ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  “And so,” Anthony Achen concludes, “when the angel Gabriel asked the Virgin Mary to bear the fruit of the world, the Immaculate Conception, did she doubt? No. Did she say, ‘Can I have a minute to think?’ No. Did she say, ‘I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Do with me what you will’? Absolutely yes. Because when God calls, we do not think. We trust. We go. We do.”

  In the audience, the Kapyar nods along as if he and Anthony Achen are engaged in a private conversation. As right-hand man to Anthony Achen, the Kapyar keeps his robes as white as his superior’s beard, bleached with bottles of Ujala. Sometimes, when Linno is bored, she makes a habit of watching the Kapyar’s movements, to see what rowdy boys he is glaring down over his shoulder, which ears he is planning to pinch, a small brutality that has earned him the unofficial title of “the Crab.” He looks over the congregation, his gaze laced with disapproval. Just before he catches her eye, Linno returns to the conclusion of Anthony Achen’s homily: “And then there are others who have nothing better to do than to steal ladies’ shoes from the doors of our very own church. Whoever has Pearlie Varkey’s shoes, please return them.”

  The congregation wears grave expressions, not only at Pearlie Varkey’s loss, but also the loss of trust among fellow Syrian Catholics. But maybe next time Pearlie Varkey will think twice about wearing her milk-white high heels to church, or any shoes whose insoles declare LIZ CLAIBORNE, and placing them at an obvious distance from the rabble of dusty sandals that belong to everyone else. Pearlie Varkey has family in Toronto and flies back and forth often, always with her tender feet buckled and belted into new styles. Not that theft is ever acceptable. But ask for attention and ye shall receive.

  Someday soon, Linno thinks, Anju will return buckled into a shoe like that.

  Ever since Anju’s plane ticket arrived in the mail, it has occupied a hallowed place behind the curio glass, nestled against her plaque along with her passport. And then came her suitcase, open-mouthed in the living room, collecting the clothes she would wear, the foods she would bring, including jackfruit that Ammachi specially fried and dried for her and hard balls of sugared sesame seed.

  These thoughts weave in and out of Linno’s prayer, reducing its meaning to a stream of vowels and fricatives. She stands in the back, rows of heads packed thickly all the way to the nave. On the left stand the men, on the right are the women, crowns covered with sari pallus and shawls, and between them the long, wide aisle that leads straight to Anthony Achen. Above him hangs a massive tapestry of Saint George slaying the dragon. With his placid blue eyes, Saint George appears almost benevolent, aloft on his bucking white horse, lovingly plunging his spear into the writhing side of the dragon whose eyes look almost as human, but brown.

  On the coir mats, the congregation rises and sits, rises and sits, the soles of their feet stamped with waffled patterns, so they can walk into the world weak-kneed but blessed. The hymns drone through the church like tides of music, a new verse beginning in the front row with the overeager Kapyar before the previous verse has finished in the back.

  O Saint Yohannan Nepumocianos!

  Your heavenly blessings, priceless blessings

  Bestow on us, your humble servants.

  We pray you.

  We beseech you.

  From here, Linno spots Anju standing closer to the front, her hands folded, her shawl draped over her head.

  AFTER TWO SOMBER HOURS of church, Ammachi enjoys a bit of socializing. Aglow, she flits through the scrum of people that have gathered around the entrance, asking after children, parents, and ailments. But that day, every question pertains to Anju—when is her flight, which airline, who is to meet her? Restless, Anju excuses herself, claiming that she has several errands to run, while Linno stays behind to wait for Ammachi and, to her dismay, to act as Anju’s spokeswoman. The more Linno laughs and thanks everyone for their well wishes, the more it sounds to her ears as if she is laughing at an ugly, exuberant joke in which she has been made the fool.

  While Ammachi gossips, Linno makes her way to the nearby cemetery, which is rounded by a short wall, brightly gilded with moss. Teak and tamarind trees fringe the border, shedding dead leaves over the village of crosses and tombs left to bake in the shadeless heat. Linno passes an ivory vault trimmed in pink, a bird-splattered cross planted on top. This is one of the many family tombs that preside aboveground, holding eight to twenty bodies in separate numbered drawers. Those who cannot afford the family tombs are assigned an earthen burial, a mound temporarily marked by a wooden cross.

  Once, several years after her mother’s death, Linno visited the cemetery with Ammachi only to find strangers at the same gravesite, mourning their dead son. Ammachi told her that Gracie’s remains had been dug up and deposited in the Asthi Kuzhi, the Bone Pit on the other side of the church, more than twenty feet deep, gathering to its heart the generations of broken bones that would soften, gradually, to ash and dust. In time, the dead son would be moved to the Asthi Kuzhi as well, leaving the nameless mound to be filled with another body in need, and grieving strangers would continue to converge at the same spot to mourn their different losses. Sorrow was not a space to be bounded.

  LINNO FINDS ANJU crouched before the wooden cross that once marked their mother’s place. Anju lays a few weak wildflowers atop the mound, her head bowed, her eyes closed as she prays. Her shawl does not match her salwar, two discordant shades of blue. An obvious mistake, but just like Anju to be so careless, and not only with her clothes. A hundred prayers would not change her.

  As Anju rises, Linno asks if all is packed.

  Anju whirls around. A smile follows, relieved and artificial. Almost done, she says, though she still has to convert her rupees to dollars. Ammachi knows a man who can give them a good exchange rate, under the table of course, since the banks will rob you blind—

  “And my painting,” Linno says. “Have you packed that too?”

  During the long pause that ensues, Anju’s hands fall slowly to her sides. “I promise I will be careful with it.”

  “That’s only one of my worries.”

  “Miss Schimpf wants to put it in some sort of student exhibition.”

  “As if it’s yours.”

  “Yes.”

  The softness of her answer, delicate, almost inquisitive, only enrages Linno the more.

  “She saw the tailor’s painting,” Anju says. “And she asked me if I had more.”

  “You showed her my sketchbook?” The thought surprises Linno even as she says it, as the image returns to her of Miss Schimpf looking down at something in her arms, Anju beside her, hungry for approval. “You went through my things and brought her my sketchbook?”

  Anju draws herself up and attempts an innocent expression, without remorse, if not for the way she is wiping her hands against each other, over and over, long after they are clean. “But I’ll bring all of it back.”

  “With your name on it.”

  “Not written on it.”

  “So?”

  “I’m trying to help us get somewhere, Linno. I’m trying to change our lives.”

  “Your life first! By stepping all over mine! And then what will happen when you leave? You will go on and I will be here, only a chapter in your life.”

  Anju stares at the ground, pained, but not pained enough. Linno knows the way her sister will continue, the way her temporary regrets, with time, will become trivialities, things she will assign to desperation and youth. If only it were as simple as that.

  “Put that shawl back on its hanger,” Linno says without emotion. “You always forget.”

  Anju looks up, cautiously hopeful, but Linno is already walking away.

  Linno tramples over the mimosas that she and Anju used to tickle as children, watching the edgy fernlike leaves fold at the slightest brush. Praying Plants, Anju called them as they shimmered in the wind. After a while, Linno slows her pace, as there are people ahead who will notice her haste and ask her questions, who will hear the tears lodged in her throat
. She walks, each step more leaden than the last, toward the distant thrum of voices taking their leave.

  II.

  ORIENTATION

  1.

  OR YEARS, Anju has made a habit of mentally penning lines to her autobiography. It is almost always the same line, a variation on the epiphanic flashes found in biographies she has read, most recently those of Franklin Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, and an unauthorized tome on Oprah Winfrey. In each, the line always ends with: … I found myself at a crossroads.

  And now, sitting in window seat 29A, selected for its proximity to one of four emergency exits, she thinks: In the airplane, I found myself at a crossroads. At the moment, there is no crossroads, only a gray runway leading in a singular direction that her tiny window will not allow her to see. But recalling the line gives Anju a modicum of control, a sense of promise. A crossroads does not end in a crash.

  The sari-clad stewardesses are slim, pretty, irritable. The pleats of their saris are neatly stacked, like Oriental fans, giving the impression that these are women who never sit or slump or sweat. They poke Anju awake when she tries to sleep through a meal. Wrapped in blankets, she fingers the plastic knife and picks at the papadam, while reading the safety manual for the seventh time. She stares at the screen built into the space above her tray table, where she can track her journey as a jagged blue vein slogging along from Kochi to Mumbai, and eventually Mumbai to London, then London to New York.

  After dinner, the child in front of her, demanding leg room, reclines to a nearly horizontal position, so that Anju is forced to watch the screen within inches of her face. A Bollywood actor is talking about his favorite restaurant, Lotus, near Juhu Beach. “I highly recommend the strawberry salad,” he says in dainty Anglicized English, pointing a forkful of salad at his fans, who toss and turn in their economy seats. “It’s succulent, truly succulent.”

  THE JOURNEY BEGAN with a white jeep that arrived outside her home in Kumarakom, having miraculously navigated the scarred, narrow roads. While the driver roped her belongings across the top of the jeep, family and neighbors gathered in the sitting room. They bowed their heads and, facing east, murmured a prayer for safekeeping, each at his own pace, so that the disparate words—“servants” … “bestow” … “blessings”—floated around Anju’s ears like the slow pulsing of fireflies past her window, the ones she watched for hours the night before, unable to sleep.

  Anju mumbled along, focused on the painting of P. C. Mappilla that hung on the wall opposite. When Linno was eleven, Ammachi had commissioned her to paint the portrait of their ancestor, a minor celebrity of his time, according to Ammachi. Having no other model, Linno painted a rosier version of Melvin, with the same hollows in the cheeks, the same bumpy nose, but a fuller head of hair.

  According to family history, Mappilla descended from the first Indian Christians, themselves converted by St. Thomas in A.D. 56 (“The Christian Christians,” Ammachi said. “Not like the latecomers over in Goa, all those Hernandos and Fernandos.”) In 1653, along came the Portuguese priests with their swinging censers of incense, their ribbons of Latin chant, intending to spread their brand of Christianity to the Indians, making Hernandos and Fernandos of whomever they could. So Mappilla, along with the rest of his congregation, tied a rope around an iron cross in the courtyard of their church. In protest, they held fast to the rope and swore on the Bible of the Church of Our Lady of Life at Mattanchery that they would never be subject to the Portuguese bishops.

  “The Coonan Cross,” Ammachi called it. “To this day, you can see it in Mattanchery. Bent from the force of their pulling.”

  “Why were they pulling?” Anju, then a little girl, had asked.

  “The lesson is twofold. One: force of mind brings force of body. And two: the West is not the best.”

  And now, years later, Anju stood poised and packed for the less-than-best West.

  Ammachi mashed a kiss into Anju’s cheek, crying, clutching her granddaughter’s face as though she planned to pluck it off as a memento. Several times, Melvin reassured Anju that he felt no trace of inner itching, so the flight would be fine. When the jeep honked, he flinched.

  “It’s only ten months,” Anju said, though uttering the time frame seemed only to lengthen it.

  Everyone agreed: such a short time amounted to no time at all. But what was good-bye between those who had never spoken it? Awkwardly, Melvin folded his daughter’s face into his chest and kissed the top of her head, his red eyes all the while on the vehicle that would take her away.

  LINNO WAS THE ONLY tearless one. She stood against the wall with arms crossed, a pose that told she was in no mood to be touched. Anju glimpsed the old woman Linno might become, thin and embittered, arms wrapped so tight she seemed to embrace herself.

  “Linno,” Anju said gently, by way of good-bye. Linno did not move.

  “Don’t look so jealous, chedduthi!” one of the neighbors called out. “Anju will come back and take you too!”

  They all laughed, all except Linno and Anju.

  The jeep rattled away. Over her shoulder, Anju waved and her well-wishers waved back. They prolonged the wave, palms wagging, faces growing blank until the gesture lost the luster of farewell. Anju wiped her eyes, weeping not for the people who were waving, but for the one person who wouldn’t. Not once had Linno broken her silence since leaving their mother’s grave. Her face remained as stony as it had been that day.

  SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD and here is Anju, stepping on American tile with its slick, game-show sheen for the first time in her life.

  The JFK customs officer asks Anju a series of questions. Many friends and acquaintances have prepped her for this interview, have coached her to insist that she has absolutely no designs whatsoever to stay in the States. Even if she has designs (everyone has designs), she is to be firmly bland in her lack of imagination and ambition.

  The gatekeeper, a woman with a crispy-looking perm, opens an envelope that had been sent to Anju by the Chennai consulate, with the warning that should she open it herself, she would not be allowed entry. Glancing at its contents, the gatekeeper asks why she wishes to enter the United States, and then, how long she plans to stay. “Ten months only,” Anju says. She is about to explain how she was recruited by Americans, but to her slight dismay, the official stamps her papers and welcomes her.

  After waiting an hour to retrieve her luggage from its carousel, Anju surrenders her bags to the poking and prodding of another official. He unearths a set of dolls that fit one inside the next, each of them a pear-shaped American president. Anju explains that these are gifts for her host family, while the officer unscrews Nixon and sniffs inside. Anju does not explain how she spent an hour in three trinket shops, hunting for the perfect present. Her father begged her to take frond-woven handicrafts, on the assumption that six dolls did not make an appropriate gift, but this series of presidents birthing smaller presidents epitomizes something unclear yet profound about America, about its leaders fattening with optimism, about growing toward the future while carrying the past in deepening chambers. Surely her host family will display them with warmth.

  With all her bags and belongings intact, Anju pushes her cart toward the exit sign, where the glass doors part automatically. Once outside, a placard with her new name catches her eye: MISS ANJU MELVIN.

  Her real name is Anju Vallara, but at her father’s insistence, she lopped off her last name and took his first as her last. “You need a name that people can pronounce correctly,” he said.

  “Why can’t I correct people myself?” she asked.

  Melvin cited the names of acquaintances who had gone abroad—look at Gopal Ananthakrishnan who anointed himself Gopal Ananth, or Johny Kochuvarkey who became John Koch. Everyone tossed and scrambled their names into something more globally palatable, so likewise Anju found her passport and visa bearing her new title under a picture that rendered her a bit lemurlike, with eyes surprised and far apart, the rest of her face receding to a timid chin.

  �
��Miss Melvin?” asks the uniformed man holding the sign.

  A regrettable change, she thinks.

  She nods hello as he takes control of her cart. He is a young black-American. Or is it black-African? African-black? Blafrican? She experiments with several more hyphenates, all in her head, though none seems correct and her driver seems exactly the wrong person to ask. They walk out into a world of concrete and glowing brake lights, people clasping one another, a pink balloon floating into the rich blue sky, forgotten, and a couple that meet in a violent kiss, the man’s hands locking the woman’s head into place as if it, too, might drift away.

  The driver opens the car door (For whom? For her!), and she enters to find them divided by a wall of dark glass. In the reflection, she examines her ensemble, the flowery blouse and skirt that swished with a chic nonchalance back home. The outfit has suffered from the journey, looking now like a flowery tent that collapsed into wrinkles all around her.

  She shivers, assaulted by mighty gusts of air-conditioning on either side, and pokes her fingers into the empty cup holders. She reviews what she knows of her host family: the Solankis, a Gujarati family of three, with a mother and father whom she will call Uncle and Auntie out of respect, if not relation. Being Hindu, they will likely impose a beefless diet within the house, but she hopes that they will be more forgiving of fish. They have a son, several years older than Anju, currently attending a celebrated college named Princeton. The father is a doctor. The mother is somewhat famous as the host of an American daytime television show called Four Corners. Her name is Sonia Solanki.