ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Always I was your myna bird, Tobichayan, your doll made of glass. Only now do I see the truth: that I have been living with a strange man for eight years, that I have given him three children. Now I can stand it no longer!

  The customers ignore Ghafoor’s lines as most of their concerns lie with their facial hair and how best to get rid of it.

  Despite so much shared history, Bird left the salon over a matter of interior design. One day, she arrived at work to find an old show card framed on the wall. She remembered the poster well, the silhouette of a myna bird perched on a branch in the lower right-hand corner, while more birds were depicted in flight, aswirl around the words:

  Apsara Arts Club Presents …

  Kalli Pavayuda Veede

  starring the exquisite BIRDIE KAMALABHAI

  Bird stared at the show card, unblinking. In a strangely hollowed voice, she demanded that Ghafoor remove it. She would not say why. She would not mention the name on the cast list that plunged her into a pain so acute she had to look away and gather herself.

  They fought over whether the show card should stay or go, which became an argument about Ghafoor’s poor managerial skills and Bird’s unwillingness to learn how to wax or thread. Ghafoor called Bird a prima donna. Bird accused Ghafoor of stealing Western ideas because he had none of his own. Enraged, he countered with Varghese Mappilai’s 1893 adaptation of Taming of the Shrew, the earliest in a long tradition of lending and borrowing, but Bird stopped him with an outstretched hand. “Just give me what you owe and I will leave.”

  After he counted out the bills, she pocketed the money and collected her belongings from her station. There was not much to collect as she had never brought photos and frames to work, like the other ladies did, no small, portable windows into her personal life. The show card was personal enough. With so little to tidy up before leaving, it was as though she had never arrived.

  THE OFFICE POSITION was a sitting job, clearly a step up. To prove herself, Bird was willing to take a typing test, but Mr. Tandon only questioned her about her commitment to the job and her ability to make chai.

  “I am very loyal,” Bird said, wondering if she were making herself sound like a dog. “I speak Malayalam, Tamil, some Bengali, Hindi, and English. And I make my own chai masala, not like the gunpowder that comes in the plastic packages.”

  “Impressive. How do you know all these languages?”

  “I was born in Kerala, but I have been traveling since I was young. I was an actress.” She regrets this statement, as the response is usually one of amused doubt.

  “I believe that.” He studied her. She felt semiprecious under his gaze until he added: “You have a certain grandmotherly quality. I think anyone would believe you.”

  She wondered why Mr. Tandon had not tested her secretarial skills, but since then, she has learned the breadth of her job. Not simply a secretary, she is a presence. When clients give her their names, she can pinpoint their mother tongues with near perfect accuracy. She reaches out with their language, or the closest ones she knows, and the comprehending client relaxes into a chair and accepts a Styrofoam cup of chai. Over the past month, Bird has learned to tell when language and chai are the closest a client has come to home.

  BECAUSE EVERY FRIDAY is a half day, Bird’s schedule leaves her free to enjoy the Manorama at leisure. As is her custom, she spends her Friday lunch at Tandoori Express, a narrow restaurant crammed with tables, the low ceiling strewn with so many disco lights and crepe paper mobiles that the space resembles some sort of electrified cave, thick with neon stalactites. During the day, thankfully, the lights remain off. The waiters know her enough to predict the small packet of honey that she prefers with her tea, and Arpit serves her regular order of dahi batata puri, four crispy disks as opposed to the usual three. Tea, honey, puri, and paper. At her age, consistency is all she hopes for.

  She spreads the Malayala Manorama on the table for the first skim through. The front page tells of an ongoing fight between a Coca-Cola plant and tribals in Palakkad who blamed the plant for draining the drought-prone land of water and leaving behind toxic wastes. Pictures show the tribals gathered in a sit-in strike, the women’s pallus drawn over their heads, while another sit-in takes place nearby, among the families of laid-off workers who look not unlike their opposition. A few policemen in khaki uniforms hover around them, hands held behind their backs, looking off to the right or left but not at those seated below them. Bird knows these lands; her mother was from Palakkad, but it feels insincere to consider their struggle hers. She has not been back in twenty-two years. Who among them would consider her their own?

  She looks for lighter stories. On the second page, she comes across a picture of a girl holding on to one side of a plaque, a white woman holding on to the other side. The headline reads KUMARAKOM GIRL WINS NEW YORK SCHOLARSHIP.

  This is the type of article that Bird usually ignores. Triumphant parents constitute a high fraction of the Manorama‘s subscribers, thriving in their dual roles as publicists, phoning in their childrens’ successes in spelling bees, national exams, synchronized swimming competitions. Someone’s child is always winning.

  But this article confronts her with names she buried long ago.

  … Miss Vallara is the daughter of Melvin and Gracie Vallara, and the granddaughter of Elsamma Vallara …

  Three times in one sentence, “Vallara” bobs up like sea-swept flotsam that will not sink.

  Bird looks at the waiter beside her, who reaches down to rescue the spoon by her ankle. His face is heavy with concern. What is his name? She knows it but cannot remember. When did she drop her spoon? She did not hear the sound. And even now, it requires some effort to hear his words, as though muscling upward from deep waters, breaking the surface for air.

  “Are you all right?” the waiter asks, his forehead creased.

  She could say that she knows the girl in the photo, but she does not know the girl at all. It is foolish to think so, from just the two paragraphs that the article offers. But she does know the name of the school, the Sitwell School, and the address will be easy to acquire. For now, the girl is little more than a picture to Bird, just as she herself must be to these waiters, a lonely woman in the corner booth, whose small, hard features bespeak an age older than her own.

  3.

  O EDUCATE HERSELF on the social strata of the American high school, Anju watches several American movies on Mrs. Solanki’s home theater, a screen that nearly engulfs an entire wall, much like the tapestry of St. George at church. Many of the movies involve a nymph whose beauty goes unseen behind glasses, a bun, and baggy clothing, though during the course of the movie, the nymph removes her glasses, releases her bun, and tightens her belt, thereby wooing her classmates as well as her leading man. The lesson to be learned: assimilation is an equation that can be reduced to two variables—a short, swishy haircut and a few smooth lines.

  At the Sitwell School, Anju finds it difficult to cast students into their proper roles, especially when she can hardly tell one from another. Most students come in shades of pink and white, plus the occasional orange of a girl who appears to have slept in a kiln. Most boys bear monosyllabic names—Matts and Mikes and Daves and Dans—while some scions stand alone, like Leland or Grayson or Jackson. Everyone wears the standard white collared shirts, the boys’ slacks slung low, the girls’ skirts hemmed high. A few, however, stand apart for unique reasons. Like Dena Geisler, who presses her hair with a flatiron that gives her a singed smell all day. And Shane Hootnick, a lumbering man-child who begins every Monday morning in homeroom with a report of the weekend’s beery excess.

  At first, she expects the other students to ask her any number of questions about Sonia Solanki—what it might be like to eat breakfast with a celebrity, what Sonia looks like in the morning, before makeup. But Anju quickly learns that Mrs. Solanki is only a semicelebrity compared with some of the other stars who have traveled these halls and attended these Open Houses. Someone’s godmother is Barbara Wa
lters. Someone else’s uncle is a movie director, the one who made the blockbuster about the androids sent to reverse the events of Pearl Harbor. To most of these students, Mrs. Solanki’s face is like the flag of a small European nation, vaguely familiar, obviously important in some way, but difficult to classify.

  As for the other students, they are distantly welcoming, but often Anju feels that people are greeting her, chatting with her, smiling at her out of courtesy. She is constantly receiving thanks, for no apparent reason. If she answers a question about the time, they thank her. If she gives them a pencil to borrow, they give thanks. She wonders if this is part of a larger national psychology, a combination of good intentions and guilt. Or maybe thanks is simply thanks. She also wonders if her lack of thank-yous leaves the impression of thanklessness, when in truth the gratitude she feels for her classmates, her teachers, this country, all of this weighs so heavily sometimes she can but lift her eyes from the blond wood floors.

  In gym, when someone passes her the basketball, Anju says, “Thank you,” and immediately another girl steals the ball from her hands.

  THE ONLY ONE TO PAY prolonged attention to Anju is Sheldon Fischer, known to his classmates as Fish. His skin possesses a pale vitality set off by a shrub of dark curls, a style that seems to belong on a tortured doll. From time to time, he plucks the shrub with a black comb. Its handle is shaped like a fist.

  Fish received the comb from one of his friends, Paz L. Mundo, who performs spoken word poetry at various Brooklyn venues of exclusive repute. “Everyone there is black,” Fish says proudly. “Usually I’m the only white guy.” Fish has never taken the microphone, but he plans to, as soon as he comes up with a good stage name. (Aided by her thesaurus, Anju comes up with suggestions—Waxy Alabaster, the Achromic Bomb, and so on—none of which appeals to Fish.)

  His main concern is getting into Yale, which was attended by his mother, his father, and both sets of grandparents, their family tree well-watered by blue-blood educations. “Harvard and Princeton,” he says, “are for the socially deformed.” “Harvard” and “Yale”—she knows these words as she knows the word “Everest.” All are equally gauzy and mythic, names that hang in the air like mist.

  She has no doubt that Fish will summit every goal. He is perhaps the smartest member of his class, a role he both relishes and rejects. During democratic circle discussions, he seems weary of the ping-pong of student opinion, and Anju feels similarly. When all the desks are in a circle, every answer is right. All are equal. Even the teacher sits among them like a big, conciliatory child. Through all this, Fish keeps his arms crossed and his expression unimpressed, as if mutely guarding a multitude of truths. From his posture, Anju learns that a certain kind of silence appears weightier and wiser than speech.

  During Anju’s first week, Fish tells her not to worry. “I’m not going to ask if you’re betrothed or if you have a dowry or whatever else these fools have been asking.” The truth is that no fool has asked her any of these things at all. “So are you seeing anybody?”

  She is not sure what exactly he means, but shakes her head.

  “Cool,” he says.

  How suprising that Fish is so relaxed around her—his new rival—and even seeks out the company of his greatest academic threat. Back home, her #1 threat was Manilal Iyer, a small scholar who clutched his books to his chest with a protective, hungry love. On the rare occasion that he looked at her, he did so with such intensity that he seemed to be lining her up between crosshairs.

  But at Sitwell, there is space. One student’s success does not imply another student’s defeat.

  Not only space, but choice, as revealed in the breadth of cafeteria options, a dietary freedom far evolved from what she experienced at her previous school, that virtually changeless trio of dal, papadum, and rice.

  But here: a multitude of salads that taste nothing alike! Tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, potato salad, seafood salad, not to mention chef’s, Caesar, and Cobb. She samples some of each exotic entrée—a pot pie, a casserole, a complicated lasagna. No matter that the lasagna leaks a diluted juice that sloshes around the contours of its squarish bowl, or that certain cups of chocolate pudding come veiled with skin. The opportunity to turn something down, to glance at the achromic cauliflower and move on, to pick at a few foods, guzzle others, and then casually, guiltlessly, slide them all off the tray and into the trash if one wishes—this, Anju believes, this is the essence of Americana.

  IN ADDITION TO three fresh school uniforms, Anju receives a student handbook and a schedule that depicts her week as a rectangle, each day divided into blocks of varied colors, a well-manicured garden of time. How she wishes her after-school time were equally plotted. But as she has no friends, no after-school activities, she often finds herself at home, alone, with Mrs. Solanki.

  Mrs. Solanki’s voice has the dispersive quality of a gas, reaching into every room of the house even when she whispers. At first, Anju is reluctant to close the door to her own room, worried that this might seem offensive or suspicious, but she soon realizes that with her door closed or open, Mrs. Solanki’s phone conversations filter up through the vent in the carpet. “She’s from Kerala … Oh please, Jeff, it’s nothing … I’m just trying to give back.”

  Through these overheard conversations, Anju comes to understand that Jeff, like the son taking time off from Princeton, is both a source of frustration and desperation for Mrs. Solanki. Jeff Priddy is one of the Four Corners producers, and Mrs. Solanki harbors a deep and unsubtle desire to be taken more seriously by Jeff and his cohorts. More than once, Anju has heard Mrs. Solanki complaining to her husband of the fluff pieces she must often introduce to the other ladies—usually about perfumes, cooking, or on one occasion hatha yoga. Regularly, she brings up Jeff’s failure to “push the envelope,” as with the Ayurveda episode, in which she wanted to focus on the economic debate between Britain and India over who should control the Ayurvedic market, and in her words, “the Western attempt to steal a global market worth two hundred seventy billion dollars! We are talking about five thousand years of Indian intellectual property here—how is that not riveting?” Jeff’s position: Let’s be pleasantly educational, not controversial. But during the taping, Mrs. Solanki insisted on mentioning in her otherwise pleasant segment: “And now, popularized by Madonna and Cher, Ayurveda is even gaining the interest of British Parliament, which, two years ago, ranked Ayurveda as hocus-pocus, about as useful as hypnotherapy. Now, it seems, everyone wants a piece of the pie.”

  Despite these occasional tiffs, Mrs. Solanki is all sweetness and suggestions when on the phone with Jeff. “Oh, I’m happy to be a host parent if it means promoting higher education among young Indian women. Really, I consider myself a global citizen, Jeff, so I think of women’s rights on a worldwide scale. I’m sure that even in Kerala, the girls have fewer opportunities. Studies show that in a tiny Tamil village—I don’t remember the name—one hundred ninety-six girl babies were slaughtered by infanticide in one year alone…. Yes, China’s much much worse. But that would be a topic, wouldn’t it? Infanticide?”

  At times like this, Anju wants to holler through the vent that female infanticide is about as popular in Kerala as Four Corners. But here among the lace and pulled-silk pillows, yelling would be unseemly, especially at the one who has provided the pillows.

  IN HAPPY TIMES, Mrs. Solanki is girlish and warm, painting the bucolia of her life’s history in golden tones. “Varun and I had a love marriage,” she says to Anju on one occasion, her palms hugging a mug of Belgian hot chocolate. “A very big upset to his family. They thought I trapped him, you know, because they knew what I came from. A shack no bigger than an outhouse.”

  Mrs. Solanki glances at the glass shelf fastened to the wall next to Anju. On this, propped among several other frames, is a small photo of a young Mrs. Solanki with eyes like large blots of ink lined with kohl. Her posture in the portrait tells that even in her youth, despite her circumstances, she seemed aware of her potent
ial to rise in the world. Not a single picture of Anju possesses the magnetism of this one. Mrs. Solanki’s sisters must have stood by in jealous awe.

  “Do you miss them?” Anju asks. “Your sisters?”

  “Missing …,” Mrs. Solanki says softly. She taps her wedding band against the mug, like the double tap of a conductor rousing silence from an orchestra. “‘Missing’ is not the word for it. What is that feeling?” She looks at Anju with sincere concentration, and Anju, in return, finds herself hanging upon every word, as if her own future lies in the answer. “I miss what we were. I miss something that no longer exists. My sisters and I, our simple life among the jasmine and mulberry bushes.”

  If Mrs. Solanki is just off the phone with one of her sisters, all of whom have remained among the jasmine and mulberry bushes, her tone changes considerably.

  “All they want is a visa. ‘Bring me! Bring me!’ they say. ‘Don’t you care about your own kind?’ My own kind. My own kind are masters of manipulation. I sent my sister a pair of Nike sneakers last month, but her son is complaining that they aren’t Air Force Ones. I said, ‘You can’t get these for fifty dollars!’ And she said, ‘Fifty dollars? You spend more money to get your manicure!’”