ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

There is some shuffling and murmuring between Principal Mitchell and George de Brigard. “It’s a girl?” asks George de Brigard, accidentally, into the microphone. “Oh. Oh. Excuse me—An JEW Melvin!”

  Anju shoots up from her seat. In this moment of victory, she feels at home, spotlit and praised, culled from the rest in a way that makes all her prior isolation somehow meaningful. She hardly thinks of why her name is being called, so sweet it is to walk across the gymnasium before the many eyes that usually ignore her. She records everything to memory: the squeak of her shoe soles, the trickling applause, the number of steps she must take to travel across the glossy hardwood floor (sixteen) to receive the principal’s warm handshake and a slim white envelope from George de Brigard.

  Standing between the two men, she spots Fish in the audience. He watches her intently, leaning forward, holding the edge of the bleacher. Her victory deflates. She remembers what Fish said after her confession, when she asked him, “Would you have done the same as me?”

  At this, he paused. “Not a lot of people would, I think. But you’re the one that’s standing here. You’re the one who made it.” His expression was not congratulatory but grave, and slightly bewildered.

  Of this and events past, they have not spoken. It seems as though they never will.

  12.

  OR THE COVER of Rachna’s Sweet Sixteen invitation, Linno draws a mermaid, which seems a proper interpretation of Rachna’s ratio of nationalities. Linno spends several hours drawing and erasing, erasing some more, but something about the seashell bosoms and the curvaceous flipper render the mermaid far too sexy for a sixteen-year-old. All night, she sits with her head bowed, thinking and sketching and sometimes neither, with the wall lizards as apathetic company, as still and flat as if they had been drawn there. She remembers her Sixteen, neither sweet nor bitter but bland, and the years preceding, the bandaged cocoon that came to nothing.

  Bored and blocked, she riffles through Ammachi’s stack of Christmas cards, which grows thicker by the year as she has yet to discard a single one. The stockings and bells are uninspiring, nor does the angel Gabriel, sent by an insurance company, act as muse. One card, sent by a cousin in Dubai, is heavier than most. Upon opening it, two planes lift from the lower half, creating a three-dimensional image of the Nativity scene. The kneeling shepherds rise up on the frontmost panel, while the wise men occupy the middle panel, and in the center is the triad of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus watched over by the white North Star. Linno studies the card for a long time, closing it and opening it, watching how the various shapes spring up and take form.

  With Ammachi’s sewing scissors, she cuts a page from her drawing pad, folds it in half, and makes two parallel cuts. Opening the page and pulling out the strip, she learns how to coax a small building from the crease. With more cuts, she creates several buildings of varying heights, each wall with windows. She complicates the design and constructs new ones, a process not unlike solving a jigsaw puzzle, wherein the question always remains: How can three dimensions smoothly return to two? With snips and folds and several failed attempts, she comes to replicate the Christmas card, which only fuels her curiosity as she continues to work at the kitchen table, pasting panels with grains of rice, pushing and pulling and scraping the edges, vaguely dazed as the night passes by her window and leaks into the dull blue of dawn.

  LATER IN THE WEEK, Linno sets out to visit Alice’s shop. She takes the bus to Good Shepherd Road, her nerves eased by the breeze that cuts through the barred windows, freshly skimmed from the paddy field’s surface. Two egrets, one with prey in its beak, circle and dive around each other, meeting and parting and meeting again, painting the sky with invisible patterns.

  By the time she reaches town, Good Shepherd Road is already bustling. A mini-lorry bumps along, carrying open crates of perfect white eggs, though the driver seems unperturbed by the precariousness of his burden. Bicycles whiz by with a squeaky tring around the fruit vendors, who build citrusy pyramids of limes and lemons on the ground, budging from their stools only at sundown.

  The invitation shop is easy to overlook, wedged between a tailor shop and a hardware store. Gently, Linno pushes open the door, which tinkles at her entry.

  From the back of the narrow room, Alice welcomes Linno by waving a wand of incense, attempting to slice through the sweet, mulchy smell of old paper. A slender rope of smoke dissolves toward the ceiling. Linno tries not to wonder which beam Reji chose.

  After nodding hello to Prince and Bhanu, Linno follows Alice to the back room. One wall holds shelves of mill paper, each color split into a small spectrum of its own. Within the color white, there is ivory, lily, butter, and shell. Linno’s gaze travels up and down the columns of tint and shade, as unable to focus as when she first entered Thresia Paint House. For Rachna’s invitation, Linno decides on navy blue and rust red.

  Alice seats Linno at a card table, before a set of tools arranged on a napkin, as if for a surgeon—a pencil, an eraser, scissors, glue, and various pens, a few that produce metallic ink and one tipped with a sharp, thin blade. Linno hunches over the table for twenty minutes, re-creating what she designed at home, while Alice pushes a mop between the benches. “Take your time,” Alice says, but Linno needs very little, having struggled enough over the past few nights. The paper had seemed so stubborn then, impossible to shape, and the overall process of creation was as confusing as finding her way out of a maze. But now that she knows the route, it is easy to repeat.

  When she is finished, Linno fans the ink on a design that is simpler than her previous plan. The card is multilayered, with the outline of a butterfly cut into the navy cover to unearth the red layer beneath, stroked with gold arabesques. Upon opening, a red butterfly springs from the gutter of the card, the paper edges whispering against each other as the wings spread wide. Beneath the butterfly are two small flaps where information and RSVP cards will be kept.

  She feels a light punch at her shoulder. Alice is standing over her, beaming. “Who taught you this?” she asks, taking the card into her hands. She opens and closes it, childlike with wonder.

  The very same day, Alice posts the template to Rachna’s mother, along with a fixed price of $4 per card. Linno doubts that Mrs. Nair will agree to such a price, but by the end of the week Alice has good news. Not only did Rachna request 150 invitations, but 300 place cards, a whole battalion of navy and rust red butterflies.

  ALICE TAKES THE BLUE PAGES to the production house, where the die cutting machine can quickly carve the butterfly mosaic into the covers and the Baby Heidelberg can fold them. In the meantime, Linno cuts the parts for the inner butterfly and shows Alice how to fit the wings together.

  At first, they work in silence. Each butterfly has a personality of its own, and Linno feels a certain kinship with this early flock, which are clumsier in ways that only she can recognize. Gradually, her fingers learn to move without thought.

  So far, Alice has refrained from the topic of Kuku, for which Linno is quietly grateful. Instead, Alice rambles about her favorite topic—foreigners—who have been sighted in increasing numbers throughout Kerala. Foreigners are excellent for business, she says, and their presence necessitates an interior overhaul of the office. No more tinsel and streamers, but strictly Raja Ravi Varma prints, those paintings with the plumpish, pleasant Malayali women playing veenas or holding ripe-bellied children to their hips. Around the clock, Ravi Shankar will whine softly from hidden speakers. The sign over the doorway will have to be fashioned anew, made to hearken after the royal mystique of Rajput kings, another task for which Linno is suited. A sign, if properly seductive, can net a whole school of foreigners.

  Alice pronounces the word “foreigner” using the loving, hungry tones with which she talks of sweet kulfi. But Ammachi views them as an invasive hoard, questing with the same plundering spirit as their ancestors of centuries prior.

  “They are mostly tourists,” Linno argued with her. “They’re not staying. They’re not claiming anything.”

>   “Oh no?” Ammachi pointed out the new billboards for Kalyan Silks, all of which featured a regal blond woman in a sari. “Hundreds of pretty girls here and this is who Kalyan chose as a model?”

  There is no denying the presence of foreigners, the houseboats carrying women in airy kurta tops and jeans, tall, rangy men in Velcro sandals and elaborate backpacks, or older couples with visors and fragile crowns of silver hair, blinking away the river’s glare behind insectile shades. The tourists seem either wary or ignorant of all the stares they draw, but their normal behaviors take on an odd exoticism—smoking, sneezing, strolling along. What they do not do is just as intriguing as what they do. For example: Why do they refuse to walk beneath an open umbrella on brutally sunny days?

  “You know, it’s rude to stare,” an American woman once said to Linno. The woman must have been in her thirties, too old to be wearing her hair in those pigtails. Vulnerable blue veins branched along the insides of her wrists.

  Linno wanted to come up with a sharp retort, but she was astonished that the tourist had addressed her at all, and pleased, almost gratified that the tourist had found Linno’s home worthy of invasion. She saw no inconsistency in her position. Like most Keralites, she denounced the American president, American imperialism, and ate vanilla pistachio ice cream at the Ernakulam Baskin-Robbins all the same. Thirty-one flavors and the Coffee Coolatta! No ice-cream parlor, not even Vemby’s, could rival it.

  WHEN LINNO AND ANJU were little girls, their favorite game was called Tourists, in which they dressed up in castoffs that they had found in Ammachi’s closet. Anju went about the house wearing her plastic shamrock glasses with the green lenses, her head turbanned in Ammachi’s massive brassiere. A pair of pants served as Linno’s cape, the ankles tied at her throat. Their names were Linda and Angel. Together they roamed from room to room, clicking pictures with imaginary cameras, shading their eyes, cooing over their found souvenirs, usually ashtrays and pencils and empty coffee tins.

  From Ammachi’s closet, Angel plundered a thing more valuable than any brassiere-turban. It was some sort of hat, big as a melon, ruby red with glitter, balding in patches. Angel coronated herself before her only rival could object.

  At that moment, Melvin entered the room and asked if the girls had seen the iron. They were used to these tiny punctures in their Tourist fantasy and found it easy to recover their world from intruders. But this time, Melvin stayed even after Linno said that the iron was on the ironing board. Melvin was staring at Anju, who stared back from under the big red hat.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked in a strange voice.

  Anju put her hands on the hat. “Can I have it?”

  In two strides, Melvin plucked the hat from her head. Anju looked like she might cry. “But that’s mine!”

  “Don’t take things that do not belong to you,” he said.

  It was hard for Linno to picture how and why the big red hat belonged to her father. It matched none of his clothes. He had no interest in joining the Tourists. In their pant-cape and brassiere-turban, Linno and Anju pondered Melvin as if he were a perplexing native whose customs they did not understand. Melvin shifted his feet.

  “Go study,” he told them, which was what he told them whenever he didn’t know what else to say. Big red hat in hand, he left the room.

  13.

  N ANJU’S OPINION, Rohit suffers from an addiction to his camera. He brings it everywhere, phobic to the possibility that a witty remark might be made or a crisis might occur at the exact moment when his hands are empty. His addiction makes every banality precious and worth filming, the tying of a shoe freighted with meaning when viewed through the lens.

  At first, Anju was grateful when Rohit volunteered to accompany her to Jackson Heights, where she would have her first meeting with Rajiv Tandon. She was reluctant to ask Mrs. Solanki, who seems increasingly busy with work, along with her upcoming diabetes fund-raiser. In her rush, she hardly seems to notice the comings and goings of her son, who has been staying with a nondescript entity he calls his Ex. “Probably staying with that Ex of his,” Mrs. Solanki says. “He thinks I don’t know, but I’m his mother. I know.” What Mrs. Solanki does with her arsenal of maternal knowledge is unclear, but Anju can tell that the power lies in stockpiling, not usage.

  When Anju meets Rohit at the subway station, her gratitude shrivels. Rohit has his camera bag slung over his shoulder, a paper cup of coffee in hand. Even before saying hello, he tells her not to worry. “There isn’t a person in this country who doesn’t want to jump in front of the lens. Trust me, cameras give you clout.”

  AS SOON AS they enter the number 7 subway car, Rohit wedges himself into the seat next to Anju’s and asks her a number of questions, most of which begin with “where” and “why.”

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “You know where we are going.”

  “I know, but for the camera. And make it a full sentence. So, where are you going?”

  “To Jackson Heights. Sorry.” She starts again. “I am going to Jackson Heights.”

  “Why?”

  “I am going to see about how to get green card.”

  “Why do you want a green card?”

  “No one does not want green card.”

  “But why do you?”

  “Why would I not?”

  As an interviewer, Rohit rates far lower than Mike Wallace, who, if frustrated, would not mutter “Forget it,” turn off his camera, and pout into the middle distance. But Anju is happy to gaze out the window when the 7 train creaks out of the tunnel, emerging aboveground, clattering on tall tracks like a geriatric roller coaster. Queens unfolds before her in rooftops and power lines, a few distant smokestacks piping gray fluff. A cluster of brick buildings wear bright explosions of graffiti, which Rohit points out as the Graffiti Museum. A museum for works of beautiful ruin. She thinks of Linno, wonders what she would say.

  Anju clutches the purse in her lap. Inside it is an envelope with $500 in cash, taken from her Art Exhibition winnings. She assumes this to be the maximum fee necessary, and the rest she will give to Linno. Linno, who has begun to haunt her days and fill her dreams, whose presence, once brought here, would right every wrong.

  BENEATH THE LOFTED TRAIN TRACKS that empty into Jackson Heights, children dart across the intersection at Eighty-second Street, bold against the beeping cars. White people are a rarity here where it is gray and lively, the stores insistent for attention. Dimmed neon signs declare DENTISTA and FARMACIA, and though it is not yet evening, another sign is surrounded by blinking bulbs, like a movie marquee, peddling the main attraction of PAWN SHOP. She lingers before a barber shop that shows a pictorial menu of men beside the door, offering the shape-up, the blowout, the Caesar, the low fade, and the skin fade. Inside, a few men wait and watch as a barber applies an electric razor to a man whose newly mown head is nearly as bald as when he came into this world. Why would a man choose to speed up the balding process when baldness awaits him, a decade away? The men chat happily over the hum of the razor.

  On Seventy-fourth Street, the scenery switches. No more dentistas and farmacias and menus of men, all these replaced by Surekha Designs and Butala Emporium and Rupal’s Desserts, whose storefront sign offers fresh sugarcane juice. It is strange, the sense of detached belonging that overcomes her, the vague familiarity of passing through one’s home to find it inhabited by another with the furniture replaced and rearranged. All around her are people who resemble her until they break into their assorted tongues, mostly Gujarati or Hindi, some Punjabi, none of which she understands. Women wear sweaters over salwars; men shuffle their socked feet in chappals. Here is Payless ShoeSource, there Patel Brothers Grocery with boxes of vegetables in a row. Beneath the deep green cucumber is scrawled: KHIRA. Beneath the bright, wet cilantro: DHANA—2/$1.00 . Strange that she should come so far from home, to Jackson Heights, to learn Hindi words she had not studied in school.

  In the windows are mannequins draped with daring saris
, thin as a fly’s wing. Some of these hard, surly ladies are bald; others fare a little better under Beatle moptop wigs. They stand unmoved by the melodies flooding from the music store next door, the remixed drumbeats beneath the divine bellow of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Anju and Rohit pass an old man hunched on a stool outside the music store mumbling, “Goprice, goprice,” which Anju understands as “Good price.”

  She would like to absorb her surroundings slowly, anonymously, but as she walks, Rohit walks alongside, pointing his camera at her. He tells her not to pay attention to him. Everyone pays attention to him. Bystanders lean away and stare at her with the assumption that she must be famous, or at least a local TV personality. That she is neither embarrasses her. The crowds of people make an aisle through which she can pass, following her with their stares. She walks swiftly, even as Rohit stumbles to keep up, complaining that this footage won’t be usable if he keeps bumping into trash cans. She walks faster.

  By the time they reach Rajiv Tandon’s building, Rohit is in a dark mood. They ride the elevator in silence.

  AS SOON AS Anju enters the office, she hears a triumphant, “HAH!

  “You’ve come,” Bird says.

  Once again, Bird’s Malayalam is a balm to Anju’s nerves. Anju and Rohit take a seat in the waiting room while Bird hands them Styrofoam cups of chai pumped from a large steel canister. Anju introduces Rohit as the son of her host mother. Noting Rohit’s camera, Bird says, “Mr. Tandon will not like that,” and returns to her desk.

  They lapse into silence when Bird answers the phone. “Offices of Rajiv Tandon, this is Birdie, how may I help you?”

  Birdie. The name does not quite fit, befitting of someone daintier. Also odd is the way that Bird seems far more knowledgeable in this place than in the library, phoning and filing and stapling all at once. Anju looks around the room, her gaze passing over the gaunt African mask on the wall, the seventeenth-century map of the world, framed behind glass, and finally Rohit, who is filming her.