ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “I came to bring you more business,” Linno says. “I came to paint you a window.”

  The tailor glances at Linno’s knotted wrist. “Paint what?”

  Prepared for this reaction, Linno pulls her sketchbook from her satchel and opens to what she has designed in pencil. A woman stands smiling demurely in a sari, its fabric like liquid silk over her hips, the pallu billowing behind her and tapering into the needle of a sewing machine. Behind the machine is a plumpish woman in spectacles, smiling with motherly satisfaction at the sari-clad woman, her muse.

  The chubby seamstress hovers at the tailor’s elbow, cooing over the picture with pickled breath. “This looks just like you, Chachy!”

  The tailor makes a noise of grudging agreement and points at the sketch of the woman in a sari. “But my hips should be a bit wider than this.” The chubby seamstress begins to protest but, reconsidering, keeps quiet.

  By this time, the waif has come to peer over the tailor’s shoulder as well. “Make the sari red,” she suggests.

  The tailor waves the suggestion away. “Better to be subtle. Maybe rose … or peach color,” she decides. “You know what peach color is?”

  So she is hired! Elated, Linno asks for a measuring tape with which to measure the window, unless—

  “Wait, wait,” the tailor says. “Just because a woman can stitch doesn’t mean she knows how to work a sewing machine.”

  The tailor bends behind a counter, on top of which are binders full of possible dress designs and collar cuts, and surfaces with a large roll of white parcel paper. She unravels a lengthy piece which she slices with a swipe of her scissors.

  “Make it in color.” The tailor pats the paper. “On this. Then we will see.”

  MEANWHILE, Melvin’s job search has become something of a passive hunt, as he spends more and more time in the company of a bottle of Kalyani beer and Berchmans, the bartender and owner of the Rajadhani Bar. Berchmans, named after the seventeenth-century saint, thinks himself a fairly god-fearing and compassionate man, which would have made him an excellent psychologist, if his father had allowed him to take his master’s degree in psychology. Instead, his father demanded that Berchmans take over the family tavern.

  In all parts of his life, Berchmans exercises temperance: he does not smoke, barely drinks, exercises, and eats well. So he remains younger than his years, with a drum-tight belly and pectoral muscles that he can activate separately—left, right, left—beneath his shirt. At the risk of losing business, he tries to advise his patrons with priestly patience to forgo the next drink or add roughage to their diets or see the argument from the wife’s perspective. As well, he watches out for patrons like Melvin, on whom he could rack up quite a bill over time, if he wanted to.

  “I found you another driver job,” Berchmans says.

  Melvin straightens up.

  “For Mercy Chandy’s family. She’s been looking for someone since their last man left.”

  Melvin scowls at his beer. “Abraham Chandy’s wife?”

  “Yes? So?”

  “Don’t you know about …” Melvin gestures at the stool next to him, as if the stool will elucidate everything. “My wife. Gracie and him.”

  “Edda, they broke it off! So what? That was twenty years ago! You think a rich man like Abraham Chandy, a man with a wife and two sons, you think he even thinks about that old business?”

  “He might. Sometimes.”

  “Did you know that he has put seven girls through nursing school on his own donations? Seven. Not even relations, simply poor girls whose parents went up to him at church. This is not the kind of man who holds on to petty feuds.” Berchmans pushes his sour-smelling towel across the counter. “It is you who can’t put the past in the past.”

  IN THE EARLY EVENING, Melvin irons his second-best shirt and leaves for the Chandy house. His best shirt has a pearlescent sheen that Ammachi deemed too “disco.” Melvin has no idea which TV show gave her the word “disco,” but he agrees that this might be the impression he would make under intense lighting. He has a feeling that Abraham is the type to install so many bulbs and fixtures that one might mistake night for day.

  Melvin walks slowly, taking the time to inhale the damp exhalations of the earth. After rain, the air always has a gentle, smoky taste, and it was this that he missed most while in Bombay, where the air was ripe with competing odors. At a street corner, he pauses by a cold drinks vendor slouched on a stool in front of his stall. Melvin asks for a cold bottle of Coke, to which the vendor spits over his shoulder, a sickle of crimson paan on the dirt. “No Coke,” he says.

  “Pepsi?”

  “No Pepsi.”

  “Thumbs Up?”

  “No Thumbs Up.”

  The vendor explains that he, like all shopkeepers in the area, is partaking in the boycott of Pepsi and Coke products. “Anti-var protest,” the man says in clipped English, between chews. He points to a poster on the side of his stall that reads: Boycott superpower business like Pepsi and Coca-Cola! Protest military action in Iraq! Brought to you by the Anti-War Samithy’s General Council.

  “For how long?” Melvin asks.

  The vendor shrugs. “I’d sell it to you, but the Anti-Var Squad will come and bother me if I do. Not worth the trouble.” He scratches his chest and squints at the sky. “But all these things can’t go on forever.”

  THE HOUSE IS a two-tiered stucco structure with a tiled roof the color of cinnamon and an upper-level veranda where a hammock swings languidly in the breeze. Standing before the house in his second-best shirt, Melvin pictures Gracie in that hammock, her slender arm hanging over the side, a glass of lime water in her hand.

  The servant leads Melvin into the sitting room, where Abraham rises from a plush armchair, his hand extended. He is tall with hairy wrists and a chest like a slab of wood. His handshake has all the brevity and precision of a military salute.

  “She is in the kitchen,” Abraham says. “My wife.”

  “Ah.”

  “Hm.”

  They stand for a moment, lost without a woman to direct them.

  “Sit!” Abraham almost cries out, both shocked at his own ill manners and glad to say something useful.

  They sit. On the television is the ever-present Mammootty, the mustached megastar whose classic swagger Melvin had long ago tried and failed to emulate. Here, Mammootty is turning away from a man who possesses two traits quintessential to villains: a sleazy voice and a boulderlike paunch. The villain calls out: “Hey big shot, wait.” He scratches his cheek with a smile. “You can’t leave just yet—”

  Mammootty turns and smacks the man across the face with a loud dshoom!

  In shock, the man clutches his cheek. Mammootty says: “How about I leave now?”

  Meanwhile, Abraham is talking about the satellite that he recently installed on the roof so he could capture channels from around the world. “We also get American channels, but all we want is our Mammootty. Isn’t it?”

  Melvin nods, though he is more of a Mohanlal man, the huskier, equally mustached counterpart to Mammootty.

  At that moment, thankfully, Mercy Chandy emerges from the kitchen with a plate of cutlets and a dollop of ketchup in a crystal bowl. Melvin rises. “Sit, sit,” she says, and glances at the TV. “This one again?” Sheepish, Abraham mutes the TV, leaving Mammootty to swagger, slow-motion, in silence.

  Mrs. Chandy is one of those women who moves easily through any social circle, whose greetings are like an invisible hand on one’s shoulder. Melvin admires the nobility of her chin, something Greek and classical about her profile. As one with a rather prominent nose, Melvin envies those whose prominent noses somehow work in their favor.

  The interview is conducted by Mrs. Chandy, though mostly she asks about his family’s health. No one mentions anything about the driving job, and Melvin is suddenly stricken by the thought that this is not an interview at all in the Chandys’ minds, but simply a house visit.

  “About the job,” Melvin says carefull
y, “I used to drive for the Uthup family. If you need a reference letter …”

  “Reference letter?” Mrs. Chandy tilts her head. “What for? This is not an interview.”

  Melvin hesitates. “No?”

  “Of course not. This meeting is to discuss a schedule. You had the job as soon as Berchmans suggested you to us.” Mrs. Chandy looks to her husband for reassurance.

  “No, no, we don’t need an interview. We know you. And Gracie, of course.” Absently, Abraham gazes into his glass in which a lime rind is floating like a dead fish. He looks up with a sudden smile. “What more is there to know?”

  Melvin clears his throat and thanks them. He feels as though he is courting two people who are both out of his league, a feeling with which he is not inexperienced.

  CURRENT CUT.

  It is announced from house to house as if the snap-sudden darkness and slowing of ceiling fans were not explanation enough. Small children are ordered to stay still. Fathers tell sons, “Find the torch, the torch,” and sons go blazing the flashlight around the house, attempting to rescue whomever is stuck in the bathroom, mid-bath, without a light to distinguish floor from toilet hole. Out of the darkness, mothers appear around the corner, bearing candle flames behind cupped palms. Candles and flashlights are kept within easy reach in every house because this evening, as with many evenings, the electricity workers are on strike, unsettled by their wages, powerful in their unions.

  Linno lowers the candle to the floor, where Anju sits behind a small barrier of books. The past year has thinned some of the baby fat from her cheeks and she has gotten reading glasses that now cast slanted shadows up her forehead, a set of evil eyebrows above her own. She bites her lip, scanning the page as Linno sets another lamp before her, a cylindrical white light that sizzles stray mosquitoes.

  Linno crouches on the floor before the large square of parcel paper and a set of oil pastels that Jilu Auntie sent her last Christmas. She has never used them but has repeatedly run her fingers over the sticks of color lined up in the box, hues richer than the words that are found on the sides of crayons. The oil pastels transcend naming. They are made for professionals. They are paralyzingly perfect.

  The woman’s figure will come smoothly, all the gatherings and ripplings of fabric around the body. To make the fabric recede deep into the page, to create depth through distraction, this poses more of a challenge. But when the page is blank, she harbors no doubt, which makes drawing unlike anything else in her life. It is strange, this pent part of herself, this smallest kernel of confidence, pure as gold, that whatever her mind summons to the page will eventually appear.

  From behind her book, Anju watches as Linno maps the ghosts of figures to come. Anju returns to her books, then looks up again. “Is that for the tailor’s window?”

  Linno nods, drawing an oval shape. A face. She loosens the lines across the figure, the bosom, the hip. Huge, outlandish hips. She slims them.

  When Linno looks up, Anju is still watching her.

  “I’m bored.” Anju yawns, collapsing on her side. Casually, she adds: “Sister Savio told us about a scholarship today.”

  Linno pauses to listen, her pencil hovering over the face.

  It will be awarded to the best student in all of Kerala, Anju explains. A panel of judges. Two weeks of indecision. And then, finally, one student sent to a school in New York called the Sitwell School, for a full year. A year—an expanse of time so long, it rolls out like a scarlet carpet. And who knows where it will lead once her visa is renewed? An image comes to Linno, perhaps from a movie, of Anju at the bow of a departing ship. A fluttering handkerchief. Broad-brimmed hats and blown kisses. Linno realizes that she has never even been to an airport.

  “Are you going?” Linno asks.

  “I’ll apply. If I get it, I will go.”

  For a moment, there is only the soft scrape of lead and the humming light. Distracted, Linno angles the chin too sharply, throwing the face off-balance, a heart-shaped cartoon. She always knew that this time would come, that Anju would leave, but so soon and so far?

  Anju stretches extravagantly. “Did you know that in America, husbands and wives sleep in different beds?”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Not all the time but most of the time. There’s so much space in America that everyone has her own bed, her own room, her own bathroom, her own closet.”

  “Where do you get all this?”

  “That American show, the one with the wife who dropped chocolates down her blouse.”

  Linno tries to lighten her voice. “Next you’ll tell me there is no color in America, only black and white.”

  Anju flips onto her stomach and studies what Linno has drawn so far. Smoky features, a face with plumed lashes and a darkened lower lip. Linno feels suddenly embarrassed by her box of oil pastels, their smallness, how they command such importance in her life. And they do look like crayons.

  “Is that supposed to be you?” Anju asks.

  “No,” Linno says sharply.

  Anju returns to her books. “I was only asking.”

  Linno spirals her pastel over the woman’s face until a vortex of scribble swallows the features completely. She flips the paper over. The mere suggestion that Linno would be blessing herself with a pictorial, imagined beauty seems pathetic, and more or less true.

  ALONG WITH every other eligible student in Kerala, Anju applies for the scholarship. She brings the forms home so that Linno can fill them out, as Linno’s penmanship possesses an elegance that Melvin believes might win extra approval. With care, sometimes by candlelight, Linno copies Anju’s test scores while Melvin hovers over Linno’s shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, as in the Fontainelle days.

  During the mornings, Linno is also painting the tailor’s window. On the first day, she plots her drawing in chalk, bringing the smaller painting up to scale. The tailor emerges from her store every so often, fists on hips, to offer warnings and criticisms: “Don’t make me too dark, understand? I am not a fig.” At the tailor’s behest, Linno adds a gold bangle and a dainty, pert nose in place of the one that, in actuality, looks slightly squashed.

  With an advance from the tailor, Linno buys paint from Thresia Paint House, where a woman who claims to be Melvin’s friend gives her a good discount. Over the chalked lines, Linno strokes the first layer of colors, flat carnation pink and peach, then hollows for the eyes, black frills for the lashes, and lighter accents to pinch folds within the fabric. Over the course of two more days, passersby linger while children on their way home from school stop to watch, unblinking, silently reverent in the presence of one who is allowed to vandalize private property. Uncomfortable with their worship, she takes to painting earlier in the morning, in the few dawning hours before the tailor arrives.

  When finally Linno is finished, three days later, she stands back and finds the whole thing a hideous, bosomy, burlesque mess. Is that a colander hiding beneath the rump of the woman’s sari? Her eyes are of two different latitudes beneath heavy eyebrows, and the pallu, dear God, is a juvenile rendering, a wrinkly peach mess.

  “Aiyyo, look what you did to my cheek,” the tailor says from behind her.

  Closing a paint can, Linno begins to stammer that everything is removable with ammonia and water, but the tailor is not listening.

  “My cheek,” she repeats, her gaze fixed on the window. “It glows.”

  Taking a few steps back to where the tailor stands, Linno looks at the window. Sunrise has filled the colors with rose and in this light, Linno glimpses her dim reflection, all baggy eyes and fuzzy braid, a lick of paint across her forehead. She sees what the tailor sees in the painted lady, an inner phosphorescence at the summit of her cheek.

  Over time, Linno gains a small fame as people congratulate her on what they call “Linno’s window.” She is hired to paint another window for Frames & Optics, which consists of a giant diapered baby with a pillowy chest, wearing oversized, black-rimmed eyeglasses. Upon the owner’s request, s
he makes the eyes shine like pool blue marbles, though she has never seen a brown baby with pool blue eyes. The tailor’s window remains her favorite, and she elaborates upon the parcel paper painting that she initially designed for the tailor. In each corner, she adds a thicket of roses, and in the lower right corner, she draws her name in a tiny, undulating vine unlike the others, thorny and leafless, the green gone brown. Ammachi hangs the picture on the side wall of the sitting room.

  Whenever she passes by her windows, Linno slows her step and tries not to linger for too long, but she derives a pleasant vanity from staring, the kind that she assumes a beautiful woman must feel upon looking in a mirror. Sometimes the truth creeps up on her in a quiet, inner explosion—she made these things. On more than one occasion, the tailor has been known to say, “Linno can do more with her one wrong hand than anyone else can do with two!” And for the first time, when she hears mention of her wrong hand, Linno is proud.

  IN APRIL, Anju is notified that the panelists have selected her to be one of ten finalists, and that the primary judge, Miss Valerie Schimpf, will interview her personally. Miss Schimpf is an art teacher and counselor at the Sitwell School, and has spent the spring semester on sabbatical, teaching children at a fine arts school in Kochi.

  In a letter that is read and recited and handled like a relic, Anju is told that the interview will take place at “the Vallara residence.” Five days of cleaning ensue, but no matter how thoroughly Linno and Anju tidy the residence, the door appears ramshackle, the walls a funereal gray as soon as Miss Schimpf crosses the threshold. Linno notices things to which she rarely gives attention, like the creased poster of three pink-skinned babies in diapers, all sharing frustrated faces of constipation, next to the phrase CUTE AS BUTTONS! She wants to ask her father why he hung such a thing over the doorway, but he is conveniently out driving Abraham Chandy.