by Tania James
“More?” Anju asks, not meaning to.
“Manicure and pedicure.”
The thought of her own kind plagues Mrs. Solanki in every way, the thought of them coming just as much as the thought of them never coming at all.
“I am a someone here,” she says, riffling through the mail. A newsletter from the Indo-American Arts Council invites her to a gallery opening of a Persian miniaturist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She often attends such events and writes checks to the Indo-American Arts Council, which she tears from her checkbook with careless panache. “If I brought my sister and her family, where would they stay? With me. Whose kitchen would they swarm? Mine. You don’t understand these people. It’s part of our culture. If you bring someone, they are your responsibility.”
But there are other times, such as the nights when Uncle is once again working late, when Mrs. Solanki seems to have no one to phone. She leaves a few messages on the machines of various friends or apologizes profusely for interrupting someone’s dinner, and then surrenders to a lone glass of port at the kitchen counter. On occasion, she asks Anju if she wants to watch a DVD in the home theater. Their first film is My Fair Lady, Mrs. Solanki’s favorite. By the time Audrey Hepburn is pulled from the gutter and pruned into the hourglass fashion of a lady, her fair face blooming from the petaled collar of her pale pink dress, tears are trailing silently down Mrs. Solanki’s cheeks.
Hepburn says, “You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.” And with this, overcome, Mrs. Solanki lets escape a small, animal whimper.
WITHOUT MRS. SOLANKI to guide her, Anju dives into the city.
None of it seems true. None of it possible. That a castle so sprawling, so full of books, guarded by stone lions, can be entered—for free. That men and women stand on sidewalks and beseech passersby to take wedges of fancy soap, cups of raspberry sorbet, movie tickets, soft drinks, and iced coffee—for free. That in the subway, an old man draws a bow across the strings of a violin almost as ancient-looking as he, creating a sound of piercing melancholy, a sorrow almost seductive while he sits, a boulder against the ebb and flow of commuters who sometimes toss a few coins into the balding velvet of his open instrument case, but otherwise listen—for nothing.
Land of the free indeed.
It is Saturday afternoon, and feeling adventurous, Anju treks down to the Financial District, toting Linno’s sketchbook in her satchel. On the way, she is nearly killed a total of six times, usually when she scampers across the street just as a car is beeping and barreling toward her. In Kumarakom, cars chat in short, giddy honks, as careless and common as the bleating of sheep. It is only from the long bellowing honk of a cab driver, along with his battery of roaring curses, that Anju learns to obey the orders of the traffic light.
But she refuses to turn back, as she still has one last school assignment to complete.
Thus far, art class has inspired in Anju a vague but light distress, the kind of disaster that remains distant enough for time to resolve all things. On her second day of school, she found the class listed on her schedule, and when she tried to remove it, Miss Schimpf objected.
“My father would like for me to focus on studies,” Anju told her.
“Art is a kind of study,” Miss Schimpf said, looking hurt. “Besides, it’s an elective. You need an elective.”
Poor Miss Schimpf. Here among the smog-spewing cars, her skin has lost its tan translucence, her knuckles gone chalky and dry. Her lofty position as “visiting artist” has deflated to her previous title, that of “art teacher.” In Kerala, she cut through crowds like a celebrity, salwar-clad and fairy-tale blond, but here, walking the halls, she has returned to her usual state of anonymity. Sometimes she offsets her cardigans and khakis with wild rhinestoned bangles or a belled choker of black metal, the proud, noisy spoils of her travels. And yet Miss Schimpf is to Anju the same saint she always was, one who performed a miracle and exacted no debt in return.
“At least take your sketchbook around with you this weekend,” Miss Schimpf urged. “Draw anything that strikes you. I’m sure you can find something.” Anju agreed, not wanting to disappoint her.
Though Anju has never tried to draw before, she has considered using notebook paper to trace a picture of a tree, which she might then be able to transfer to the sketchbook. Or there must be how-to books that show how a circle becomes a nose becomes a lion in a jungle. Wasn’t Rousseau, untrained and self-taught, accused of a certain childishness of style? According to the school’s art history textbook: yes. In fact, she might try to assume his style as her own. To be brilliant, one must explode into the world with an unparalleled vision. To be gifted, one must simply borrow from someone else who is more gifted.
She continues on her journey down the island, such a tiny thing, changing its colors and contours from one mile to the next. Farther south, the buildings stand closely together, giant hives of industry. Outside the revolving doors, besuited men and women smoke and speak on cell phones, some of them Indian or maybe Pakistani. She is compelled to look at them as if they might recognize her, though it seems that they make a conscious effort to do the opposite.
When Anju can put off her task no longer, she sits on a bench and opens to a blank page in the sketchbook. The white of the pages nearly blinds her. Pressing her hand to the paper, she takes in the rough weave where Linno’s hand might have rested before she inked a dark dot—iris, eyelid, lashes, eye.
She remembers when the book, wrapped in brown parcel paper, passed across her lap from her father’s hand to Linno’s. She remembers the soft tear of paper, the strip of red that appeared, the twine knotted along the spine with what could only be love. When Anju saw the book, her own envy startled her, how it flamed up from a place she never knew existed. A feeling that tugs at her still, makes her doubt the very steps that brought her to this place, alone. Were her intentions ever clean? Her eyes grow full, reminded that there are untapped doors of the mind through which a person can fall and fall.
She shuts the book.
No one seems to notice her, engrossed as they are in the changing of traffic lights. Maybe each of them stepped on someone else to reach their cubicle of success, and maybe each is carrying his guilt, like a leaky pen, in a pocket of his heart. She watches the men with their ties like tongues over their shoulders, the women with their swollen handbags, their serious, sexy shoes. Anju could watch them for hours, imagining herself in similar footwear, expertly avoiding the treacherous grates through which a heel could fall. These are people who do not open doors; the doors automatically part for them. And if the doors do not part, these people fling them wide.
4.
IRD PREFERS NOT TO think of herself as a stalker, not with all these policemen prowling the subways. Two of them, a male and female, stand behind a card table next to a sign that declares their right to search any bag at will. The male fixes his gaze on Bird, and she can picture the abacus of his brain behind the broad forehead, making its weary calculations. Perhaps it is the size of her bag that attracts his attention or the black kerchief tied over her hair. Men used to eye her for different reasons. She wears the kerchief because it is windy, and she has recently come to notice a thinning of hair at her crown, like ice melting away from a thawing plain. Were she a Muslim, she would be no more committed to keeping her crown covered in public, a devotion born of being beautiful in her youth. A cursed gift, that kind of beauty, which takes itself back over time.
The policemen do not make Bird nervous, so much as the duty at hand. To calm herself, she buys a bag of Raisinets from a nearby magazine vendor, a pasty, sullen man with covers of naked ladies lining the top of his booth like prayer flags. In each, the girl looks somehow both chesty and emaciated, in contrast to the row catering to black clientele, in which the rear plays a more prominent role. Bird lingers before the women, snacking, and the policeman looks away.
If
he were to ask, Bird would unload the contents of her bag without complaint: a wallet, keys, an envelope. At home, in her bedroom, she stood for a full minute looking at the envelope, a pen in her right hand, wondering what to title its contents. One word gave way to another: A letter from your mother. To me. About you.
She left it blank.
A STALKER DOES NOT climb the subway stairs wincing, with one hand on her troublesome knee. A stalker moves along the current of people, does not slog through the masses like an oxcart taking up so much space. But on the prettied streets of the Upper West Side, Bird is fit to stalk, as she is at an age where trees win more attention. Some women, from a distance, seem to know how to live beyond the reach of age, an effect that is sometimes haunting. There are those with long, fawn brown hair or pert ponytails, who turn their withered faces and smile with shiny, graying teeth, ghosts of the girls they were.
Consulting her map, Bird finds her way to the Sitwell School and enters a shop across the street, whose storefront window will give her a clear view of Anju exiting her school. So intent is Bird on her object of focus that she hardly notices the interior of the store itself, until she is confronted with a lacy yellow bra draped on a hanger, each cup the size and depth of a salad bowl. Headless plaster torsos of the chesty/bony build are positioned throughout the boutique, each wearing a complicated lingerie set, one of which looks vaguely like a torture device with all its straps and buckles. Nearby, a young woman in a lab coat is showing a customer a brassiere, using words like “state of the art” and “invention” to explain its functions.
It seems that Bird has picked the wrong store in which to disappear. She explores a rack of white bras embroidered with cherries and squints at the tiny satin labels that warn against machine washing. When the bra doctor approaches and asks for whom Bird is shopping, Bird blurts out: “Myself.”
Dr. Bra seems warmed by the thought that a woman like Bird might be having sex. She offers to measure Bird’s bustline using the measuring tape around her neck. “You know, eight out of every ten women are wearing bras that don’t fit them properly.” Dr. Bra relays this statistic with dismay.
Bird knows better. The muscles slacken. The flesh descends. The wrinkles frown around the knees. Why fight? Why should acceptance mean defeat?
“No thank you,” Bird says. “Not today.”
Ever upbeat, Dr. Bra swallows rejection with a smile and says that she will be nearby, if needed.
Turning back to the window, Bird’s heart falls. Students are pouring through the school doors like so many limes rolling out of a sack. Their noise carries across the street, the calling of names and good-byes, messages faintly penetrating the window’s glass. Her eyes are too slow to search them all. Has Anju already gone? Would she stay late? The stupidity of Bird’s quest suddenly seems obvious.
After the first clot of students pushes through the door, a few strays saunter out. Among them, a slight black-haired girl. Bird’s first thought is Grade, whose face seems to ripple just beneath the surface of the girl’s, the cheekbones, the small, sharp chin. But there is also a blankness around the girl’s eyes that renders her nothing like Gracie, as though she has quarantined her emotions from the world.
Her school clothes fit awkwardly. She needs a mother to stitch the hem and cinch the skirt by adding a button to the waist. These are Bird’s thoughts, at a safe remove from the actuality of Anju crossing the street, walking down the sidewalk nearest to the lingerie store.
Bird huddles behind the lacy shrubbery of the bra rack. In passing, Anju looks up at the lingerie displays, two tall, naked mannequins, hands on hips, impatiently waiting to be dressed by the clerks. Bird can see clean into the girl’s thoughts because those thoughts were once her own: Nipples? On a doll? Though Anju does not notice her, Bird grows short of air. She grips the envelope in her satchel, once again struck by the lunacy of her project, to approach a young girl with a sweaty envelope in hand, and happily, madly insist: I know you. Here is proof.
As Anju passes, Bird reclaims her breathing. Her shoulders relax. If, this time, her courage has failed, her patience will not.
She emerges from the lingerie store and follows Anju from a distance. Even while people block her path, waving fliers and pushing strollers, even when stoplights stretch a chasm between pursuer and pursued, Bird always finds her way, her chest pulling in a singular direction. Past Fiftieth Street, Forty-ninth, and Forty-eighth, they turn a corner, one after the other, as if tethered.
At last, Bird pauses before the New York Public Library. Anju is climbing the stone steps. If she follows, what then? She notices Anju’s calves, boyish and strong, above narrow ankles. Legs that belong to Gracie. Bird’s heart, deceived, goes skipping after those legs.
Was it ever clearer than now? Time is but a circle, and a person might run from the past only to find herself faced with it in the end.
5.
N ORDER TO DROP OUT of art class, Anju has devised a tripartite plan, based on a term that she found in her pocket dictionary. Circumvention: Avoidance (of defeat, failure, unpleasantness, etc.) by artfulness or deception. She feels vindicated by the word “artfulness,” its favorable and unfavorable connotations coiled in an elegant word. Maybe she is not an artist, but she is certainly artful.
On Friday, after school, Anju begins with the first step of the Circumvention—the New York Public Library. She is unprepared for the library’s inner sanctum of marble and lowered voices, and grows ashamed of the amplified clops of her shoes perforating the cathedral quiet. Their echo carries all the way up the swerving stairways whose marble banisters are as wide as a footbridge. Giant candelabras stand at every archway, and not a hall goes without the engraved wisdoms and sculpted busts of notables. As in a museum, she is not sure what can be touched, but she strolls the corridors, light on her heels, with an expression of scholarly belonging.
In one of the smaller rooms, she pauses before a poster encased in glass, advertising a new exhibit called patterns of migration:
New societies, new peoples, and new communities usually originate in acts of migration. Someone or ones decide to move from one place to another. They choose a new destination and sever their ties with their traditional community as they set out in search of new opportunities, new challenges, new lives, and new life worlds.
What is a life world? And who is severing? Anju has always pictured her Pattern of Migration as an elliptical track, jogging from Kumarakom to the U.S. and back round again, gaining wealth and funneling money home with each revolution. She will continue orbiting until certain goals are met: an extra room built onto the side of the house for Ammachi, who has always cherished the idea of a second sitting room filled with viny houseplants. A tin or tile roof instead of ola. Enough income for her father to retire. An adjoining bathroom with a sitting toilet, more for show than usage, as the squatting toilet is more user-friendly. She finds it strenuous, looming over the sitting toilets, knees half bent, quivering against the possibility of contact. Sometimes she layers a wreath of toilet paper around the rim but still cannot bring herself to sit.
Mostly she engineers plans for Linno. Perhaps a visa, or a dowry, or tuition to attend some sort of vocational school. All or none or only part of the above, whatever she prefers. Then finally Linno will see that this elliptical odyssey was fueled by love all along, and she will be grateful and sorry for playing mute on the phone every single time that Anju has called and asked for her. And one day Anju will return forever, like a mythic ship gliding into port, and she will unlace her shoes and slip her big toes into her chappals and lie down on a bed all her own—
“May I help you?” asks a woman librarian, standing beside her.
The librarian’s eyes are as bright as the cadence of her question. She is fair-skinned, with a black kerchief over her head. She wears brown saddle shoes with rubbery soles that must have muffled her approach.
Anju turns away from the poster. The future will come, but first, the present, one muffled step at
a time.
She says, “I am looking for medical texts, please?”
AS IT TURNS OUT, the librarian is a volunteer. Her name, at first, is confusing.
“Beard?” Anju asks.
“Bird.”
“Burt?”
“Bird.”
Back and forth they peck at the name until Anju finally understands.
On the way to the medical texts, Bird takes her on a tour, gesturing around as they walk. Consuming the height of one great wall is a mural of a white-haired man cradling stone tablets in muscular arms, his hair billowing about him as he glares down on two cowering figures below. “And here we see a painting of God,” says Bird, “writing His punishments for Adam and Eve.”
Anju reads a nearby sign: THE ADJACENT PANEL DEPICTS MOSES DESCENDING FROM MOUNT SINAI WITH THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
For a tour guide, Bird spends more time looking at Anju than at the mural-laden halls through which they pass. Bird is not only looking, but scrutinizing in a way that makes Anju suggest that they part ways. “I think I know where I am going now,” she says.
This is the best that Anju can do. Crazy or not, Bird is an elder, and to say more would be disrespectful.
“Nonsense,” Bird says, as if abandoning a youth would be equally disrespectful.
SOMEONE AT THE INFORMATION DESK directs them to a room with two long wooden tables and shelves of texts so fat that pulling one from its spot makes the shelf look as though it is missing a tooth. Sitting down at a table, Anju consults the index of a medical encyclopedia. Bird takes the adjacent seat, her chin in her hand, watching Anju as if there were volumes to learn in her face alone.