless you do something wrong…. Just be a good girl and don’t get sick and don’t go out too much and everything will be fine. Next week I will call a lawyer about starting these things. I will call Monday itself. Promise.”

  “What about the money?”

  “I’ll give you more of my own.”

  “Debts on top of debts.” All this time, Anju’s hands have not left her face, as if trying to keep her mind intact. “I have to think of a different way. I don’t want to be where I am not wanted.”

  The words almost tumble out of Bird: But you are wanted, I want you here. Stupid, frantic words like the lyrics to a desperate song. Instead she asks: “Should we tell your father?”

  “No, no. It will just worry him. I’ll think of something.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bed.”

  Bird glances at the oven. “You don’t want anything to eat?”

  But already Anju has shut the door to the bathroom. Bird watches the door and almost goes to knock until she hears the faucet whistling water.

  It had never occurred to her that Anju’s visa could be revoked. How could she have known? For the first time, she envies Ghafoor his Internet.

  Bird goes to the sink to do the dishes. She left a light coating of batter on the steel bowl, having been under the impression that children like to lick the leftovers. And yet perhaps she has been wrong all along, and Anju is not a child but an adult, absorbing the full weight of her mistakes and their consequences. Bird squeezes a line of dish soap onto a sponge. Water gushes into the battered bowl as she scours its sides and forces herself to consider what must be done next.

  9.

  ORK GIVES A SPINE to Linno’s day, draws her through the malaise that descends over the evening. There is always something to be done, more now than ever before, since the website is up and running. Though Linno is given her own email address, she leaves the inboxes to Alice and Prince, who field and answer the growing number of messages. Linno feels embarrassed about using the keyboard, her hand skittering spiderlike over the letters. In the one email she returned to Rachna Nair, she sounded less like the head designer and more like the writer of a ransom note. (yOU Want extra thankyou cARD? linno.)

  As Alice predicted, December and January brought a slew of clients whose invitations were to be completed by March. Women arrived with fiancés in tow, to settle upon the invitation that would embody all their conjugal hope and familial bliss; mothers came ready to bargain. Bhanu is most invaluable in dealing with tireless brides, such as the one who had him type her name in sixteen different italicized fonts just to see how they appeared on the computer screen.

  But to Linno’s mind, the company could use a little more impatience. True, their reputation is spreading, reaping customers from as far as Bedford, Indiana. Yes, she has designed twenty new invitations, all of them showcased and captioned on their website, but not even this can keep pace with her hopes. Sometimes, on the way home, she thinks she sees a small Anju sitting on the steps of a house, toeing circles in the dirt. The little girl looks up; she belongs to someone else. Linno moves on quickly, the pang in her chest burrowing deeper by the day.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of March, a relentless rain arrives and, with it, an email from Sonia Solanki. Seeing Sonia’s name in the inbox brings Linno no hope. She remembers how the woman sniffled through every phone conversation in the immediate aftermath of Anju’s absence, and an email, unlike a phone call, carries news of little to no urgency. As well, the subject line “Proposal from Sonia Solanki,” puts Linno in mind of the only other proposal she has ever received, more than a month ago, in Kuku’s living room. For a brief, queasy moment, Linno wonders if Sonia is trying to arrange her marriage.

  From: ssolanki@lbc.com

  To: linno@eastwestinvites.com

  Subject: Proposal from Sonia Solanki

  Dear Linno,

  My assistant gave me your website and email; I hope my message finds you as well as can be, despite the present situation. I want you to know that I am doing my absolute best to find Anju. I am as frustrated as you are with the handling of these matters, both by the school and by the police.

  With this in mind, may I make a proposal? As you probably know, I host Four Corners, a daytime television show in which I, along with my three female cohosts, debate pressing issues in the public arena. Every week we present a new Hot Topic. For example, last week, we discussed abortion rights, and the week before that the lack of role models among young celebrity starlets. One Hot Topic that we have not yet touched is Immigration, both Legal and Illegal. I suggest that we present this Topic and have you on as a guest, so that you can tell your sister’s story We would be exploring questions of globalization, modernization, and the very history and future of this country Yours would be one of several stories, but there is a very good chance that Anju might see the program (she used to watch it all the time in my home theater!) and be inspired to come forward. Or maybe someone who has seen her will see the program and inform us. We have a viewership of 3.5 million.

  Of course, we would take care of the visa application, airfare, per diem, and hotel.

  I write this by email so as to make things as clear as possible. I will phone you tomorrow to speak with you further, and if I get the green light from you, I will pitch it to my producer, Jeff Priddy.

  I truly hope that we can work together on bringing Anju home.

  Yours,

  Sonia Solanki

  Upon hearing the news, Alice is immediately wooed, having long been a fan of Sonia Solanki’s Mysteries of the Orient cookbook series. “You’re going to be on TV!” Alice says, radiating joy. “With Sonia Solanki!”

  “I don’t know. What is ‘per diem’?”

  Alice grows stern. “You are going to be on TV.”

  “How can I go on television and announce to the world my family’s private business?”

  They argue a bit, though Linno folds more easily than usual. Sonia Solanki could bring Linno to New York in half the time that Kuku’s plan would require. Her immediate concern is twofold: how she will hide her wrist, and how she will stop herself from crying. She has seen shows of this kind and their guests, how even the most stoic middle-aged man will turn to the camera lens and, perhaps seeing his loneliness magnified in the dark reflection, will become overwhelmed by his secret sorrows and collapse into tears.

  MEANWHILE, Melvin waits on the front steps. It has become his favorite place, beneath the star that Ammachi refus
es to unplug and detach, as doing so would be akin to dislodging the moon. It is here that he waits for Rappai to come walking up the road as the sun goes down, to partake in their evening nightcap. Melvin has decided to limit his bar visits to once a week, occasionally relying on Rappai’s bottle of bootleg arrack, so as to save money for the time when money will be needed. Linno is working hard, but if her plan falls through, Melvin has only to make a call and Plan G will be under way.

  Avoiding the bar is taking its mental toll on Melvin. Its daily presence in his life provided a therapeutic calm with which he could rise above the current mess in a kind of mental, angelic ascension and tell his corporeal self, slouched at the counter, that everything would be fine. But now, on the front steps, he succumbs to the opposing pulls of pessimism and optimism. The questions tug him back and forth, questions that have no answer, so that by evening’s end he is exhausted, not by physical exertion but by the futility of going nowhere.

  He fears what is done to illegals over there. It is a different country than years before, trying to corral its evils. What if they catch her and question her? He is not sure who “they” might be, but he imagines sweatless men in suits and dark glasses, coolly cracking their knuckles. A girl like Anju could fumble, say the wrong thing. Melvin’s cousin Kuriacko is a policeman, and once, while drunk, Kuriacko said that when questioning a suspect, there were times when he wanted to hear a confession more than he wanted to hear the truth.

  Melvin gazes down the dirt path for Rappai, who is a poor conversational substitute for Berchmans. The other day, Rappai asked Melvin how Linno got to be so headstrong, a question he was tactless enough to pose only because the liquor in his veins made him so, knowing well that people do not favor the term “headstrong” when speaking of young women, usually applying it to girls who marry against their parents’ wishes. Melvin asked Rappai what he meant, and Rappai held his glass up to the moon, either in awe of its powerful contents or in search of his own backwash.

  “Well first, she said no to that rich blind man, and now she runs a business with the blind man’s sister …” Rappai dispelled his own question with a grunt. “Ah, but what’s the use of these questions.”

  “She got it from her mother,” Melvin said.

  Rappai fell silent, knowing better than to respond.

  LINNO WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD and Anju just three when Gracie began to propose her plans for New York. Nowhere else in the States would do. Her eyes shone when she spoke of her friend who lived in an apartment outside the city proper, connected by a web of subterranean tunnels by which one could visit the brightly lit heart of the city that pulsed, unblinking, all through the night.

  Around that time, Melvin’s father died. Gracie phoned Melvin at work to give him the news, but he knew before taking the phone. While she told him of Appachen’s stroke, a few silvery clichés crossed his mind—It was his time … God wanted him—words meant to take the place of an emotion he could not quite conjure up. All day, the news felt like nothing, and his sadness stemmed from this absence of feeling rather than the absence of his father.

  Melvin gathered up his family and took the train home for the funeral, where he completed the rites of the only son. His father’s face was wreathed in cloth, his nostrils plugged with cotton to suppress the draining humors of the dead. At the grave site, each relative gave Appachen one last kiss on his cold, powdered forehead, more kisses than he had ever received in life. Watching kiss after kiss, Melvin thought of the times when he and his father would go to the river, where walls of stones had been built along the banks. Appachen reached into the gaps between the stones and magically withdrew small, scrambling lobsters in his fist, dropping them into the bag that Melvin held out. “Kochu Konju,” Appachen called him, Little Lobster, a name that felt almost like a kiss. But eventually, a dam was built on Vembanad Lake, blocking the salty tidal waters of the Arabian Sea, clogging the freshwater with sewage and chemicals, and the lobsters disappeared, as did the name Kochu Konju.

  At last, Melvin draped the white satin handkerchief over his father’s face, and as he did so, a sharp, torn cry came from his mother, a sound that he had never heard, that made his hands shake. Ammachi stood with her younger sister, Chinamma, whose husband had died several years before, a space of time long enough to heal her bruises. And there were other widows as well, with lowered lids and stone-cut faces, dressed in white chatta and mundu, the last of their kind.

  Through the cloth, Melvin kissed his father’s forehead before they closed the lid of his wooden coffin. For days and days after, Melvin recalled his mother’s cry. It was not the sound that continued to surprise him but the fact that his parents had loved each other, a secret they had kept between them for almost forty years.

  THE NEXT DAY, Gracie took Melvin to her teak trees, where she pointed out a dab of blue among the branches, a ponman that took flight as soon as it was sighted. It was nice, for once, to leave the children with Ammachi, to have the world as their private aviary. Gracie kept singing the same two lines from a film song, unable to remember the rest: “O blue ponman, my blue ponman …” He wished she knew more lines.

  Melvin tentatively stepped around the trees, deep in his own thoughts. That morning, he had seen a picture of Abraham Chandy in the newspaper, as the new president-elect of the Lion’s Club. It was the first time Melvin had seen the man, and even in such a small photo, he could tell how proudly Abraham Chandy filled the space. This was the man whom Gracie might have married. No woman in her right mind would have turned him down.

  “Shouldn’t we pay your parents a visit sometime?” he asked.

  Her eyes grew wide. “Did you see my mother at the funeral? She looks like a lizard! All that weight she’s losing, it makes her chin look too sharp.” Melvin always found it strange the way Gracie spoke of her parents like a pair of curious acquaintances. Ever since their marriage, she had kept no real relations with her family beyond sending a belated birthday card. This was because Ammachi kept all important dates in her black address book, and when she called to remind Melvin, he in turn would remind Gracie.

  Her gaze grew distant. “I wonder how much a few trees would fetch.”

  “What for?”

  “To get us started over there.”

  He avoided her eyes but tried to look bewildered. He had been considering a certain decision for the past few days, and perhaps this was a window in which to broach it.

  “In New York.” She faced him. “Remember?”

  “New York, yes …” He put his hands on his hips and blew out a firm sigh. “I was thinking about that. I was wondering if it wouldn’t be best to stay here.”

  Gracie stared at him. “But we agreed, there is nothing for us in Bombay—”

  “No, I mean that we could move back here. Into my mother’s house.”

  “Here?” Hers was a tone that one might employ in reference to a leper colony. She took her hand off the tree, as if it, too, repulsed her. “Did your mother ask you to do this?”

  “Of course not. But I don’t want her to be alone.” He gathered himself. “And what is so wrong with my mother?”

  “Nothing. She is fine, much better than mine. Though she did tell the neighbors that Anju looked like a hairy matthangya in her baby pictures—”

  “Old people have a different sense of humor.”

  “The point is not your mother, but mine. My mother and my father, they can’t even look at me.” And here, she stopped herself and began again. “You and me, we were going to start our life somewhere else. Away.”

  “We did go away.”

  “Bombay was a bad start. But if we come back …” She looked at the leaves, as if addressing them. “I was not meant to be here. I was not meant to live near the very people who turned me out.”

  “Don’t be hysterical. You are their daughter.”

  She shook her head slowly, a gesture he hated, as it made him feel small. “People can disown their children gradually, over time, so that no one has to notice.�
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  “Why is everything so complicated with you? Other husbands, they make a decision and the family agrees. The wife moves into her husband’s home. She follows him around. What do we have in Bombay? What do we have in America? Just some drama woman you know whom I never even met.”

  “She’s not some drama woman.”

  “Yes I know. She’s Bird.” Melvin plucked a leaf and folded it into smaller and smaller halves. As with all their recent fights, Bird’s name had a maddening way of entering the conversation. This was the woman whom Gracie had called her best friend, her Chachy, someone who understood her, details that did not amount to the Bird that he remembered from the stage.

  As always, Gracie came to her friend’s defense. “She’s doing very well there. I’m sure she gets auditions.”

  “And is that what you want? Auditions? Bird? Over your own family?” He felt a familiar question crawling up his throat, and though he could usually force it down during fights like these, this time, the picture of Abraham Chandy returned to him. At a loss, Melvin asked, “Why did you marry me at all?”

  She looked up at the sky for patience. “Because it was time to marry. Now who is being melodramatic?”

  “I don’t mean why did you get married, I mean why did you marry me? Didn’t you ever …” He thought he had known the answer, but recently, he had begun to doubt. “I thought this was a love marriage.”

  It was her turn now, to stare at him, bewildered.