by Tania James
“Where is your Ex?” Anju asks. “She is living here, no?”
“Yeah, yeah, she just wanted to give us some privacy,” Rohit says. He nervously scribbles something in his black Moleskine notebook, the same kind, he once told her, that Hemingway carried. She did not think it appropriate to ask who Hemingway was. “This interview is going to be pretty personal, and it’s important that you’re totally comfortable.”
Anju surveys the large studio apartment, a bed coyly hidden behind a great span of bookshelves where the books have been arranged according to the color of their spines, a spectrum of literature. It is the only orderly thing about this habitat. A cereal bowl sits on the coffee table, a green flake petrified to the bottom. A small, unplugged television faces a wall, as if being punished for its ineptitude, and on top of this, a tall burgundy boot with a lethal heel.
Rohit has uncluttered an island of space for the interview. Anju sits at a round table by the window, whose shade Rohit keeps opening and closing, deeply bothered by the view of the fire escape. He puts an ashtray full of pennies on the tabletop, then takes away the ashtray and replaces it with a fat vanilla candle. Stepping back, he stares at the candle meaningfully, chin in hand.
“All right.” He stands by his camera, which he has set up on a tripod. “I think we’re ready. Don’t look directly into the camera, okay? Just meet my eyes, like we’re having a conversation.”
Throughout the shoot, his eyes dart up and down between his camera and her gaze, and she senses that his mind is thusly divided, his interest in her words only partial. He nods emphatically, even when she has said nothing of import. He seems to hope that his nodding will inspire her to offer up some precocious gem of wisdom, some well-phrased message that deserves to be hugged by quotation marks in his Moleskine book. Part of her worries about the state of her hair, which she forgot to check before taping began, but maybe mussed-up hair is appropriate for the Starting-from-Zero look.
Q: What did you hope to accomplish by coming to the States?
A: My family is not a poor poor family, but we were having bad luck, and I thought I will change our luck by coming to U.S. I was having high marks in school and my teachers were saying I will do great things, so I was believing this too. And then when you believe something should happen, you will make it happen, whichever way. Even if the way is maybe little bit crooked, still it is going in up direction. Like that fire escape.
Q: Well, fire escapes go up or down. But okay, so speaking of downward spirals, are you referring to your sister and the scholarship?
A: Yes.
Q: Are you sorry about that?
A: Of course I am sorry. I went from number one in my class to pulling hairs in a beauty salon.
Q: Can you say “I am sorry for faking my scholarship application”? It’ll just make more sense in the editing.
A: I am sorry for faking the scholarship application.
Q: If you could go back, would you not do what you did?
A: Now you are trying to make me be little.
Q. What?
A. You are being belittling to me.
Q: I’m sorry, I take it back, then. Why don’t you tell me about your sister?
A: Linno. My sister’s name is Linno. She is older to me by four years. She had an accident when she was small from playing with this mala padakkam, how do you say … fireworks. The doctor took away her hand. Cut it off, I mean.
Q: That must have been a traumatic experience.
A: What is the meaning?
Q: Traumatic, like when you’re traumatized by something. It haunts you. It messes with your head, makes you upset or angry or sad.
A: I don’t know. We do not talk on these things. After the accident, Linno always was cutting her sleeve to tie her wrist, so that no one will see it. One time—I was younger then—I cut the sleeve of my best Christmas dress and tied mine also. I remember Linno saw me walk around like this and she was very traumatize with me. She ran into the bedroom. My grandmother thought I was making fun at Linno—I was not—but she beat me for that and for cutting my dress. My grandmother, she shorted the sleeves. Still it did not look right.
Q: Hmmm … (nodding)
A: There is no more to that story.
By the end, the interview has whetted Rohit’s appetite. He badgers Anju to let him film Bird as well. “We need some interaction with your roommate. With Bird, I mean. Don’t you think she’s a key figure in your story?”
“Key to what?”
“No, I mean that she’s important. She’s the one who took you down that road with Tandon in the first place. And now she’s become your benefactor, in a way.”
“She does not like movie people,” Anju warns.
“Trust me, I’ve heard it all. I’m in documentary. We’re the least loved of the bunch.”
Rohit pushes eject on the camera. With a tiny growl of gears, a panel on the camera’s side juts open and offers up the tape. Rohit writes on a sticky label—ANJU FILM INTERVIEW 1—which he presses to the tape with pride.
“My mom would love to get her hands on this footage,” he says. “To be honest, I kind of got the idea for this film from her.”
“Mrs. Solanki?”
“She was trying to get this episode together for her crapass show Four Corners. She even called your sister about it, I think.”
Anju’s breath catches in her throat. “Linno, she called Linno? What did Linno say?”
“I don’t know. The idea tanked, I think.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, Anju wriggles her fingers into Bird’s waterproof gloves, which are as large as oven mitts. “I did not know your mother is making documentary film also.”
Rohit throws off a dismissive laugh, almost a snort. “If what she does is documentary, then I’m Errol-fucking-Morris. She does talk show segments, you know? They’re, like, short and packaged and slick, like MTV. There’s no real depth, no complexity to what she does.”
Anju nods. Whenever he speaks of his film aesthetic, she feels comforted by his confidence, his panache, cut to this and fade to that. She also feels a vague pity for him. Piece by piece, he nestles the camera parts into the cushioned niches of the bag while she watches him in silence, thinking how safe and sad it is to put the bulk of one’s love in an inanimate thing.
FOR THE SAKE OF THE FILM, Anju allows Rohit to come over to the apartment and speak to Bird when she arrives home from work. Anju forbids him from turning on the camera until Bird agrees to being filmed, a rule that Anju will not allow him to bend, out of loyalty to Bird.
Anju perches nervously on the couch while Rohit moves the blue vase from the coffee table to a side table and turns on all the lamps he possibly can. He is appalled by the darkness, baffled by the fact that Anju and Bird could survive here in this cave they call home. His own is as ruthlessly bright as a hotel, but since arriving here, Anju has come to prefer the forgiveness of shadows. She thinks of her bedroom back home and its single window as familiar to her as a member of the family. How well she knows its view, its moods, as when the light comes hard and glinting through the bars or lugubriously blue, and shadows travel across the room, marking the passage of hours.
The front door opens. Anju sits up straight, though what she was planning to say—I’ve been meaning to tell you … I believe this is the best way to …—flies out of her head along with her courage.
In steps Gwen, flushed from the cold. She pulls off her lime green galoshes before noticing Rohit and the video camera on the coffee table. “Oh hey. What’s going on?”
“I’m Rohit.” He raises his hand in a swift hello as he goes for his camera.
“We said no camera,” Anju says sharply.
“No, no, it’s cool,” Gwen says. The tip of her nose is charmingly ruddy. “Is this for a project or something?”
“I make documentaries. Actually, I’m making one about Anju here.”
“Oh yeah?” Gwen pulls the elastic from her ponytail and fluffs her hair. “Very cool. Did you do some
thing special, Anju? Something I don’t know about?”
“She’s done a lot.” Pointing the camera at Gwen, Rohit presses the record button.
Usually, when Gwen enters a room, Anju withdraws to her own so as to minimize conversation. She is fairly sure that Gwen thinks that she knows very little English, a comforting assumption that allows Anju to continue on her silent orbit within the apartment, without the collision of a conversation. But she does think it strange that the shampoos and creams of virtual strangers should occupy such intimate positions in the bathroom. Anju uses Bird’s efficient and unlabeled bottle of shampoo plus conditioner. Gwen’s shampoo is called Pure Blonde, a golden bottle whose fliptop is always open, like a taunting tongue. Once, on impulse, Anju used the Pure Blonde on an inner lock of her hair, but it did nothing to “release the golden tone and caramel essence of each strand.”
Gwen is saying something about Truffaut’s auteur theory and the caméra-stylo, to which Rohit is murmuring, mhm, mhm. Holding the camera to his eye, he asks, “So do you know Anju’s story?”
“Does who know Anju’s story?” Bird asks from the doorway, both arms saddled with grocery bags. She steps past Gwen and into the living room, but Rohit keeps the camera rolling. “Who are you? Why are you filming in my house?”
“This is Rohit,” Gwen says brightly. “He’s making a documentary about Anju.”
Bird stares at Anju, brow furrowed, the bags still in her hands, which are ashy from the cold. Anju elbows Rohit, and he lowers the camera.
“Since when?” Bird asks in Malayalam. “We didn’t discuss this.”
Silence follows, during which time Rohit turns off his camera and puts it on the couch. He picks up the blue vase with both hands, as if it has suddenly gained in value, and sets it in its original place on the coffee table.
Gwen backs into her room, her brightness diminishing with each step. “I’m gonna hop in the shower.”
IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE to Anju that Bird is uninterested in befriending Rohit. Neither is Anju all that offended, on Rohit’s behalf, that the only “interaction” he witnessed was Bird pointing at the door and asking him to leave. In fact, he seemed prepared to leave yet confident that he would return, adding: “I’ll let you both talk this out.”
Now Anju watches Bird preparing dinner, wondering how to talk things out when all of Bird’s words form incredulous questions. “You want to let this boy follow you around with a camera?” Bird breaks a fistful of yellow twigs over a pot of boiling water. “You are an illegal. How much attention do you want?”
“He says that attention is good, when directed the right way. Attention can help.”
Bird goes back and forth between the fridge and the stove, muttering, “Salt, salt.” She pulls a clear jar of salt from a high cupboard. “So you trust him.”
“Yes.” And she does. Trying to mimic his magnetic sense of urgency, she translates his words into Malayalam. “Because my best interest is in his best interest. He wants the same ending that I do—citizenship in the States. He promised to get me the best lawyer because his parents know many powerful people.”
“What about your father? Maybe we should get his opinion.”
“But in the meantime, I will keep filming with Rohit. If my father says no, I will stop.”
Bird opens the jar and spoons a heap of salt over the twigs, which have softened and curled into a wreath of noodles. “Why do you need this Rohit? I told you I would help you.”
Anju chooses her words carefully. Over the past two weeks, Bird has grown strangely sensitive, hurt when Anju did not want to watch The Price Is Right with her, irritated when she learned that Anju’s clothes were still in her duffel bag rather than folded in the dresser.
“I want to move forward,” Anju says. “All this time I feel I’ve been walking in one place.”
“You think I am holding you back?”
Anju says nothing.
Bird busies herself in hurt silence while Anju slowly closes the lid on the salt jar. She spots an ant burrowing a tunnel through the white sand, not far from its colleague working an inch below. Her mind falls through the past months, to Linno and Tang in sweaty steel cups.
“This is sugar!” Anju says, holding up the jar.
Bird sips from the wooden spoon. “Oh shit hell dammit!”
Anju stares at Bird, stunned by her unlikely string of curse words.
Bird snaps off the stove, nearly taking the dial with her. In one motion, she pours the noodles into a colander, steam drifting off the hot, sweet mess.
AT NIGHT, Bird lies on her sliver of bed, listening to the fuzzy drone of Anju’s snore. Bird hadn’t noticed, but earlier in the evening it had rained, leaving the windows gemmed with droplets that redden each time a car’s headlights go streaming past. Bird had imagined this day turning out much differently, with spaghetti marinara that she would make from a recipe out of Good Housekeeping magazine, quickly perused but not purchased under the disapproving eye of a magazine vendor.
And to come home to this—to a camera in her face. To hear that Anju has been cooking up some disastrous Make-Me-Famous recipe, fed to her by a boy claiming to be a filmmaker. Could they possibly be in love? No, Anju is more discerning. Bird remembers him from his visit to Tandon’s office. There was something untrustworthy about him, about the way he barreled into a place with his camera, the way he seemed to be examining you through a lens even when he wasn’t. Why doesn’t Anju listen to her elders, or in this case, her elder? And why did she take so long to unpack her bags, waiting until Bird simply hung up her clothes for her?
It is almost as though Anju feels no real attachment to Bird.
The thought of this is a weight upon Bird’s chest. Feeling queasy, she rolls onto her side, facing Anju, whose lashes are fluttering between dreams. Merely looking at the girl makes Bird wish for so much more than what she has, makes her think, This is the closest I have come to home. A thin wind escapes from Anju’s mouth, which in sleep belongs to her mother and during the day belongs to someone else. Anju looks nothing like the baby in the photograph that Gracie sent so long ago, of chubby Linno seated on an upturned crate, Anju in her arms like a surprised sack of flour. Maybe Bird could tell Anju that she and Gracie were acquaintances. Friends of friends. She could paint over the past in a clean dull white, but the loss of that landscape, carefully preserved all these years, would erase her as well.
HAD BIRD RECOGNIZED her last day with Gracie when it came, she would have devised something better to do than sit in the dressing room. It was the opening night of their Kottayam performance, which had taken place outdoors, on the Thirunakkara Maidan, with the statue of Gandhi looking on from the north and two pale minarets in view from the east. All had gone well, it seemed. Gracie had tempered her lines, and rain had not swept away the show at intermission, as it had in Thiruvananthapuram. But while the others had gone off to celebrate, Bird preferred to take her time as she sat before the mirror and removed her makeup. Gracie perched on the ledge of the dressing room table and spoke of a man in the audience who had liked her ruby red hat. “Strange fellow. Something sweet about him, but definitely not his nose. His sneeze could topple a small child.”
“You went into the audience?” Bird said. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not? My part was finished, and I wanted to see you up there.”
“Because there should be some space between us and them, some mystery. People can only believe from a distance.”
With a damp towel, Bird stroked the makeup from her cheeks, the coats of pink and peach, until her face was marbled with flesh tones. On the counter were the compacts from which the colors came, slender brushes resting neatly beside them, and a steel bowl of water.
Gracie sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway, whether his nose is big or not. He is not the one I’m marrying.”
Bird’s hand stopped mid-stroke. “Your family made a match?”
“Six months from now I will be a married woman.”
&n
bsp; Slowly, Bird dipped her rag into the steel bowl. She steadied her voice. “I thought it was a year.”
“My father found me someone sooner.” His name was Abraham, she said. A dignified name, such that belonged to the sort of man who would raise an army of sons. “My father says it is dangerous for a girl to be alone for too long. She might start to like it. And my mother says, ‘Always pluck a bud before it fully flowers.’”
Bird looked at the girl before her, nineteen years old, eager and angry, bright but unsure. The ceiling light skimmed the outline of Gracie’s hair; seated beneath her, Bird felt herself within some fleeting shade. “I’ve always thought,” Bird said, simply to fill the silence, “that a flower is best on its second or third day of blooming.”
Gracie nodded; Bird could not read her thoughts. Turning to the mirror, Gracie dipped the end of a clean rag into the bowl and drew the rag across her eyelid. The kohl was smudged but still there.
“Not like that.” Bird unscrewed the lid from a jar of Vaseline and dabbed some onto a clean rag. She stood up and steadied Gracie’s chin with one hand while wiping her eyelid with the other. The kohl came away in thick streaks of bruisy black until finally her eyelid was slick and shiny, her lashes like thorns. Gracie kept both eyes closed as Bird stroked the rag across the other eye, now more slowly, gently, taking the time to contemplate the features that she might not see in another six months, down to the finest detail, to the pink tendril of a vein on across an eyelid. This was the face that Abraham’s hands would hold and study for years as age carved its way around the scant freckles, the mouth. Bird removed the rag, but she did not remove her hand from Gracie’s chin. The muscles in Gracie’s throat shifted up and down. With her eyes still closed, she reached for Bird. She laid her head on Bird’s shoulder, and Bird, too, closed her eyes.
