ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

… and shadows of thinning trees

  like writing on the wall

  Tell how seasons, like people, will pass.

  But it’s when I sleep that time goes still

  With the moon as witness at the windowsill.

  So whatever I have kissed in dreams

  I’ll keep at least in part.

  The words rush a foreign warmth to her cheeks. The poem pins her to her chair. Not for all the A-pluses in the world would she turn her head, just then, to meet Fish’s gaze, but she does notice the cannon cartoonist vengefully footnoting his textbook: I wouldn’t fuck Loignon with a stolen dick.

  WHEN ANJU WAS TWELVE, she came quite close to having a boyfriend.

  In school, the word used for a girlfriend or boyfriend was “item.” Her almost-item’s name was Sri Ram. Theirs was a doomed affair, not only because Sri Ram was Hindu, but also because a girl who was rumored to be kissing a boy could just as well flush her reputation down the commode and plan for a life of parentally enforced celibacy.

  They did not exchange kisses, but love notes.

  His first, smuggled into her hand on the morning of the first day of school: “I like your skirt. Will you be my item?”

  Because everyone wore uniforms, Anju had not been impressed by his compliment. He was a scrawny, sleepy fellow, seemingly incapable of lifting anything other than his own satchel, but the brazenness of the note charmed her. New to the class, she felt invincibly impulsive and wrote on the back of his note:

  “Would you convert?”

  She had no hopes that he would convert, certainly not on account of a gray skirt, but she had thought the rhyme rather clever. And if he liked her at all, it had to be for her cleverness, as she had little else in her corner.

  Before class began, Anju stuck the note in her pocket, her hands placed atop her math notebook, her knees bouncing beneath the table. Linno, sitting next to her, told her to stop shaking the bench. Anju was doubly anxious, as it was her first day in Linno’s math class, two years beyond her own peers. The classroom was nearly identical to her old one, the painted walls molting in patches, the buckling wooden floor, the rows of long tables and benches that made it difficult to rise from the desk in a ladylike way. But now, Anju was anxious for different reasons altogether, aware of a pair of eyes at the rear of the room, pressing into her back.

  Sister Savio took roll call. Present, Sister … Present, Sister … Anju was focused on the present in her pocket.

  “And Linno Vallara,” Sister Savio said. “Next time sit in the middle of the bench. You’ve gotten so big you might tip the whole thing over.”

  Anju’s knees stopped. Her heart seemed to delay between beats.

  Laughter spilled from the back of the room to the front, and out of that chorus she could distinguish the timid chortle of Sri Ram.

  For the rest of class, she pictured herself choking Sister Savio with her eyeglass chain. Sri Ram she would kick between the legs, as this region, to her limited knowledge, would summon the greatest amount of pain. But neither image brought peace because she felt more than rage. She was shamed by her own shame, made worse later that day when Linno told their father that she would not return to school. Anju’s first day would be Linno’s last.

  Several days later, after recess, Anju laid a cushion of cow dung on Sister Savio’s seat, leaving Sister Savio with a bull’s-eye on her rear for most of the day. Unfortunately, Anju had not washed her hands with enough soap, and after sniffing each student’s hands, the headmaster ordered her to stay after school. Anju received a paddling that prevented her from sitting properly for days, her rear marked far more severely than that of Sister Savio.

  And like a true amateur in the art of love, Anju left Sri Ram’s note in the pocket of the very skirt that had wooed him. One minute Anju was standing at the kitchen table, adding fractions, and the next minute Linno’s open palm was on the corner of her book. In it: the crumpled piece of paper.

  “Are you crazy?” Linno scolded her, though her eyes were ravenous for details. In the midst of laundry, she had discovered a scandal. “What is this? Who are you trying to convert?”

  Anju looked at the crumple, which had once held such sweat and hope. She thought of Sri Ram, who had reportedly passed the exact same note to five different girls in the random manner of a fern casting spores into the breeze. Sri Ram had stopped talking to Anju as soon as he realized that she and Linno shared a last name. She thought of the seat next to her, where Linno used to sit, unoccupied for the past three days. Its emptiness—impossible to admit aloud—was a comfort.

  But for Linno, Anju conjured a story of how Sri Ram had fallen madly in love with her, how he had wanted to convert her to Hinduism, how she had refused him, citing the First Commandment, and had traipsed away in her gray skirt, leaving him with eyes wet and tortured. And as with all her little fictions, the deeper she mined the details (her braids: swinging; his lower lip: trembling), the more the melodrama gained a truth in which she could believe.

  9.

  S DOES EVERY SATURDAY MORNING, this one begins with a heap of warm croissants; coffee; baguettes; blueberry preserves and violet jam; wedges of Havarti, Gouda, and Brie; and a bowl of shiny, warmed olives. Mr. Solanki and Anju sit at the breakfast table, he behind his Wall Street Journal, she pretending to read an unfunny comic strip. Mr. Solanki chews noisily on a croissant, a smattering of flakes along his striped tie. It is as though nothing has changed from one morning to another, the previous day part of some fever dream. She hardly has the appetite for more than half a croissant, though she eats the whole out of courtesy. She might fast the whole weekend, internally grazing on a singular message:

  She is loved.

  Anju remembers nothing else from Fish’s poem. Grammatically and practically, the actual subject who loves the object—she being the object!—is not the most important detail. That there exists someone who can love her does much to convince her that she is capable of loving that someone back.

  Her insides tremble with the weight of it.

  It seems that Anju is not the only one with a revelation. Mrs. Solanki usually sleeps through Saturday breakfast, but this morning she hurtles down the winding staircase in her pajamas, her robes gusting out behind her like the cape of a satin-clad superhero. She stops at the edge of the table, pauses for effect and breath. Anju has never seen her without a minimal layer of cosmetics so her chapped lips and stunted lashes add to the sense of alarm.

  “Rohit,” Mrs. Solanki says, “is coming for dinner.”

  Mr. Solanki stops chewing but does not swallow. “When?”

  “Tonight. He just called.”

  “I thought he wasn’t returning from Maine until next week.”

  “He is coming back early,” Mrs. Solanki says. “He said he has something to tell us.”

  “That means he’s bringing the camera. He’s going to make a big show, I know it. Tell him to leave that thing at home.”

  “I tried.”

  “He should not suprise us on camera, it’s not fair.” Like a child refusing his vegetables, Mr. Solanki has both fists on the table. His scorn turns to vexation as he looks at his plate, as if trying to predict Rohit’s announcement from the constellation of crumbs. Anju shifts in her seat, wondering if she should leave.

  Mrs. Solanki, suddenly noticing her, smiles brightly. “Rohit just happens to film things in his life. Sort of like home videos.” She scoops bread crumbs into her cupped palm. “It is his hobby, a very important hobby.”

  From the moment Mrs. Solanki begins scooping bread crumbs, the household cleaning continues without pause. An hour later, two Colombian cleaning ladies arrive, armed with mops, pails, and yellow rubber gloves. They scrub, they spray, they polish, they shimmy a feathered stick along the contours of the sculptures and vases. Mrs. Solanki divides her time between watching them and speaking on the phone, ordering a vanilla bean cheesecake to be picked up later in the day.

  The more Mrs. Solanki watches the Colombian ladies, the more
she fidgets until she can stand back no longer, overcome with the need to join them on hands and knees.

  “But this is not clean,” Mrs. Solanki says, reaching under the TV stand, triumphantly surfacing with a spidery wad of her own black hair. “No clean,” she enunciates, almost attempting a Spanish accent. The women continue to scrub at the exact same rate, back-forth, back-forth, as if chained to each other.

  WITH THE APARTMENT under siege by mopping solvents, Anju is only too glad to escape.

  Overnight, it seems, rows of pumpkins and butternut squash have appeared beneath the awning of the corner deli. Coolly, September is sliding into October, green leaves tipped in a yellow that portends the end of hot, lazy days.

  What does this mean to Anju? That a new stylish coat is in order, especially if she is to visit Fish at his next show. Mrs. Solanki recommended a department store within walking distance, one that takes up half a block. Surely it will provide Anju with a better option than the lumpen gray thing she is currently wearing, given to her by Ammachi. “Jilu wore this when she came from Canada,” Ammachi said, pulling the bloated coat from a trunk that smelled of mildew and baby powder. Luckily for Anju, Jilu had forgotten to take it back. Turning the coat inside out, Ammachi showed Anju a number of secret inner pockets, an intricate cavern of storage systems, where one could keep various foodstuffs in case of apocalyptic disaster. “Hah!” Ammachi said triumphantly, upon unzipping a pocket and discovering an antiquated box of Sunkist raisins.

  INSIDE THE DEPARTMENT STORE, Anju runs her hands over the racks of coats. She lifts one from its hanger, something long with mannish shoulders, impossibly heavy and teal blue. Wearing it is like carrying the spoils of a tiger hunt on one’s back, and even the lighter coats bear a padded prosthesis on each shoulder.

  “Removable!” the clerk says, reaching into the lining and surfacing with two cutlets the color of uncooked chicken. The clerk is young and heavily rouged, with man shoulders of her own. At first, she was cautious with Anju, until Anju told her that she lived nearby, at the Monarch. Immediately, the clerk warmed to her and began cracking desperate jokes, making it clear that she works on commission.

  She puts Anju’s cutlets on top of her own shoulders. “And if I can’t use ‘em here”—she puts the cutlets against her smallish chest—“I can always use ‘em here.”

  The clerk throws her head back, laughs, like they are old friends.

  Anju throws her head back, laughs, achieves a crick in her neck.

  Five minutes later, Anju has retreated from the coat section, after hearing the price of the coat, which is half the price of her plane ticket from India.

  She passes the makeup counters with their palettes of pinks and lavenders, past the jewel-colored bottles of perfume on shelves of glass. Well-dressed women offer spritzes from designer bottles, happily chirping the lacy names of scents like Beyond Heaven or Eau de Désir. Crossing through a patchouli and lilac fog, Anju pauses before the sunglasses rack, stopped by a familiar voice whose name she cannot place. “Anju Mol! Eh, Anju!” In the dark reflections of several lenses, several tiny Birds are moving toward her. She whirls around, her spirit lifting in spite of her guilt. In all this time, Anju has not called her. Is it possible that Bird volunteers here too?

  Bird seems less excited to see Anju. Her mouth is pursed, her hands patting her head kerchief to make sure it is still in place. “Where have you been?” Bird demands in Malayalam.

  “I was meaning to call,” Anju lies. For a brief, ridiculous moment, she imagines telling Bird about her newfound love. “I’ve been so busy with school….”

  Bird groans at the inanity of this answer. “Every day I watch for you, but you never come. I told Mr. Tandon you were coming, but you never did. You think some immigration fairy will leave a green card under your pillow?”

  Anju shakes her head.

  Bird pulls a date book from her bag and flips to an open page. “How is next Monday?”

  “But what is the cost?”

  “No cost to meet!” Bird nearly cries her answer, so pained is she by this degree of procrastination. “I will tell him you are coming at four p.m. Come straight from school.”

  After jotting down the date and time of the meeting, Bird claps the book shut and waits for Anju to record the same. Anju takes down the information on the back of a perfume sample, all the while wondering how much she should owe this meeting to chance. This city can likely keep friends apart for years, such is its density, its speed. But now, in the space of two weeks, Anju and Bird are again brought face-to-face.

  By the time Anju pockets the perfume sample, Bird appears to have calmed a bit. Light, dull piano music wafts around them. “You should come to my house too,” Bird says abruptly. “Come and have tea. Okay?”

  Anju hesitates. She is familiar with the warm, bossy aura of aunties back home, but to find it here is strange, and welcoming.

  “Okay,” Anju says.

  “Good.” From a nearby counter, Bird takes a stack of perfume samples and drops them into her purse. “This way I can wear a different perfume every month.”

  Her lesson, delivered unapologetically, puts Anju at ease. She asks how Bird came to find her here.

  “I called the number you gave me. Said I was an old friend of yours. That Mrs. Solanki, she said you would be here.”

  Anju nods, slightly surprised and pleased at Bird’s decision that they are already old friends.

  IN THE EVENING, Mr. Solanki wears a candy pink tie and Mrs. Solanki wears a sweater of the same color, as if matching renders them a united front against whatever news Rohit will bring. Anju scratches at the brassiere that holds her shoulder cutlets in place. At the store, she told herself that she was doing a service to the coat from which she stole the cutlets, and unless the future owner of the coat possessed concave shoulders, the owner would be grateful. Anju has decided to give the cutlets a test run today, to see if they might be wearable on Monday, but can one be allergic to ill-placed cutlets? Or perhaps the irritation is due to the Calvin Klein Obsession sample that she smeared around her collarbones, one from a whole deck of cards that she stuffed into her pocket.

  Her conversation with Bird continues to bother her as well. Bird was right to scold her. All this time, Anju has been selfish, ignoring her original intentions and the family whose future she meant to shape. And why? Because of homesickness—a child’s excuse. And like a child, she needed to be rebuked, to have someone jog her sense of ambition.

  Also, she has begun to think that there may be certain perks to the elliptical odyssey due to the many miles between home and here. The inspiration for her newfound optimism: Sheldon Fischer.

  As a potential husband for Anju, Fish has two strikes against him, being both white and Jewish. No doubt Melvin would never speak to Anju again if, back in Kumarakom, she ran off with either. She knows of only a few Jews in Kerala, descended from those who migrated thousands of years ago from Palestine, fleeing persecution. Before most left for Israel, these Jews found their next-best resting place in Kerala, a land where many religious enclaves existed with little commingling, each enclave confident in its proximity to God. Diversity was fine as long as each clung to his own.

  But if she were to agree to a life of here and there, if she were to accept the breadwinning role of the family, could she not demand a bit of romantic autonomy in return?

  Wherever Bird came from, she is a blessing, a reminder of greater possibility. Next week, accompanied by Mrs. Solanki, Anju will keep her appointment with Mr. Tandon.

  MRS. SOLANKI OPENS the front door while simultaneously using it as a shield, peering around the edge. Instead of hello, her first words are a dismayed, “Oh, Rohit.”

  Rohit steps into the foyer with a large video camera where his head should be, or so it seems from Anju’s distance. The camera is strapped to his hand, its small screen flipped out to one side like a blunted wing. Immediately, Anju is impressed with his sparse safari style, a khaki vest with pieces of equipment jutting
from the pockets, scuffed sneakers, a single duffel bag which he drops by the doorway.

  Mr. Solanki smooths his tie. “Rohit, beta, can’t we wait until after dinner for filming?”

  “Dad,” Rohit says, warmly ignoring his father’s question. He holds the camera away from his body, its red light still solid, as he hugs his father with his free arm. He does the same for his mother, adding a noisy kiss on the cheek.

  “And this must be the exchange student,” Rohit says, turning his lens on Anju. She stands absolutely still, feet together, hands at her sides.

  “I’m Rohit.” He extends his hand, which she does not take, tensed and frozen, until he reassures her that he is not taking a still photograph. “You can move or whatever you want. Just be yourself.”

  AT DINNER, Anju marvels at the napkins, which have been contorted by the Colombians into the shapes of swans. They float on ponds of porcelain plates which Anju has never before seen, all of them gold-leafed and gleaming. Mrs. Solanki first fills Rohit’s plate with a colorful salad, all reds and yellows with a drizzle of dressing, but he partakes rarely, spending most of his time swinging his camera from face to face as the conversation skids along. Apparently, Rohit has filmed family scenes before, such as last year’s Christmas dinner and a few days in February, after his mother underwent a hysterectomy. (Mrs. Solanki seems irritated by this disclosure.) Still, no one is quite able to follow Rohit’s directive to “act normal,” not even Rohit, who sometimes asks his parents to repeat themselves: “I didn’t catch that. One more time, please?”

  “I said,” Mr. Solanki sighs, “that Dr. Ummat’s daughter got into medical school.”

  Rohit tinkers with the focus ring on his camera. Anju is fascinated by the camera and his ease with it, all the buttons and the lenses and the confidence required to fiddle with them. “So what are you saying, Dad? You’re saying you wish I had gone to med school?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Then why’d you have to mention that Nirmal’s going to med school?”