THE ATLAS OF REDS AND BLUES
Copyright © 2019 by Devi S. Laskar
First hardcover edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Although The Atlas of Reds and Blues is inspired by actual events and people, it is a work of fiction. Many of the events portrayed here actually took place, but the author’s rendering of those events and their particulars are invented. The characters’ thoughts, conversations, and actions are a work of imagination.
Grateful acknowledgment for reprinting materials is made to the following:
Vandana Khanna, “Blackwater Fever” from Train to Agra.
Copyright © 2001 by Vandana Khanna. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Laskar, Devi S., author.
Title: The atlas of reds and blues : a novel / Devi S. Laskar.
Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018023436 | ISBN 9781640091535
Classification: LCC PS3612.A846 A95 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023436
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For
Anjini, Ellora, Devrani
&
For
Joy
with all the light left in the world
I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been
VANDANA KHANNA
Contents
Trouble Swallowing
Moving Day in the Ordinary World
Inciting Incidents
Act I: The Curtains are Drawn, Briefly
In Media Res
Act II: Low Like Losing Hope
Z is for Zenith
Brave New Ordinary World
Acknowledgments
TROUBLE SWALLOWING
Now this fainting, this falling, this landing so ungainly. Concrete scratches her face, the back of her arm. Her legs twist like licorice.
Nearby, it sounds like cocktail hour at a convention of common starlings: a murmur punctuated by intermittent laughter. Why? The sky marbles blue and white, but the clouds are leaving town. She closes her eyes, breathes in the metal essence of her own blood as it exits the hole the bullet has created.
The last time she smelled this iron: 1997. Blood on the toilet seat, blood on the tile, guilt flooding like ocean water overhead. She shouldn’t have gone home that day after her collapse. She should have driven herself to the hospital. Maybe that baby could have been saved. Still, that was thirteen years ago. Three babies since then, alive and thriving, but she’s at once on the driveway and back in the employee bathroom, washing that blood off the long-since-discarded skirt in the white sink, wiping away the blood on her fingertips with brown paper towels.
Her eyelids so heavy now but she possesses the power of flight. Her spine against the concrete of the driveway, cold, but her mind the jumble and rattle of a projector running continuously, a moving picture made of stills, but not a silent movie, a kaleidoscope of time and place, an atlas of the past. The call of other voices: husband’s, children’s, sister’s, and the sharp bark of Greta, the shepherd who’s been dead for almost two years, of a degenerative disease. Other voices too, unfamiliar, newly introduced, the policemen and their dispatchers; and voices of those so dear but gone long before the babies came. Her eyelids so heavy. How much liquid has spilled near the heart, toward the stomach? Why is the act of spilling liquid so painful? Suddenly realizing: this is a miscarriage of a different kind.
No baby to lose this time.
A different kind of secession.
The owl that has been living in the tree outside the bedroom window hoots to the agent’s assault-rifle trigger call. She—daughter, wife, and mother of three—tries to open eyes, mouth. Film ends. Light shining on blank screen, screen dissolving into page, something she can read. Pain shifts. An outline. Not a chalk outline, or the outline of a body for the shooters at the practice range. But Aristotle’s Incline, an outline of a story, an explanation of why her back is to the concrete. Every story has a beginning, a middle, an end. Aristotle’s ski-lift structure with seven stops, outlined in his Poetics, a book she has studied and restudied over the years. She begins searching for the words that will form her beginning; that will anchor the story, her own story, in its ordinary world. She reads the words that form as she remembers . . .
MOVING DAY IN THE ORDINARY WORLD
. . . In which she moves thirteen long miles to a new house, three girls in tow, their beloved shepherd parked in a kennel, their belongings painstakingly packed box by box and hauled over from the old house bit by bit, the man of the hour, her husband, on a business trip, first France and then Japan, during this entire event. They move from the boundaries of Atlanta’s city limits to just inside the enclosing arms of suburbia. Black clouds waste no time: heavens open up, trees swing like pendulums, thunder fails to cease. The rain unrelenting, impassable roads under perpetual construction, strip malls decorated in neon, gated brick monstrosities and carpet-soft lawns, ravines covered in kudzu, etched metal historical markers dot streets like stop signs—subtly celebrating the Confederacy one hundred and thirty-nine years after the loss; commuters honking a concerto of road rage, the smog-laced air they all breathe, and a pair of shopgirls crossing the street when they see her coming . . .
&
She’s a chronicler of the dead. Obituaries. A lowly job, usually given to interns first, those who are new to the newspaper world; or those old-timers who could not stomach the deadlines or the politics of daily journalism; those who could not stand the constant criticism from the public. For the first time in ten years, since the year 2000, Mother arrives last to her section of the newsroom, far from the windows that look out to the skyscrapers crowding the urban landscape, the street way below, downtown Atlanta. Editor Dennis on the phone. His face is red and crumpled like used gift wrap. Dennis does not wave. He swivels his chair back to his computer screen as though he doesn’t see her. Her other two colleagues are absent, rather their things, lunch bags, jackets, notebooks, are dumped over their desk calendars, but their bodies are not present. She looks around and there are reporters in the thick of the newsroom where the City Desk journalists cluster, crowding around the watercooler, watching live TV on multiple screens. She grips the jangle of keys in her left hand. Where is the car parked? What route had she taken this morning after a breakfast of toaster strudel and black tea?
She is achy, content to sit. Desk is tidy. Facing the narrow corridor that leads to the restrooms. Desk is tidy because there is no work to carry over, day to day. At workday’s end, she files the notes and the notebook into the cavernous drawers, touches the four-by-six color photo of her family tacked onto the bulletin board, and rushes home. Today no lunch and no jacket, not even a purse. Why? No one looks at her, no one gives her anything to do.
She used to be a crime reporter, used to have to keep watch over everything that had to do with her assigned police municipalities, the courthouses in the counties she covered. She practices still; who goes in a
nd out of the corridor and the bathrooms, how many times each day. Who goes in, who doesn’t come out. Who goes in pensive and comes out giddy. Who goes in all nervous energy and comes out sated, slow. She gleans George the metro police reporter’s coke habit this way, and the fact that the assistant food editor, Julie, has been having an affair with Charles, the morning editor at the City Desk, for three months. How do they have the time? They are each married, and have kids on the same Little League team. Car pool must have become a hotbed of innuendo and long looks.
She turns back to Dennis, but he is occupied by the urgent call on the telephone. His sweat and the anger rolling off his back build an ill wind.
Now she is neither an intern nor a shadow. She is a seasoned reporter with a husband who knows which kiosk sells the best croissants at Charles de Gaulle Airport better than he knows where the cough medicine is stored at home. She is a mother of three small children. A woman who does not want to let go of her former life, a woman who cannot stand the mind-numbing repetition of her present. Once the children came in quick succession, she accepted this job, writing about the accomplishments and attributes of a person who will never read the work and tell her that she got it wrong.
Today, no file resting atop the desk calendar. She longs to swivel the chair three hundred and sixty degrees, like the children do when they visit her workplace on occasion. She longs to scrounge the desk for loose change, see what could be had from the vending machines for lunch. But she scrounged last Tuesday, and for those efforts ate chocolate-covered peanuts, the candy coating smudging her files. So there’s no change to be had. She could ask to borrow a few dollars, but doesn’t want to ask. She can’t remember exactly when she last spied her purse or her jacket. She doesn’t want to be imprecise, especially at work. Position tenuous and part-time. If there is a bloodletting, cutbacks, she will be the first to be let go.
The number of reporters watching TV balloons. Their collective undertone sounds like bees surrounding a hive. She sighs. It sounds like the hive of bees making a home in the tree in her backyard. The keys bunched in her left hand bloom into a metallic sprig. An owl hoots on the TV, and then she knows why they are watching. They are watching the spectacle at her house. They are watching her through the magic of television.
Dennis yells, “God damn it!” and hangs up the telephone. His face almost purple. He rises from his chair, looks through her. Because she is really not there, she is on her driveway bleeding. He staggers to the men’s room. Goosebumps cover her arms and her head begins to ache at the temples. The timer on her phone buzzes insistently in her right hand, but she doesn’t turn it off. Can’t remember how. The phone rings. The number scrolls across the top of her screen. She gets up and dashes to the elevator. Immediately, she’s back at the car. A few moments later she’s navigating the toll road, the goodbyes to the children this morning echoing. And then a second later, she’s in her driveway again, prostrate, pain expanding at the rate of the universe, and men crawling like ants, searching her car.
&
The tired adage holds some truth in its scaffold: they are never meant to be heard. Like children, most dolls are made only to be seen, put on display. Real live dolls are taught to remain stoic, bear witness in silence, no matter how the consumer judges. The radio dispatcher squawks and a policeman’s voice describes her: Black hair. Brown skin. Gray sweatpants. Brown T-shirt. Flip-flops.
The dispatcher’s voice drawls. “Is she Black?”
A lawn mower sputters to life nearby and drowns out the policeman’s reply.
Third Monday of May 2010. When you put American clothes on a brown-skinned doll, what do people see? The clothes? Or the whole doll? Or only the skin?
&
The baby doll arrives in a pink cardboard box, a toy with black hair and brown eyes, and skin like caramel crème. A gift presented from their paternal uncle, for the Real Thing (who will grow up to become Mother on the driveway) and the Baby Sister (who will grow up to become a nun). The girls’ mother braids the baby doll’s hair into a tiny plait. The Real Thing and the Baby Sister and the toy baby doll now match. Three dolls in small-town North Carolina. Their mother shakes her head every time the Real Thing or the Baby Sister cry. Their mother points to the doll: “See? She’s a tough cookie. We never hear her cry.” This refrain often repeats, no matter if the Real Thing and the Baby Sister don’t want to eat lunch at the appointed hour, don’t want to go to bed before the sun finishes setting, don’t want to stop reading the book aloud. Out of the three of them, the toy baby doll never talks back, always closes her eyes when she is put down for a nap, never complains when their mother takes a kitchen rag and wipes the smudges of dirt from her face.
The toy baby doll is shoved into the black Samsonite rectangle the summer before she, the Real Thing, turns ten. The toy doll rides in the belly of the plane across the International Date Line in a suitcase-coffin and is bequeathed to a girl cousin in a crowded, noisy suburb of Calcutta. There is talk in the next room, where the maternal uncles sit and drink chai, about the Americans landing a probe on Mars the previous day. The Bengali grandmothers and great-aunts smooth their own hair with worn hands, the colored bangles on their arms tinkling like wind chimes heralding the start of a new day.
&
Their amusement echoes down the throat of the neighborhood, gathering volume as it reaches the cul-de-sac, the dead-end lung. The neighbors are dressed in tennis whites, their bottled-blond hair in ponytails. She can hear these real Barbie dolls, each stationed at the tops of their own driveways, watching and laughing, but what she pictures again is a murmuration of feathery starlings cresting and dipping in unison against the swath of sky.
&
Scratches scar the arms and legs of the pair of Barbie dolls their mother picks up from the consignment shop in Carrboro—as if the dolls’ previous owner was trying to pierce the plastic skin to see what lay underneath. Their mother plucks miniature accessories from the curb, when the mean older girl across the street throws a fit loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear and tosses all of her toys outside in a cardboard box. A hot-pink shoe and a blue one, and a pair of white sandals with frayed straps, a Barbie “bed” that is no better than a plastic gurney, one pastel pink skirt, and one orange-and-black top. The Real Thing and the Baby Sister empty out five shoeboxes storing old letters, buttons from coats long donated, paper clips, and use their stapler to fashion a “house,” each room a diorama made from repurposed juice cans, padded manila envelopes, socks too holey to be darned. Their mother collects scraps from the material for aprons she sews in front of the TV most weekend evenings, and donates them to the Barbie improvement project. They watch the ads for a new movie, Star Wars: Episode IV, but their mother will not let them go, declaring it to be witchcraft and a waste of money. The Real Thing and the Baby Sister grow tired of the not entirely new perky Barbie dolls and their forced smiles and their scarred bodies. It is not The Sound of Music with Maria making play clothes from drapes for the Captain’s seven children.
The Baby Sister strips the scraps from the Barbie girls and she, the Real Thing, fashions temporary transportation from the shoebox that was the Barbie sitting room in the cardboard dollhouse. “They have a better chance of getting new homes if they don’t have ugly clothes,” the Baby Sister says.
“They have a better chance if the white girls near the river never know we played with them,” the Real Thing says.
She and the Baby Sister put the dolls into the box, sitting up, side by side, and set them free down the tributary that leads to the Cape Fear River Basin some miles away. They wave goodbye and watch the box sail calmly downstream. Later, their mother says nothing as the Real Thing and the Baby Sister take the Barbie clothes and shoes and throw them in the trash.
&
Someone trips the switch for the red bullhorn on the squad car parked at the far end of the driveway, next to the blue recycling bin and green yard-waste container. “Good lord!” a voice exclaims. “Why does
everything have to be so complicated?”
Mother is forty-three years, six months, and twenty-five days old.
&
Today, the Middle Daughter gets in Mother’s car after school—in tears, sobbing that her new classmate won’t invite her home. “Annette said her mom won’t let her play with Black people outside of school.” Middle Daughter’s shoulders slump forward in her seat. Everyone in the first grade is invited to the special premiere of Bee Movie at the Buckhead mansion of Annette’s famous athlete uncle—everyone but her.
Mother drives back to school, leaves the car idling in the fire lane, and marches into the office. “Why are children allowed to even say such trash?” The teachers and administration look as blank as stretched canvas. “You know they are hearing this from their families.” The school employees simply fix their eyes on a point just past her shoulder and stare. “What are you going to do?” Their silence is the loudest thing she’s ever heard.
She marches back to the car, a wooden soldier on fire, plotting.
“Don’t tell Daddy,” Middle Daughter says to Mother as soon as she straps on the seat belt.
That girl has always been able to read her mother’s face like a road map. “Why not?”
“He’ll be sad, and he has to go out of town for work.”
“So what? He needs to know.” She pauses, eyes the last piece of cinnamon-flavored gum in the cup holder but leaves it. “Besides, he’s already out of town for work.”
Middle Daughter is shaking her head. “No, he’ll be sad.”
Mother is hardly out of the pristine neighborhood that surrounds the school when the patrol car passes her, makes a smooth three-point turn, flashing red lights, deejaying a siren. “Stop the vehicle,” the robotic voice booms through a bullhorn.
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