ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Upon returning home, he complained to his friends of the smoke, the congestion, the too-sweet tea, the food heavy with ghee, the beggars with sunken, bullet-hole eyes. But as he grew older, none of these reasons approached the real belief to which he clung like a zealot, that his presence in Bombay had kept him from his wife, thus severing the sweet, green years of his marriage. Every zealot has his target, and to Melvin’s mind, Bombay was to blame.

  OVER CHRISTMAS, he came home to Kumarakom with the express purpose of finding a wife. Marriage was a stage of life to which he was resigned, an eventuality for which he had no way to prepare. He simply told himself that on his marriage night, either carnal knowledge would descend on him like a holy revelation or he would disappoint his wife. If the latter were true, at least they would already be married, and therefore compelled to work on it for the rest of their lives.

  But once in Kumarakom, Melvin began to hope, and the thought of his future wife brought a delicious thrill. She would be there when he woke and when he returned home. Her words would break the tedium of days. She would prepare for him a tiffin of lunch to take to work, and when he opened it, his face would be lovingly caressed by steam. On his rare days off, maybe they would point to a place on a map and whimsically decide to take the train there.

  Such innocent fantasies ended as soon as he saw a picture of Gladwyn, the girl his father had deemed a good catch because of her dowry and parentage. The only aesthetic quality that concerned Appachen was the girl’s fairness; he was otherwise blind to her buckteeth. Melvin felt too embarrassed to object, but he proposed that they let the girl’s family wait for a week, lest better offers should come along. “What better?” Appachen asked, genuinely puzzled. “Fine. A week.”

  The week brought no new offers, and by Saturday, Melvin resigned himself to a future with Gladwyn and children with dental problems. That evening, he attended an outdoor play that was showing in town, wanting the escape of some pretty, fluffy fairy tale. He hoped that this drama troupe would be less depressing than the K.P.A.C. troupe, which performed Communist plays about the injustices of capitalism, or Geetha Theatres, which championed the opposing Congress Party plays. This was a new drama troupe called Apsara Arts Club; he had seen their show card posted on the wall of a tea shop. For tonight’s performance, they were presenting Kalli Pavayuda Veede, based on a European play called A Doll’s House, starring “the exquisite BIRDIE KAMALABHAI.” Melvin sat in one of the many plastic chairs arranged over the great green lawn of the Thirunakkara Maidan, beneath lofted strings of white lights strewn around the heads of leaning palms.

  From the moment Birdie Kamalabhai appeared onstage, the story seemed to close in around Melvin; he felt enveloped by her plight. Neera was her character’s name. Her costars were also talented, even the teenage boy playing the servant, his youth apparent in the high pitch of his voice. His costume stripped him of seriousness, a cross between a genie and the Air India mascot, with a bulbous, ruby-colored turban atop his head.

  But no matter which actor was next to Birdie Kamalabhai, it was she who possessed the stage. She was beautiful in her desperation, fumbling as she made the Christmas Star, quivering as she spoke: “It is all nonsense. This Christmas will be perfect. I will do everything I can think of to please you, my husband! I will sing for you, dance for you….” And when she danced for her husband, fear swirled and cycloned through her body, gathering to her all the sympathy in the audience, who quietly condoned her leaving of insensitive Tobin. This from a rigorously pious audience who shrank from the very thought of divorce like mosquitoes from marigolds. Contrary to their social codes, they forgave Neera, and it was all due to Birdie Kamalabhai. Never, until now, had Melvin witnessed such miracles of the theater, far more wondrous than those of cinematic special effects.

  As Melvin watched the play, another one unfolded in his mind, starring Birdie and himself. He imagined her wearing the kind of flowery muumuus that his mother wore at bedtime, but uneasy with the idea, he mentally redressed his Birdie in a pale cotton sari. The fluidity of her movement translated into the fluidity of her daily chores, singing as she swept the meager floor, straightening the rug with her outstretched toe, his tiny flat thrumming with her graceful energy.

  It was at that moment, mid-daydream, that Servant came bustling along Melvin’s row. With his performance over, he was joining the audience, all the while staring at Birdie Kamalabhai as if a single blink might destroy the mirage. Lost within his trance, Servant failed to remove his oversized hat when taking the seat directly in front of Melvin.

  At first, Melvin tried edging from side to side, but the view of Birdie Kamalabhai was eclipsed by the hat. He tried to make a few hissing noises, but Servant did not turn. Melvin waited until intermission to tap him on the shoulder and whisper, “Eh! Your thotti is blocking me!”

  Servant turned, putting a protective hand to his hat. They stared at each other, and gradually Melvin was filled with a thick, viscous terror, a slow-growing regret. An English phrase came automatically to his lips, one that he used often at the Oasis Hotel: “Excuse me, miss.”

  Servant removed her hat. Underneath, hiding all along, was a large, black bun.

  A bit wounded, the lady asked if Melvin really thought her hat looked like a bucket. He quickly said no. A fruit maybe, from a distance, but not a bucket. He was unsure of his words, focused instead on the mole at the outer corner of her eye. She said that she was replacing a man who had previously played the servant role, but to mask her gender, she had spent two nights crafting the hat from plaster and paper. She had even visited a fabric store in Ernakulam for the red glitter, which, to her frustration, continues to turn up in the strangest of places, a red fleck in her eyebrow, another between her toes. Very nice glitter, he assured her. A manly glitter.

  At this, she smiled. The white of her teeth broke the dark.

  As people around them shifted and stretched, Melvin and the lady remained chatting. Her name was Gracie. Later, he would find it difficult to remember the specifics of their conversation, though he did recall asking her if she enjoyed acting.

  “I do, only I wish I had more time to improve.” She looped her arm over the back of her chair and rested her chin on her knuckles. “You should’ve seen me when I started. So nervous, so distracted. You would be too if you had to rehearse with Birdie Kamalabhai.”

  He asked her why she had continued, if she found it difficult.

  “Because my mother disapproved.” She gave him a rueful smile. “But then I began to like being up there.”

  Here she paused, her brow furrowed as she scraped a speck of glitter from her hand. Her silence made him fear that he had said something wrong, but she was only thinking of her answer. “To be up there is to be natural. Free.”

  “Free from what?”

  She turned to him. “You can see it in Birdie’s performance. As Neera. Isn’t she beautiful to watch?”

  Melvin nodded but said nothing, worried that his clumsy questions might destroy her reflections. He felt privileged by the degree of her honesty and amazed that she hadn’t gotten up and left by now. In the past, interactions with women generally caused him to suffer a barrage of symptoms—rapid heartbeat, loss of humor, profuse perspiration. He treated women the same way that he treated the manicured section of a public garden, appreciating the whole, respectfully sidling around the borders.

  He lay in bed that night thinking of the moment when Gracie smiled at him, and how his gut had tightened. She had a slight overbite (not bucktoothed) that nudged against her top lip in such a way that made him ponder tasting it. Until now, he had entertained thoughts like this only about actresses far beyond his reach, as it seemed safer, somehow, to confine his fantasies to the impossible.

  He kept the program, and from the cast of characters, he learned her full name. Gracie Kuruvilla. He brought up the name to his father.

  “You’ve been making a relationship with her?” Appachen asked, incredulous, scandalized.

  Th
is was the most intimate question that ever hung in the air between them. Melvin shook his head.

  They were in the sitting room, Appachen in his haggard armchair, Melvin standing over him. Even from that vantage, Appachen held dominion over the room, but Melvin did not want that kind of authority, the kind that put distance between father and family. Ever since he was small, Melvin often acted as liason between his father and his aunts, even if they were all in the same room. The women sent Melvin to ask Appachen questions, usually Are you hungry yet? or Do you want a glass of lime water?, to which Appachen answered with impatience, as if the workings of his appetite were common knowledge. On the few occasions that Appachen entered the kitchen, he immediately became the eye of a hurricane, the women halting their conversation to flurry around him and make him tea or snacks. Sometimes it seemed that he simply wanted company, but the attention made him uncomfortable, so he went back to his armchair and waited for the snacks.

  And when, as now, Appachen deemed himself above certain affairs, he said, “Talk to your mother,” and then closed his eyes. A year later, they would find him that way, dead in his armchair. They would also learn that he had been dead for three hours, but having assumed that he was thinking about something important, no one had wanted to bother him. For now, Melvin could tell that the old man was mentally transported to a happier place, where sons remained boys, where young women were never discussed, where his cup ran over with arrack.

  A WEEK LATER, Gracie’s father agreed to the match. The family was thrilled, he said, to accept the proposal.

  Melvin’s family had expected a bit of hedging, followed by a rejection. Ammachi’s extensive research, which uncovered the girl’s denomination, church name, house name, street name, age, approximate height, and enough features for a police sketch, indicated that Gracie was from a fairly well-to-do family. Her father was the head of Kuruvilla Coir, presiding over a factory that wove the fibers from coconut shells into rugs and house mats. She was once betrothed to Abraham Chandy, the son of another upstanding family, who had reneged on the deal after Abraham’s father found a better prospect in Mercy. But at least Gracie’s family could find her an engineer or a professor. What would they want with a Bombay bellhop? Melvin wondered. He became convinced that he had unwittingly left an impression on Gracie from their only encounter, an indelible mark, as she had upon him. Maybe hers was a liberal-minded family who allowed her the husband of her choosing. Rich people could afford everything, so why not liberalism?

  During Appachen and Melvin’s first visit, Gracie’s father poured a round of cognac for the men, which Appachen happily accepted despite the possibility that Melvin would shame him by taking wee sips. Melvin swallowed in a fierce gulp that tortured his stomach for the rest of the night. Equally unsettling was Gracie’s grave expression, not exactly the thrill that he had imagined. She sat on the sofa, flanked by her parents, silent as her father rambled on about the growing demand for geo-textiles and her mother affirmed his speeches with smiles and nods. The mother reminded Melvin of a porcelain miniature, with her changeless smile and her tiny doll hands folded over her knee. Or perhaps it was her husband’s size and volubility that so diminished her, but she seemed to be shrinking with age, best kept behind glass.

  Gracie was dressed in her mother’s likeness. She was wearing far too much makeup, caking her complexion in a deathly hue, with rashes of blush across her cheeks. Later, she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a tray of teas. When she bent over to serve Melvin a glass, he noticed a strange discoloring at the corner of her cheekbone, a small swelling spackled over with paint. Catching his eye, she hesitated, then smiled. The skin wrinkled around the swelling.

  For the rest of the evening, Melvin could not look at Gracie’s father, and instead focused on his two rings, thick gold bands of perfect proportion to bruise an eye.

  Gracie’s father raised his ringed fingers. “Melvin, you like these?”

  As soon as Melvin nodded, Gracie’s father began pulling and pulling on the smaller of the two rings.

  “No,” Melvin said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gracie’s father said, still pulling. “This is just the beginning. More on the way.”

  Gracie was leaning away from him with unveiled revulsion as he ordered his wife to bring the soap. Over Appachen’s protests, Gracie’s father finally soaped his finger and pulled off the smaller of the two rings, one with a small embedded sapphire. This he placed in the center of the coffee table.

  And there it remained.

  “I don’t want that,” Melvin said, barely aware that his palms were sweaty. The room went silent. In one glance, Melvin noticed how Gracie was looking at him curiously, with those pupils tiny as seeds, full of pent life.

  Appachen broke the silence with a strained laugh. “He’s allergic to gold. Some luck, isn’t it? Breaks out in a rash every time.”

  THE MEETING put Melvin in mind of Ammachi’s younger sister, Chinamma, whose husband sometimes beat her. Her bruises were a blend of colors, cloudy gray and plum blue, or yellow dappled with purple. He glimpsed them only in memory. Otherwise, the bruises were to be ignored.

  Sometimes, Chinamma came to stay with Ammachi for a few days, which meant that things were going badly with Thambi, her husband. She always went back a few days later, but during their time together, Ammachi and Chinamma slept in the same bed, holding each other like little girls, whispering into the night. Melvin had assumed that his mother was healing his aunt, or maybe cursing Thambi and inciting rebellion. But once, while eavesdropping from the doorway, Melvin heard his mother’s words: No, you can’t leave him. You are married now. Be patient, it will get better.

  It terrified him to learn that the people he loved most in the world could be such distant specters of the people he had presumed them to be.

  But there was Gracie, the woman he could finally rescue, the wife into whose ear he would whisper sweet, healing things. They were not even married yet, but already her smile lines were inscribed in his mind’s eye, and thinking of her returned the inner itch to his stomach, a feeling that he thought to be the first stirrings of love. How an open palm could meet her cheek with anything but wonder, he would never understand.

  7.

  N THE EVENING, Melvin sits next to Linno and pretends to take an interest in the serial she is watching on television. Sympathy, it is called. On the screen, a young woman is confessing to her father that she has decided to marry the neighbor’s son, even though the families have been feuding for the past six episodes. One modest tear sits on the apple of the girl’s cheek, though her immodest sobs resemble the squeaky scrape of a wiper across a windshield. Never will I disobey my heart! she shrieks. I may die of grief but at least I shall meet God with a pure and honest soul!

  Melvin and Linno watch the screen, neither of them particularly moved. Melvin’s presence renders Linno acutely aware of the fake tear, the flowery pleas, the heaving, padded bosom. It is a world created for an audience of one. Two makes the experience rather embarrassing.

  During the commercial break, Melvin casually places the photo on the coffee table and then examines the state of his fingernails. “That’s him.”

  Linno snatches up the photo and hunts for signs of blindness. But there are no milky cataracts like the ones that have haunted her recent imaginings, no harnessed hound to lead him across streets. He stands with arms crossed, a magnificent red-roofed house with tapioca walls looming in the background. Every time she tries to focus on his face, her gaze slides to the circular driveway patterned in bricks of red and gray, hugging a fountain where a stone cherub fingers a lute. Mangosteen trees line the drive, thick with purple fruit, and ivy gourd vines wander up an elegant trellis. A sudden, wanton desire rises up within her, having little to do with the man. Though he is not so bad-looking. A full head of hair, his skin as dairy-fair as promised. She flips the picture over and reads the name several times before pronouncing it aloud.

  “Kuku George?”r />
  Ammachi approaches and looks over their shoulders, squinting through her glasses.

  “What kind of name is that?” Linno asks.

  “Maybe an accident,” Ammachi says. “I never really liked the name Melvin. I thought my great-grandfather’s name was Melvin, but he was not Melvin, he was Elwin. By the time I found out, the name was already on the birth certificate.”

  “Thank God,” Melvin says.

  They do not talk of the future. They do not talk of the house like a monument to all that is possible, nor the cherub like a baby Gabriel mid-prance in the center of the fountain, come to inform Linno of her destiny. Instead, Ammachi cheerily notes that Kuku does not look blind at all.

  Linno wishes her father were more like the father in the serial, a man with so stoic a face that it belongs on a statue, demanding that she marry the blind man immediately. Melvin, at the moment, is scratching his armpit and looking to the window as a possible means of escape. If Linno were more bound and bullied by her family, it would be much easier to flail, to plead, to put up a fight in the face of familial pressures. But freedom of choice makes defiance far less attractive.

  Over the course of the week, she begins entertaining other thoughts. What it would be like to eat in restaurants at whim. What it would be like to tuck a roll of bills between Ammachi’s fingers each month. Freedom from financial worry holds considerable virtue. She boils her debate down to its elemental parts: marriage means money, her money, and this is a freedom too tempting to ignore.

  LATER IN THE WEEK, Melvin drives Abraham to his grandmother’s house in Changanacherry, and on the way back, Abraham requests that they stop at a house on Good Shepherd Road. While Melvin weaves around the bicyclists and auto-rickshaws, Abraham says, “I just want to visit with the son of one of my oldest friends. Bought him this nice bottle of brandy.” Abraham pats the paper bag in his lap. “Very expensive. From France.”