ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  I know you will say that I lost my sense of adventure. You would be right. But I have my girls now, they are my life. And we have our smaller adventures. Linno is as high as my waist—we measured. She is sleeping on the edge of the bed while I write you this letter. Anju tends to roll on top of her, even though there is more than enough room for both. For such a little one, she spreads like a starfish in her sleep. They are your girls too. I would’ve made you godmother if you were here for their baptisms, but you can be something else to them, something better. You should know these things for when you meet them, because you will someday.

  Please forgive me. And don’t take too long to respond.

  Your loving friend and sister,

  Gracie

  The television show has resumed, and it comes to Bird from the other room like the faint noise of an ocean. She remains on the bed with the page in both her hands, grateful to her younger self for preserving it. She presses the letter to her face, then her chest, and stays like this for a very long time, long after the show ends, watching the sunlight cross her lap.

  The phone begins to ring, but she lets the answering machine pick up.

  Ghafoor’s voice: “Bird, are you there? I don’t want to bother, but I am looking at the appointment book and it seems that you double-booked Mrs. Majmudar and Mrs. Mazumdar. Mrs. Majmudar is the one with a wedding to go to, but Mrs. Mazumdar will jump on my head if I push on her too much. I think you should call and explain, lady to lady. Bird, come now, I know you are there. Hello? Pick up, Bird. Are you there?”

  And hearing her life calling to her, she puts her past back in the chocolate tin and takes up the phone.

  “Yes,” she says. “I am here.”

  7.

  HE JFK AIRPORT has not undergone any major changes since Anju’s last visit. Near the ticket counter, a father and son squat before their suitcases, a small one and a bulging one, trying to shift the contents so as to magically reduce the overweight status of the latter. Surrounded by soaps, loofahs, T-shirts, and boxes of Old Spice aftershave, the man and his son look mystified by the arithmetic of it all. The son mutters at the father in a tongue that Anju does not recognize, but whose tone roughly amounts to: “I told you not to tell anyone we were going back! Half of this is for people we don’t even know!” Which is a refrain Anju heard in Hindi during her first foray into an Air India terminal, where the ticket takers seemed proudly empowered by their authority to turn whole duffels and pullmans away.

  In her own suitcases, Anju has stuffed a number of gifts for her family, mostly clothes, but also more selective purchases. Among them: a Jesus nightlight for Ammachi and a tiny hula dancer doll that Melvin can affix to the dashboard of Abraham Saar’s car. Its hips jimmy at the slightest tremble so the doll will hula enthusiastically on Kumarakom roads. The most impressive gift is a used book for Linno titled The History of Art. Each page is slick, with a pleasant chemical smell, the space taken up by a famous painting and a brief block of text. The yellow sun and crescent moon unscrolling from coils of gray cloud in The Battle of Alexander at Issus. The white turban of an Arab and the black top hat of an Englishman, framed by the arch of a giraffe’s bending neck in The Nubian Giraffe. “With the development of communication links,” the caption reads, “traders of the early nineteenth century were able to travel farther and farther afield and return with increasingly exotic gifts.”

  She wishes she could call home, to see what other exotic and unexotic gifts her family might want, but Mrs. Solanki told her not to. “We want that element of surprise,” she said. Anju recalled Jilu Auntie’s gifts from years prior, of Tang and cake mix, so Mrs. Solanki bought ten boxes of yellow, marble, and chocolate cake mix, five canisters of Tang, and two jars of Ovaltine.

  Wearing saucer-sized sunglasses that attract more attention than they are meant to repel, Mrs. Solanki pulls a mud-brown suitcase senselessly covered in gold initials that are not her own. Rohit and the rest of the camera crew keep their lives in their backpacks, having to carry their own equipment as well. The first camera operator’s name is Petra. She wears a black tank top and cargo pants; her arms are sleeved in green tattoos. At first, her mere presence seemed to inspire a sense of competition in Rohit, which gave way to intimidation, then absolute deference. At the airport, Anju overhears her directing Rohit to “stay out of her way” and to “look for the other angle.” He seems to fail both directives quite often, leading Petra to give him one of her many grim lessons.

  “Don’t jump the line!” she yells at him. He keeps his head bowed. “Do you know what I mean by that? Didn’t you learn it in school?”

  “I didn’t finish out the year,” he says, for the first time, without pride.

  Anju feels sorry for him, especially after all that transpired, though it quickly becomes clear that Rohit not only benefits from Petra’s teachings but that he is also beginning to adore Petra of the green tattoos. He seems to delight in the way she muscles him around, the way she snaps her fingers at him, how she depends on him for extra batteries which he obediently keeps charged, one per pocket, and feeds to her like an animal trainer in full thrall of his shark.

  “Go shoot some b-roll,” Petra tells him. “But be discreet. And no more slow zooms, okay? I wasn’t impressed by those.”

  Rohit walks away, rubbing his cheek and smiling sheepishly, as if Petra has just nuzzled him.

  Mrs. Solanki and Anju sit on a bench while Petra talks to the sound guy, Billy, a lanky, friendly man with headphones perpetually collaring his neck. He carries the boom microphone like a hockey stick, down by his side, and tells anecdotes about his children whenever possible. “I named my daughter Daytona,” he told Anju. “After the beach where she was conceived.” The last member of the crew is Roy, the producer. His age is ambiguous due to the white blondness of his hair, and his shirt is open two buttons too far, revealing a turquoise stone on a hemp necklace. Caffeinated and rigid and fidgety, Roy is the one to explain to Mrs. Solanki what will be shot and how. He spreads his discomfort, like flu, to whomever he speaks.

  For the most part, Anju keeps her distance. While waiting to board the plane, she sips on a beverage that she had thought would be coffee, but looks instead like a tall cousin of the sundae, all weightless cream laced with chocolate powder. When Mrs. Solanki sits next to her, Anju asks: “You are sure we should not call my family to inform them? What if no one is home?”

  “If no one is home, then we’ll wait,” Mrs. Solanki says between sips of espresso.

  Anju brings a spoonful of sweet froth to her mouth, then drops the froth back into the cup. “My stomach is tossing and turning.”

  “Mine too.” Mrs. Solanki’s eyes are bright and espressoed. “This is going to be tremendous.”

  BUSINESS CLASS, Anju learns, is all about space—the space to stretch and sprawl, armrests aplenty, to receive champagne in a glass, to wash one’s face with a warm wet towel handled by silver tongs, to stare out the window or into a book as the economy passengers file past.

  Never has Anju been more ill at ease.

  Early in the journey, Mrs. Solanki goes to the bathroom while Petra positions herself near Anju. “So,” Petra says, angling the camera at Anju, “will you miss it here?”

  Nodding seems like the right answer, but instead Anju says: “I am not sure.”

  Petra waits. It is a comfort, Anju thinks, her patience, the way she lets a person’s thoughts take shape.

  “There is one woman. I was calling her like a big sister or auntie, because she was family to me almost. She was helping me very much.” Anju looks at her hands. “I will miss her.”

  These stilted sentences do little justice to Bird, whom Anju worked up the nerve to visit four days before. She arrived to find Bird in her flannel robe, civil but leaden, smelling of Gwen’s tea rose lotion. An abandoned cheese slice sat on the arm of the couch, both still in their plastic sheaths. Bird and Anju stepped awkwardly around each other, as if a camera were in the room, forcing them to monitor their
words and movements. Anju packed her clothes into Mrs. Solanki’s rolling suitcase, and intermittently, Bird brought a few extra pairs of shoes into the room, egg-white sandals and gray flats that Anju thought dowdy and Bird called “sensible.”

  “Thank you,” Anju said.

  But Bird did not move, simply stood in the doorway, staring at the sandals in her hands as if they had asked her a question.

  “Your mother …,” she said finally.

  It seemed to require a great effort to expel the rest of the sentence, which Anju predicted to be the opening lines of a gentle, genuine moment, something like Your mother would be proud of you.

  Bird met her eyes. “Your mother and I were friends.”

  Anju waited for something else until she realized that this was all Bird wanted to share. “Okay,” Anju said.

  Bird nodded and straightened up, somehow restored by her own words. “Keep an eye on the shoes, especially at church.” She went to the suitcase, where she fit the sandals next to the flats.

  On her way out, Anju glanced at the blue vase, the dried flowers, the plastic-covered couch. And though she had seen the couch so many times before, she had never noticed how forlorn it appeared. It seemed as though Bird would never remove the plastic covering, as if she would continue to preserve the fabric beneath for a cherished guest, one that would never arrive.

  AN HOUR LATER, the entire crew (including Rohit, who has seated himself next to Petra) is snoozing away, having taken the sedatives they brought with them. These are people who swallow pills like candy. Mrs. Solanki offers Anju some of her Ambien, but Anju refuses, afraid of the side effects. She has heard of people who sleepwalk on such pills and others whose pulses stutter to a stop, though her own will not allow her to rest anyway. There are times when her mind conjures up images of Linno and Ammachi and Melvin, and no sleeping pill or sedative could keep her heart from leaping to greet them.

  8.

  LONG WITH THE SMUDGY SUNRISE, there comes the feeling that today Linno must go to church. She tries to defeat the feeling by going to work, where by ten a.m. she is useless, answering phones in automated tones and ruining three invitations in a row simply by cutting where she should have folded. Easy mistakes, but none that she would usually make.

  Alice looks at her with tender worry, a look not unfamiliar to Linno in these last few days, since she returned from Chennai. Each day seems a repetition of the last, the same “on-hold” music when calling the consulate number, the same sense of limbo provided by the official who informs her that the application is still “pending investigation.” Yesterday Alice suggested hiring a lawyer to speed things along, but today she sends Linno home early. “Get some sleep,” Alice says. “We’ll see about the lawyer tomorrow.”

  Linno takes the bus home, but traffic is slow today due to a frenzy all along the river, people gathering around the banks. The passengers squint at the water, where fish can be seen moving and bobbing just beneath the surface. “Karimeen pongi!” says a passenger. “They’ve risen!”

  “Are they dead?” someone asks.

  “If they were dead, they’d be on their sides …”

  “But karimeen always stay deep down in the water.”

  “Why are they moving so slowly?”

  “Pesticides. What else? It’ll be in the newspapers tomorrow.”

  Linno exits at the next stop, unable to stand the slow haul of traffic. With every bus that arrives, a herd of people push their way out, wading into the water for Kumarakom’s most famous fish. Some of the men remove their mundus to use as nets, splashing around in tiny shorts. Usually, only nets and rods can trap the swift-swimming karimeen, but now they wander into bare hands, bodies that barely possess the energy to resist, numbed by whatever fresh chemical has stunned them. Years ago, Linno witnessed a whole plague of fish floating along the river after an overdose of pesticides from the paddy fields, eyes staring up at the sky. But this picture is stranger, grotesque, nauseating: the sight of so many men, yelling, scrambling like fish themselves around a dangerous bait.

  LINNO MAKES HER WAY across the nearby bridge where lorries tremble past, billowing veils of fumes behind them. The humid heat feels skintight, but she keeps walking, waiting to be struck by the sight of the church she has visited for most of her life.

  For years, Linno has been attending Mass without a proper confession, and in this quiet fashion, she has received the host into a mouth still full of an untold sin, pretending a piety that she cannot claim. Today she will sit opposite Anthony Achen and form the words in a cleansing rush, and he will assign her a recitation of prayers, and in some slow, divine way, everything will be absolved and the world she knew will return to her. Maybe this is the missing part of her visa application—the stamp of the divine.

  This morning she dragged herself onto her feet, dizzy, knees flaccid as the blood rushed to her extremities, to the very tips of her fingers. She awoke with the knowledge that life comes in circles of cause and effect, of fault and consequence, that her own accident and her mother’s accident are connected in some indissoluble pattern, that her mother’s death was the first in a series of mounting failures, a tumble of dominos to which Linno gave the first push, and in punishment, five years later, she lost her hand. How easily she pretended to forget all this, what with her designs and her cards, her face in a magazine. But now, as then, she is being punished for a crime for which she never atoned, and she will continue to be punished until she does. She has clung to action rather than prayer, presuming that there is no use in turning her gaze inward rather than outward. Inside is a world of regret so vast and deep that to linger there feels as impossible as skipping around the ledge of a well. But no more impossible than giving up her sister, and that she will not do, not until she has visited every lawyer and consulate, every priest, guru, imam, and astrologer, anyone who might bring hope.

  AFTER AN HOUR of wandering, Linno feels very far from her home and her mission. She walks past an empty bus stop, its bars leprous with peeling paint, past a mulberry tree soaking the air with its sweet ferment. A wall borders the road, postered with political faces, sickled stars, slogans of India Shining. Now that elections are over and votes are being tallied, new posters will cover these, perhaps a fair, moon-faced actress from the latest Tamil movie. As a child, Linno used to watch the poster man carefully plaster each quarter of the mural until he stood back, the entire wall filled with a beautiful, unspoiled face. Then he would pull up a corner and rip a long scar through the cheek, which he would press back down, an ingenious solution to the pilfering of local boys who might want to mural their walls at home. They could not do so without destroying her; nothing came without cost.

  Linno continues past the posters. Crammed with schoolchildren, an auto-rickshaw waddles past her, in the opposite direction of a man driving his butter-colored cow with a stick. The cow is as malnourished as its owner, its ribs raised like the bones in an old pair of hands. She feels as doleful as the cow, and slow, filled with its haylike smell and its sadness. Is this what it means, then, to be depressed? To watch the steady unraveling of her life and have no impulse to take up the thread? To be more absorbed by a stain on the mirror than by her own reflection? She shakes herself free of these thoughts, thinks only of her meeting with Anthony Achen.

  And now, in the distance, she can see the triad of steeples awaiting her, each with its pale, petaled cross. It is not far, the church at the top of the hill. A lorry noisily hobbles past, kicking up dust from its bumper where someone has painted in yellow letters distance creates love. She imagines herself running after the lorry and hopping onto the bumper and riding and riding until an immeasurable distance grows between her and Anthony Achen, who will soon be sitting across from her, his knuckles whitening with every word until he banishes her from his presence. The ground begins to move beneath her, the road ripples and buckles like water. There is nowhere to look that is not moving. She takes hold of the wall which seems to go on and on, a ribbon without end, a questi
on without answer, an apology without pardon. She closes her eyes and presses her forehead to the back of her hand. In her ears is the trill of a bicycle bell, the thick whispers of windblown leaves and then, simply, her breath.

  IF LINNO KNEW that the only person at church today would be the Kapyar, she might have changed her mind about confession. In fact the Kapyar spends more time in the church than anyone else by his account. Not that anyone would ask or care that the House of God does not clean Itself. The Kapyar is the one to rinse the lip prints from the chalice and wipe the carved wood stations of the cross that hang along the walls. He pauses before the picture of Jesus with Veronica and raises his fingertip to the gaunt profile of Christ, feels the knifelike line of His cheekbone not unlike his own.

  The Kapyar would have liked to be a priest, but his father had refused the calling, responding instead to a call from a sizable dowry. Being employed by the church, the Kapyar thinks, is the next best thing. And he fulfills his duties with utter gravity, fully aware of the children who call him the Crab. Once, he twisted the ear of one boy particularly hard, a multiple offender who had bullishly snorted loud enough to provoke a hesitation from Anthony Achen. After Mass, the Kapyar heard the boy say to his cohorts: “That Kapyar, that son of a veshya.”

  The words embedded themselves in the Kapyar’s chest, caused his mind to stagger back into a moment of childhood, when he came into the house to find his mother fastening the last hook of her sari blouse as the landlord put a roll of rupees on the table. At the time, he thought: But she should be paying him.

  One boy’s curse is another man’s truth. The Kapyar used to tell himself that he was not (he thought) the son of a whore, but now that the words have been thrown down before him, the Kapyar is reminded of that slender, crippling maybe. No, he is not that: he is the Kapyar who tugs the Sunday bells; who collects the weekly moneys, watching to make sure that the same hand that deposits fifty paise into the basket does not withdraw a rupee; who travels four miles on foot from a small hut by the side of the road, built atop the matchbox shack where he and his mother and father once lived in a careful semblance of oblivion.