ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Linno’s tongue moves slowly through a syrup of half thoughts. “Abraham Saar?”

  Kuku nods. Only then does he seem to recognize that she has known nothing of this affair.

  “Of course, I will never tell anyone of this,” he says. “Not even Alice, if the answer is no. But Jincy also felt I should have this conversation with you. After all, she is very concerned about the family name, now that it’s hers as well.” He softens his voice. “Jincy has read that these inclinations might be genetic. Which is why we wanted to make sure that you … that your feelings for my sister are of a proper kind.”

  She hears a noise in the bushes, a rustle of birds in the dark. The toad resumes its lonely, interrogatory croak.

  “Linno?”

  “One minute,” she says. Tupperware in hand, she gets out of the car and wedges the Tupperware just behind the rear wheel. When she re-enters the car, she takes the front seat.

  “Shashi?” Kuku asks. She presses down on the brake and puts the car in reverse, as she has seen her father do many times before. “Are you wearing perfume?”

  “This is not Shashi.”

  “Linno? Are you crazy? Are you licensed?”

  Though Linno has never driven a car on open roads, she doesn’t plan to go very far. Letting up on the brake, she reverses about a foot, until she hears a faint and satisfying pop. She then puts the car in park once again.

  “Stop the car!” Kuku yells, his hands gripping the door handle.

  “We are stopped.”

  “Then get out of it!”

  Linno obeys. She gets out of the car. On her knees, she fishes out the bag of crushed Tupperware and rasmalai, and circles the car to Kuku’s side just as Shashi is hurrying back across the street. She tosses the bag into Kuku’s lap. “Jincy is too generous with her Tupperwares,” she says.

  “Linno? Linno!” Kuku leans out the open window. Walking away, she can still hear him barking into the night. “You listen to me, Linno! I am trying to be discreet but I had to ask! Just because something is genetic does not make it right!”

  A RUMOR WILL METASTASIZE if one lets it. Linno decides that the quickest way to remedy this one is to never mention it again, not to Alice, who may have heard by way of Kuku, and especially not to Melvin and Ammachi. It pains her to think that Abraham Saar is privy to knowledge that her own father does not possess. Now the mere thought of Abraham Saar fills her with discomfort, and she feels ashamed, made naked by what he knows.

  Alice comes to work the next day and the next without any change in her behavior, so Linno assumes that Kuku was satisfied with his investigation, if not with the mangled Tupperware. Linno will ignore what was said, and in doing so, the mother she knew will remain intact. Dead people should be treated as sculptures, dusted on occasion but never shifted too drastically, and life has made Linno particularly skilled at this, at turning her back on what should be left alone. As a child, it was Anju who tried to make Linno look at the feathery smudge of a tire-flattened bird or the pat of cow dung in the shape, she insisted, of Sri Lanka. Unless tricked, Linno never looked.

  But she cannot help but consider the kind of woman who would love another in that way. She once saw a pair of white tourists in town, a girl holding hands with a boy who, upon closer inspection, had breasts! Not flaccid man-breasts but those born exclusively of estrogen! The “boy” had mastered boyishness in the shuffle of her walk, the careless haircut with cowlick, the khakis shapeless and rumpled. It is too far a jump between these features and Linno’s mother, who frowned upon ladies with short haircuts. When their neighbor in Bombay cut her hair into a bob, Gracie took to calling her Mrs. Mushroom. “All cap, no face,” she said.

  Occasionally, the phrase comes streaking through Linno’s mind, raucous and taunting, throwing up its skirts at her while she goes about the most banal of tasks. Brushing her teeth—an affair with another woman!—or calling Duniya, Inc.—an affair with another woman! What is most disturbing is not the thought of her mother masquerading with cowlick and khakis, but the chance that she might have harbored a love that had nothing to do with Linno and Anju and Melvin, a love that scaled uncertain heights, that ran upstream, along its own dangerous course, a love that Linno will never understand. However much she might want to, she cannot defend a mother she barely knew.

  When such thoughts creep up on her, Linno closes her eyes and grits her teeth, thinks: I. Will. Not. Look.

  LINNO ARRIVES at the shop to find the Me & You article laminated and posted in the front window. She stands before it, trying to reconcile the face before her with the one she had assumed was hers all along. In the picture, sunlight falls softly across her left side, and her eyes seem larger than usual, captivating and flecked with light. For the first time ever, when looking at her own picture, her gaze does not go directly to her knotted wrist.

  Linno notices that Alice clipped only the part of the article that praised her invitations, leaving out Linno’s answer to the question of whether or not she planned to visit the States.

  “I am wanting to,” Linno said. “My sister, she is there. She is liking it so much that she did not call me in too long. I very much wish to see her.”

  According to the date on the article, the picture ran last week. Linno wonders what Anju thinks of it, whether Linno’s voice and face might jolt her into action or cause her to withdraw further from them. Or maybe this picture will lead nowhere at all.

  “So?” Alice says, emerging from the shop. She is beaming. “Pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “We shouldn’t hang it here.”

  “Why not?”

  “It will send the wrong idea. That I am vain. Or dead.”

  “You should be vain!” Alice says. “If I had a picture like this, I’d turn it into a full-size poster.”

  Linno follows Alice into the shop, inhales the comfort of percolating coffee. Bhanu is on the phone with a customer, and Prince is seated before the computer, driving the mouse in circles.

  “Doesn’t Linno look good in the picture, Prince? Bhanu?”

  Bhanu nods emphatically while listing the different shades of white. Prince, who cannot be bothered with anything outside the screen, offers efficient English: “Very gorgeous.”

  Linno pours herself a mug of coffee. “I suppose I don’t know what makes a woman beautiful. I don’t look at women that way.”

  “What way?” Alice asks.

  “In a way that notices a woman’s beauty.”

  Blowing on her coffee, Alice winks. Linno wishes she hadn’t. “Lucky for you, maybe someone at Duniya does look at women that way.”

  It takes a moment for Linno to make sense of Alice’s statement. Duniya. Linno nearly spills her coffee as Alice sits her before the computer and clicks on the message awaiting her.

  From: neha@duniya.com

  To: linno@eastwestinvites.com

  Subject: Re: I WOULD LIKE TO BE SPONSORED FOR VISA

  Dear Ms. Vallara,

  Greetings. I am the president of Duniya, Inc. We greatly apologize for our delayed response, but we receive hundreds (!!!) of emails with similar subject lines, as you can imagine. Yesterday, luckily, our intern brought your email to our attention, as well as an AMAZING and moving piece about you in Me & You magazine. Not only this, but we have visited your website and find it to be one of the finest displays that we’ve seen. We literally cooed over your creations! Your work and your life story are truly truly INSPIRING, and we would be thrilled to have you lead a seminar on wedding invitation trends during our June Exposition.

  We can speak more via phone, once you know the details of what kind of booth and seminar you would like to put together. I am sure we can provide you with whatever support materials you need for your visa application, after you send us a check for $1000 made out to Duniya, Inc.

  I look forward to speaking with you.

  All the best,

  Neha Misra

  President

  Duniya, Inc.

  Bhanu looks over at the commo
tion with a puzzled face, never breaking his on-phone presentation voice (“Yes ma’am, most people prefer gold leafing on the eggshell …”), all the while wondering why Alice and Linno are jumping up and down like little girls.

  IV.

  TRUE NORTH

  1.

  ITAL TO ANJU’S INVOLVEMENT in the film is an imperfect equation that she has formulated over the course of Rohit’s rambling pleas:

  Anju + documentary film = immigration lawyer = green card = Anju’s rise from illegality and failuredom

  He has promised these things, in so many words, over pastries and buttery, creamer-tainted coffee. Most of his credibility comes not from his own appearance, especially not with that coppery smear of a beard, but lies instead with his silent partner—the camera.

  It is sleek yet hefty, a James Bond among cameras with the stylish plume of its microphone and its dark, seductive lens. Without the camera, Rohit is just a boy with idle hands in the pockets of his Dolce jeans, for whom the world holds neither consequence nor challenge.

  On one occasion, Rohit reluctantly eases the camera into Anju’s hands, hovering about as though she is an ogre handling an infant. She slips her fingers under the strap, as she has seen him do for the past two weeks, and weighs its expensive, humming power in her palm. She puts her eye to the viewfinder, expecting spectral visions, slightly dismayed by the black and white of it all. At the end of a branch, she sees a lone leaf twirling against the wind. The control is exhilarating, the power to record the last moment of this leaf, to potentially capture the seething essence of nature. Gently, she nudges the zoom button, as she has noticed Rohit doing whenever he thinks she is saying something of import, usually about her family. This happened the other day, when he asked her to call Linno on his phone card, while he filmed.

  At first, shifting her feet before the pay phone, she resisted. Rohit peeked from behind his camera when she hung up the phone, her quarter and dime jangling into the coin return niche. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “Don’t you think they want to hear from you?”

  She had no doubt they wanted to hear from her. But after that first blissful greeting, the inevitable questions would come tumbling: What has she done? Why has she done it? How will they survive this disgrace? If she calls, they will arrange to bring her home, and she will be as much a child as when she left. Each day she does not speak to her family serves to harden her resolve. “I will not call until I have good news,” she said. “Until you get me the immigration lawyer.”

  “I told you, I’m in touch with an attorney. With a couple, in fact.” But as usual, Rohit gave no specifics on the subject, preferring instead to swaddle her in vague encouragement. “I know times seem tough right now, but the thing is, you have to start from zero for the audience to care about your problems. So in the end, when everything works out, the audience will totally love you and be on your side. It’s called the dramatic arc, see what I’m saying? Now.” He put his eye to the camera. “Go ahead.”

  It was comforting to think that Rohit had made himself the dramatic architect of her life, that he felt so zealously optimistic about the future. But as she put her fingertips to the depressions of the silver keys, she could not dial. She did not speak, but by Rohit’s silence, she could sense that he was slowly pushing the zoom button, closing in on her.

  At the time, she did not understand why he so loved the combination of silence and slow zoom, but now, as she pushes closer to the leaf and its frantic dance, she understands the heightening of emotion when coming closer and closer in the attempt to comprehend, to find significance, to see something of one’s self in the leaf.

  ON THEIR SUNDAY OFF, Anju and Bird go for a walk in Central Park, which, when they arrive, seems as bad an idea as Anju initially suspected. Ever since her first meeting with Rohit, she has harbored the disquieting feeling that gazes are trained upon her wherever she goes, pairs of dark, alarming eyes beneath wide-brimmed fedoras. It does not help that the fedora seems to be in style, as she has seen two different preteens wearing them on the 3 train. No doubt some detective movie has fed this theory, but she has the illicit sense of being Wanted, and not in the tragic way of children’s faces on milk cartons. The INS has her under surveillance, watching her from parked sedans, teasing her with this limited semblance of freedom. She wonders if there is something foreign about her gait.

  But Central Park, she must admit, is fantastically groomed and beautiful. All around are the trillings and cawings of wildlife, though rarely seeing any insects and birds gives the feeling of walking through some sort of nature-themed park, the noises emitted by carefully hidden radios. They walk into a place called Sheep Meadow. Bird sits and Anju lies on her stomach, watching the white people play their games of catch and kites, backed by a deep green border of trees and, beyond this, a bevy of handsome buildings against a fading sky. From Anju’s vantage point, the meadow is so broad, so subtle in its changes of velvety green that the land seems to curve with the earth. There is a beauty here of which she will never be part, but this is the pleasant melancholy of witnessing anything beautiful, the wish to enter and become it.

  “Relax,” Bird says, offering her an open bag of salted almonds. “No one is looking at you.” No one except for a disturbingly fearless squirrel. It stares with hostile eyes even after Bird shoos it away, as if biding its time.

  “So what did you do yesterday?” Bird asks. “On your day off?”

  Anju delays, picking almond skin from between her teeth. She has been trying to keep Rohit a secret from Bird, at least for the time being, as she is sure that Bird will disapprove of the film idea. Bird hates movie people, finds them untrustworthy, making the blind assumption that Anju trusts Bird enough to believe in her judgment. But ever since Anju discovered her illegal status, she finds herself sharing more silence than secrets with Bird, perceiving that autonomy and adulthood require a measure of distance. Still, the silence feels wrong.

  “I tried to call my family yesterday,” Anju says.

  Bird stops chewing. “You reached them?”

  “No one was home.”

  For a time, they watch the disks flung through the air, the flight of a rainbow-colored kite on a string, an animated tableau of comets and planets against a field of blue.

  “You never told me about your mother,” Bird says. “How did she die?”

  “My mother?”

  Bird nods.

  “She drowned in the sea.” Speaking of her mother’s death, after all these silent years, feels more strange than sad. “I don’t remember my mother. My older sister does, but she never speaks of these things. My sister was there when she died.”

  Bird squints at her as if from a distance, absently plucking a few blades of grass. “Did your sister ever tell you about that day?”

  Anju had tried to coax the subject from her sister on one or two occasions, long ago, and she had watched Linno’s expression cloud over, stowing her memories in some sealed mental space. A familiar image returns to Anju’s mind, formed in part from Ammachi’s description and her own imagination: a rigid little Linno, the way she was found that day, with dirty feet and eyes that would not blink. “All we know is that she drowned herself.”

  Here, Bird stops plucking. “What do you mean, drowned herself?”

  “It was a suicide.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everyone knows.”

  “And a thousand years ago, everyone knew the world was flat.” Bird brushes the crumbs from her skirt, somewhat forcefully. “Everyone knows only what they are told. Easy that way.”

  In the gauzy blue of dusk, the signs and windows of the buildings have suddenly, without notice, turned luminous at once. A neon sign reading ESSEX HOUSE glows red. Anju wonders how long she should wait before changing the subject.

  “And she loved you and Linno,” Bird says softly.

  “Maybe she did, maybe she did not.”

  “But I’m sure she did—”

  “Not enough. No
t enough to stay.”

  Careful with Anju’s anger, Bird remains quiet.

  “How did you know my sister’s name is Linno?” Anju asks.

  Bird looks up. “You said so.”

  “I did?”

  “Many, many times. Linno this, Linno that …”

  But always Anju has tried to do just the opposite, attempting to keep her family at arm’s length from everyone else.

  “Of course, I don’t know how your mother felt, do I? Who knows another person’s mind? I’m sorry. Just it is hard to believe …” Bird removes a handkerchief from her pocket and blows her nose, which clearly does not need blowing. And then, in a belated attempt at providing comfort: “Very sad, your mother’s story. Very, very sad.”

  INTERVIEW. One of Rohit’s more intimidating terms. When he says that he wants to interview her, she thinks of a bare, white room, her hands fidgeting under a spindly table, the camera in the corner like a cop. She thinks of a confession.

  According to Rohit’s instructions, she goes to his Ex’s apartment for the interview, wearing a blue shirt rather than her best blouse and skirt, whose floral pattern Rohit has deemed “too busy.” His Ex resides in Little Italy, between streets whose titles sound like jams, Mott and Mulberry, near a butcher shop that seems ill at ease among its svelte young passersby. Signs announce its presence in the windows: THIS BUTCHER SHOP WAS IN MARTIN SCORSESE’S 1ST FEATURE FILM, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR? AND IS THE LAST REMAINING “OLD TIME” FAMILY BUTCHER SHOP IN LITTLE ITALY. BEST VEAL, MEATS, AND POULTRY, CHOICE BEEF. Anju enters a neighboring brick building and climbs four flights of misshapen stairs, seemingly molded by generations of heavy-footed people. By the time she arrives at the door, she finds that the Ex has left.