ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Thankfully, they are now inside the building, in the prescreening line. Outside, Linno and Melvin waited along with fifty or sixty others, some of whom seemed to have no appointment at all. A man was strolling up and down the line, muttering in Hindi, beyond the lazy ear of the security guard: “You’ll never get an interview at this rate. My agency can book a slot within three days, no problem. You can even book several dates in case you get rejected today.” He had a lumpen cauliflower of a nose and eyes that never lingered on one focus for long, always darting to the street. These features made him a dubious ally, but still he continued down the block, casually sowing pessimism. “Three thousand rupees for an appointment within two days. See me at the photocopy shop next door.”

  Most preferred the sweat that came from standing in the heat to the sweat that came from taking a risk. Sighing, wilting, they turned their faces forward. But there were those toward the end who looked at the consulate building, then at the cauliflower man, at the building, at the man. With a shrug, the second to last in line hurried down the street while everyone stared after him, unsure whether to feel envy or pity.

  WHILE IN THE PRESCREENING LINE, Linno overhears the man in front of her telling his neighbor that this is his second time at the consulate. He works for Dell, Inc., in Hyderabad, and is applying for the H-iB visa to take him to the States as a skilled professional. Last time he failed, but this time he will succeed since he took the trouble of visiting the Visa God of Hyderabad.

  According to the man, the Visa God was Lord Balaji, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Happiness, prosperity, and fertility were Lord Balaji’s previous causes, which attracted only a few visitors a week to the Chilkur Balaji Temple. Several years ago, the temple priest decided that Lord Balaji deserved more attention, so the priest decided to broaden the god’s interests by dubbing Him the Visa God.

  In droves, they came. A hundred thousand worshippers per week. The religious and nonreligious. The young and the old. According to the priest’s directions, they walked eleven laps around the temple, and when closing hour came, the worshippers jogged. In Hyderabad, in the midst of the newly sprouted offices of Dell and Microsoft and General Electric, even the deities had to keep pace with the local need.

  “This irrational country,” said the other man, shaking his head. “More fodder for foreign people to make fun.”

  The man shook his head and argued in a low, fervent voice. “No, we are not the irrational ones. This process is irrational. U.S. receives thousands of visa applications in a single hour. They give out visas like miracles. You may get it, I may not. With so many applicants, how can they use logic? There is no logic. Totally random. And where there is randomness, there is room for religion.”

  Unfortunately, it seems, the man will have to create even more room for Lord Balaji. He is dismissed from the prescreening line because his identification photos are not of an appropriate size. Linno feels a pang for the person whose movements she mimicked in the security line, where the guards patted them down and thumbed through their folders for electronic devices. The officer directs him to the nearby market where a new photo can be taken. When the man turns, Linno glimpses his face, sallow and sedate, like a zoo animal tired of shrieking against the bars of his cage.

  BY THE TIME Linno reaches the personal interview line, it is three hours past her scheduled appointment. One after another, the hopefuls go to one window to give their fingerprints, then to another window to meet their decisions, good and bad. It seems that there are many rejections, which usually require more time as those applicants try to make sense of their fate. One of the more desperate rejects crouches so as to speak into the small microphone in front of the glass partition, rendering him a wretched hunchback. But everyone is courteous with the official administering the news so as not to upset him, low though he might be on the totem pole. Those who fail today will likely try again, and who can afford an enemy behind the glass?

  Rumors have been traveling down the line, most of them worrisome. It is said that the interview officers obey their own individual strands of logic, some just, some cruel, some mathematical, like the one who accepts only every fifth applicant that stands before him. One of the officers is a China, and of course everyone knows what Chinas think of Indians. But maybe he is a Japan? A Japan would be better. Japans hate Chinas, don’t they? So by extension, a Japan might like an Indian.

  At last, for better or worse, Linno finds herself face-to-face with the China/Japan. “Hello,” he says with an American accent.

  “Good morning.” It is long past morning, but she is reluctant to stray from her rehearsed greeting.

  He is young, but to Linno’s mind, all Asians look five years younger than they are. She once met a newlywed Chinese woman in the waiting room of a beauty salon, where her Malayali mother-in-law had brought her. Unabashed, the Chinese woman stuttered a few garbled sentences of Malayalam to Linno, which could have meant either It is difficult for me or I want to sing. To which the mother-in-law gave a silvery laugh of pride. As soon as the Chinese woman disappeared into the back, the smile on her mother-in-law’s face fell away. To Linno, she said: “I sent my son to Hong Kong for studies. You see what he brought back? Kando?”

  Linno hopes that her interviewer looks more favorably upon her than the mother-in-law upon her Chinese daughter. He takes her folder and thumbs through her papers. “Why do you want to go to the United States?” he asks.

  She answers with automated ease. “I wish to represent my company, East West Invites, at a wedding convention sponsored by American company called Duniya, Incorporated. Duniya has history of bringing foreign businesspeople for their convention.” As she continues to answer questions about her employment, all these words mean little more to her now than I am sophisticated, I am worthy, I am sophisticated, I am worthy. She attempts the posture of a politician’s wife, shoulders held back, dignified yet modest. She recalls one of the suggestions on an immigration website that Prince found for her: “Dress up nicely and keep smiling! Give a good impression of the Indian people!”

  “How long have you been working for this company?” he asks.

  “Six months.”

  “That’s not very long. What if you find a better job in the United States?”

  “I will be staying here itself. I am head designer of East West Invites.”

  Across the counter, she passes a letter of financial support from Alice and a letter from Duniya, Inc. Along with these, two salary slips and a bank statement recently inflated by a loan from Jilu Auntie. The interviewer breezes through the papers and turns to his computer. He types for a moment, then stares at the screen, his chin in his hand.

  “Do you have any family in the States?” he asks finally.

  Her throat tightens. “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “My younger sister, Anju. She is there on student visa.”

  He is nodding slowly, still looking at the screen. She feels a small hatred for the computer and its potential to tattle on her circumstances. What does it know? Is the screen telling him all the things that she has not?

  Taking a breath and maintaining her smile, she plunges into her closing argument. “As you can see from the evidence, I show a desire to abandon U.S. I have strong family ties, work responsibility, and permanent residence in my home country …” Her voice fades as she tries to remember what comes next, but the interviewer steps in.

  “I’m sorry, but we cannot make a decision at this time. This application is pending investigation.”

  His decree is as a pin to a balloon. She stares at him for a moment before realizing that her smile is no longer necessary.

  “You’ll have to keep checking in for the status of your application,” the officer continues. He is apologetic, to a degree.

  “What they are investigating?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “I can’t really say.”

  His face is an impenetrable mask reserved for the hundreds of Indians that press their questions
against the glass each day, searching for any place to hang a hope on that mercilessly smooth pane.

  Does he know about Anju? Does he think Linno will not abandon the States? She wants to shout, bang against the glass. Except for her, no one wants to abandon the States! Look at the man in the next booth, dancing his way out of the room with “yes” all over his face. Look at the couple clutching their file folders, both retired, both miraculously walking out of here with a ten-year visitor visa so as to end their days in their son’s Florida condo. Who among them does not want to nest in the U.S.? What game is this of smoke and mirrors? She is the only one with an exit strategy in mind, the only one who does not want to stay.

  Her eyes go to the clock behind him, and it seems, for a moment, that she can hear every tick of the second hand. “If they reject me, how long until I can again apply?”

  “As soon as you want.” The official peers around her to see how many others are in the waiting room. “But you’ll have to make another appointment.”

  4.

  ONSOLATION DOES NOT COME EASILY to Melvin. He never knew how to touch his wife on those days when he came home from work to find her biting her fingernails or lost in her tea. When she fell into such moods, he employed an isolationist strategy of keeping to his own quarters, which was difficult in a two-room flat peopled by three females of varying sizes and tempers. He sensed that he was to blame. Wasn’t he always? Even when her complaint was lodged against a neighbor (someone stealing her underskirt from the laundry line, for example), Melvin sensed his complicity. In America, there were no laundry lines! There were water machines and underskirts galore! Oh, he knew his wife, he did, enough to carry on the whole fight in his head, taking the liberty to add a reconciliatory love scene at the end, though not a word had passed between them.

  And now, by instinct, he avoids Linno as well. They arrived home that morning, rumpled and ill-rested from another overnight train, and she immediately went to her room, refusing breakfast. Ammachi hovered at the edge of the bed, Linno’s cup of chai going cool in her hands.

  Melvin roams the perimeter of the house, puffing on the last bidi in his pack. In Chennai, he had waited by the gate rather happily, having felt no gastric hint of ill fortune to come. He bought a roasted ear of corn, rubbed with lime and spices, and nibbled on this while eyeing the other applicants with pity. He peeled a mango and shared it with an old man who was anxiously waiting for his wife to emerge with a visitor’s visa which would allow her to visit their pregnant daughter in Chicago. The old man was so nervous he could eat only a few bites, no matter how much Melvin encouraged him. When the man’s wife emerged weepy and empty-handed, Melvin was ashamed of his own small pang of hope, that a “no” for this wife meant a “yes” for Linno. Guiltily, he gave the old man his only other mango before the couple made their way home.

  But as soon as Linno emerged from the consulate building and found Melvin at the gate, he felt something crumple in his chest. His stomach had betrayed him. Pending investigation … “About Anju?” Linno asked him. “Did someone tell them? No one even knew we had applied.”

  Were Melvin in a lucid state of mind, he would acknowledge that there might be several ways that a visa officer would be informed. He might conjecture that the investigation could have nothing to do with Anju at all, but rather a glitch in a system so overworked that at times its decisions rank among acts of God. But at the moment, he has only blind, fatherly vengeance on his side, and as soon as he hazards a guess, his body fills with a furious eureka, as close to a holy experience as he has had in years. For the first time, he knows where he is going, what he will say and how loud. Isn’t this the P. C. Mappilla in his blood, the ore of resolution? It was the absence of God that made Mappilla’s faith so unbreakable, the vacuum that enabled preachers to bellow on God’s behalf about what was godly and what was not. Melvin’s faith is just as firm in this way, thriving on Anju’s absence.

  Melvin quashes his bidi underfoot and walks down the road.

  Halfway down, he stops to look back at his house. He has heard of illegal immigrants living in America for years, gathering piles of money and returning home to sons who have surpassed them in height. Will Anju be one of those? Remaining until she is someone else? Will she know this house or, like a spirit, will she simply pass over it, presuming that it belongs to strangers? This is still her house, even more so now that she is not in it, and so long as Anju is gone, it will be a haunted, unfinished thing. Not a place of rest but a place of unrest, her hair in the combs, her shoes in the doorway, her echo in every room.

  ON THE STEPS of Abraham’s veranda, Melvin waits for the servant to fetch his employer. Melvin studies the small wasp’s nest growing beneath the eave of the roof like a solid gray goiter, a wasp floating languidly around it. At a safe distance from this are two white wicker chairs and a table between them. So many places to rest in this house, to linger and idle and scheme undisturbed. Melvin will not sit down, as he has never done so for the entire time that he has called himself Abraham’s driver. Usually he leans against the car, waiting, but this time he has arrived on foot.

  Abraham emerges, wiping his hands on his munda. “Ah, Melvin! I was not expecting you.”

  Melvin points at the roof. “You have a wasp’s nest up there.”

  “Oh yes, about that. Do you think you could help me with it today? Mercy wants me to call an exterminator, as if I’m made of porcelain….”

  As Abraham complains about the price of exterminators, Melvin remembers his original mission. Before he can interrupt, Abraham says, “My God, I almost forgot. How did it go in Chennai?”

  “Badly.”

  Abraham sighs. “It’s the Mexicans. Taking up all the spots in that country. So what did the officials say?”

  At this, a pivotal point in Melvin’s life, he feels himself steered by a new philosophy. Thus far he has believed that a boy becomes a man over the course of years and lessons and mistakes, a stone worn smooth by an ocean. But now it seems he was quite wrong. A man is made in a series of moments, an evolution in bursts, and maybe this is his final turn. These thoughts come to him not in sentences but as a tidal throbbing in his gut, a now, now, now.

  Melvin crosses his arms over his chest. “You know what they said. You told them yourself.”

  “Told what?” Abraham tilts his head, a movement whose subtlety sends a fissure through Melvin’s resolution; perhaps he is wrong. Too late now for doubts such as these. The first words have been fired and the rest come in bullets.

  “You called. You told them about my Anju.”

  Abraham hesitates, then brays a laugh of disbelief.

  “They never would’ve known,” Melvin says.

  “Who fed you this nonsense?”

  “Before I left, I told no one about this meeting, no one except you. How else would they find out?”

  Abraham gathers himself up, fits his hands on his hips. “I don’t like this tone, Melvin. It is not the tone an employee takes with his employer.”

  “I am not only your employee. I’m Gracie’s husband—”

  “Melvin—”

  Pure madness, this train of words without brakes. “And for this, you never forgave me. For this, you wanted to get back at me.”

  “Who are you to tell me about forgiveness?” Abraham jabs a finger at his own chest. “I have been very forgiving! How easy do you think it was for me to hear your name with hers? She was mine, she was to be my wife.” On “wife,” he hits the back of a wicker seat, as though Gracie would be sitting right here were it not for Melvin. “And then you bumble into the picture as if you of all people could belong to a family like that.”

  “She told me you did not want her. You gave her up.”

  “So I did. But just because a man does not want his dinner doesn’t mean he wants the servant to step in and have it.”

  Servant. They have crossed into terrain where neither meant to go, and now the word sits between them as it always will, implacable and pulsing with
life.

  “My wife hired you out of pity and politeness,” Abraham says formally. “Were it up to me, we would never have met.”

  “I am not your servant. You are not my master.”

  “I don’t need you to remind me of what I am. You are the one needing reminders, so here is one. There are only two good reasons a man should have more than his share of the world—by being born into that share or by earning it. You did neither and ended up with more than you deserved.”

  With his heel, Abraham kicks up the edge of his munda so as to tie it around his waist. “If not for me, Melvin, you’d still be stuck at that bar, asking Berchmans for a peg of Yeksho.”

  The Ambassador key has grown warm in Melvin’s breast pocket. He thinks of hurling it at Abraham’s forehead so as to scar him, to brand a permanent reminder onto his skull. But these are fantasies. He and Abraham are too old to survive old feuds, too young to be free of the past.

  Instead, Melvin drops the key into the wicker seat where Abraham’s Gracie would have sat.

  Abraham refuses to glance at the key. And though Melvin is already down the steps, Abraham shouts after him with all the volume and vigor of a real-life Mammootty: “I’ll take care of the wasps myself!”

  AND SO, in an effort to reinstate his manhood, Melvin has entered an early retirement. He always imagined that he would be older when he retired, dentured and content, surrounded with grandchildren to guide him by the hand through the waning years. Instead he finds himself bewildered by his recent explosion, and having nowhere better to go, he ends up at the Rajadhani Bar.

  The bar swelters with the alluvial heat and musk of its male patrons, the ceiling fan slowly whisking the air to no great effect. At this hour most men are at work, so only one customer sits at the counter, chatting with Berchmans. Melvin takes a stool farther down and orders a peg of brandy, neat, something to send a gentle kick to his brain. Outside, a jeep passes with a bullhorn perched on its roof, through which a voice bellows: The twenty-first century will be the Indian century! The country’s future is in your hands!