ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  Bird is watching but not absorbing the film, having seen it twice before. She does not need Chaplin to make her happy. Nothing could make her happier than when she entered this theater or when she woke up this morning and the morning before with Anju by her side.

  She senses that Anju is growing close to her, if not with a daughterly intimacy then with a sisterly one, as Anju has begun to call her Chachy. In that one word, which no one has called her in so long, Bird perceives the depth of her past loneliness, the hollow in her being, which has become apparent only now that Anju is here to fill it.

  WHEN GRACIE WAS ALIVE, she inspired the same feelings in Bird, that need so long in hibernation, gathering its strength, its grip. Bird woke with it buzzing around her insides like a fly that would not escape a room, even after one opened all the windows and doors, as if it preferred frenzy over freedom. That feeling, that need, it frightened her. She began to wonder if she should distance herself from it.

  One night, after arriving at their host’s home in Kollam, Bird sat on the front steps, massaging her feet, hoping that Gracie would fall asleep before Bird went to bed. But Gracie soon found her and took a seat on the step below. She raised Bird’s heel into her lap, even though Bird warned that her nightgown would get dirty. Gracie replied: “It doesn’t matter, Chachy.”

  The steady rhythms of her fingers sought out the knots in Bird’s feet, but with every knead and roll, Bird found her muscles coiling a bit tighter than before. She tried to relax by gazing at the moon; it was radiant but flawed, mottled like a bead whose paint had flaked away. She wondered if a pulse could be felt in the feet.

  “I received a letter from my mother today,” Gracie said. “She could not believe I’m playing a servant. She said, ‘Do they know who you are?’”

  Gracie pushed her thumb into a hollow in Bird’s sole, causing Bird to wince and smile at the same time. “Mothers want the best for their daughters.”

  It was an easy thing to say, and Bird was slightly relieved to see that Gracie was not listening but staring off into the sky, her hands in gentle movement. “Maybe she wishes she were me. She could have been an actress or a singer, you know, she has a beautiful voice. I remember once, when I was small, she spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and we sat down to shell a bowl of beans. We worked, and she sang, and my father came in and pretended to read his newspaper at the table, but his eyes never moved from the same spot.” Gracie’s fingers went still; she held Bird’s feet. “We had so few times like that.”

  Bird sat up and put her feet on the ground. “Thank you,” she said.

  Gracie hugged her knees. Bird stared at Gracie’s fingernail polish, chipped into the shapes of tiny red countries with ragged borders. On Gracie, even the chipped polish was charming. Bird thought of her own mother, who was beautiful in a rational way, her features of a perfect symmetry to which everyone had been drawn. But Gracie possessed some kind of strange, specific beauty that only Bird could see, like a woman witness to an apparition.

  That they had grown close in only a matter of weeks was not altogether surprising to Bird. She knew well how the cycling days and nights of troupe life could accelerate friendships and seal lifelong bonds. Gracie occupied her thoughts as soon as Bird woke and just before she drifted off to sleep. But she did not dare try and remember her dreams or imagine worlds where what she wanted was possible.

  After a silence, Gracie asked what Bird would do when the season was over.

  “I have a brother in California, some cousins in New York,” Bird said. “I am going to ask my brother to sponsor me for a visa.”

  Gracie turned to face her. “You’re going to California? When?”

  “Most likely New York. I don’t know. Soon as I can, I suppose.” It was true, what Bird’s cousins had said to her last time they spoke: one had to leave or be left behind. And perhaps everyone in the troupe could have used that advice. Their audiences were growing smaller as television serials attracted whole populations of viewers with the single click of a remote. At first, Bird assumed that people preferred the convenience of staying at home to watch a show, but it seemed that people also liked returning to the same hysterical characters every week, speaking of those characters as though they lived just down the street. And in any case, it would be only a matter of time before Bird herself was replaced by some young, sunny ingenue who had studied at a famed theater school, under gurus who had penned books and toured continents. No, Bird would abandon the theater before it gently, politely abandoned her.

  Gracie looked perplexed by the decision, and in a small way, Bird was pleased that she had made some impact. “I always wanted to go,” Gracie said. “Not to the States. To New York.”

  “Why only New York?”

  “There are all kinds of people in New York. You can be whomever you want in that city, with no one to bother you. You can disappear.” Gracie plucked at the end of her braid. “Maybe, someday, I will end up there too. People move. People find each other. We could be neighbors.”

  “It’s a big city.”

  “But very organized. Everyone has a place in the phone book, A to Z. I’ll find you.”

  And as the night went on, what began as a joke turned into a world with a logic of its own. They would live in the same apartment. They would share a garden of okra, bitter melon, and tomato, but on Bird’s request, absolutely no eggplant, and nothing that was grown would belong to just one or the other, but both. When Bird said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have children—a fact she had admitted to no one until then—Gracie did not hesitate in saying, “You can call mine your own.”

  “So by this time next year,” Bird said, “you’ll be married.”

  Gracie did not hide her resignation. “Probably.”

  Bird found herself trying to effect a kind of playfulness, a girlish curiosity about marriage that had never thus inspired her. “Is there someone … ?”

  “My father doesn’t tell me these things.” They were quiet for a moment, and Gracie looked up at the sky in some desperate, unblinking search for other worlds, other lives unlike her own. With her head lowered, her hands in her lap, she drew herself into a compact shape. The bone at the base of her neck protruded ever so slightly, smooth as a stone in a riverbed, so smooth it called to be touched.

  Gracie said, “I wonder what kind of movies you will make over there.”

  And so they continued talking and pretending a world that would never exist. Years later, Bird would wonder if Gracie had ever truly believed in such a life, and if she understood what building this fantasy could do to at least one of its listeners. But Bird was not without fault. She could have ended the night long before the first streaks of pink appeared on the horizon, before they wandered down the path toward a mirage of their own making. But part of the torment was wanting the torment in all its shimmering, vexing forms.

  6.

  MONTH INTO THE NEW GIRL’S EMPLOYMENT at Apsara Salon, Ghafoor must admit to himself that he made a mistake. Already there are too many beauticians, five full-timers plus four part-time girls coming in and out. He hired Anju as a favor to Bird, but he is no idiot. Bird and Anju are too kind to each other to be related. Ghafoor has considered letting the girl go, but he senses that she might be in some kind of grave trouble. Pregnant? he wonders, stealing glances at her belly. An employee wearing her disgrace in such a frontal manner simply will not do, but by the second month, when he has determined that she is without child, he tries to come up with some use for her. For years, he has been a sturdy agnostic, but he fears the karmic retribution of pushing a good girl out into the world. She may be a bad apple, but better leave that judgment to higher powers.

  IT IS LATE FEBRUARY. The air has turned brittle, the wind unforgiving. Seventy-fourth Street is still asleep, the accordion doors of each store shut like so many eyelids. With rattles and clangs, up goes the door of the hardware store, then a music store, a bakery, a sari shop. Usually Bird is the one to open the salon, but Anju volunteers to arrive e
arly on the days of her shifts, to undo the padlock and flip the switches. Glad to have an extra hour of sleep, Bird lends her the shop keys.

  Inside, Anju hangs her coat on one of several empty pegs; the others have yet to trickle in. She sits on the stool and stares at the box of red flowers pressed against the window, meant to convince passersby that within these walls is a perpetual spring of tattered petals and plastic stems.

  When Bird arrives, she shows Anju how to take inventory, counting bottle by bottle of product with a clipboard in her arm. “Go slow to fill up time,” Bird suggests. This, finally, feels to Anju like a job of some substance, something that Ghafoor will notice. But when he walks in, he barely looks at her and instead goes directly to the back of the room, where he hangs his coat on his reserved peg. By this time, the others have already arrived. Nandi is pouring Lipi a cup of chai from her gray thermos while Powder and Surya argue over which radio station to settle on. Nandi demands the morning weather report.

  Ghafoor looks around the salon, rubbing his hands together for no apparent reason. It seems that he has something to announce, though only Anju notices. She has developed the premonition of knowing when she has been singled out, when hers will be the name that is called, her hands sniffed, her hind quarters paddled. So when Ghafoor says her name, she raises her head with more dread than surprise.

  “Anju? Bird? In my office, please.”

  “YOU WANT HER TO WAX?” Bird asks. “Are you crazy?”

  Bird is standing across from Ghafoor’s desk. Anju is sitting in the corner beneath the poster of Aishwarya the bad girl, who shoots a look over her shoulder, clearly aware that her rear seems nearly edible in shiny leather pants. This is exactly the sustenance, Anju decides, that must get Ghafoor through a meeting with a disgruntled employee.

  “She is a child!” Bird says.

  “You said she was older than a child,” Ghafoor says. “If she is a child, then she should not be working here at all.”

  “But what if she does something wrong? What if someone tries to sue her? Everyone suing everyone in this country, you know that, and if they find out she is not licensed—”

  “Powder is a certified beautician, and whatever her brain has retained from beauty school, she will teach it to Anju.”

  “At least let Powder do all the bikini ones.”

  “Powder is already busy, and Surya is leaving. I want Anju to fill Surya’s shoes.”

  On and on they fight like a couple that has known each other too long. From Powder, Anju has learned the definition of bikini wax (“When they take off all the hair. Down there”). Now she weighs the pros and cons of administering the bikini wax, and while the cons are cringeworthy, they are the sorts of cons that will most likely fade with repetition. And besides, pros or cons, all will go into the Folgers canister in the end.

  She has been waiting for a window in which to speak, but finding none, she interrupts with a loud question. “Do you have a lab coat, sir?”

  “Why?” Ghafoor asks.

  “Maybe it would make me look older. Maybe people will think I am expert in the field. Their field.” Anju smiles at her own joke, then clears her throat and falls quiet.

  THE WAX WARMING POT looks like an artifact of scuffed metal, centuries old, rimmed with dried, gummy sap. It sits on a hot plate that Powder has plugged into the wall, near the beige cushioned bench. While waiting for the wax to warm, Powder lists the weaponry needed to de-hair a body part and Anju takes notes: wax, wax warming pot, muslin strips, flat wooden sticks, latex gloves, postepilating soothing cream, antiseptic toner, cotton towel, paper towel, and cotton.

  Powder holds up a paper diaper. “Disposable knicker. I got it at the supply store, a box of hundred.”

  Disposable knicker, Anju writes in her notes. She takes the knicker, folds it in half, and tucks it into her notebook.

  “What are you doing?” asks Powder. “You put that on.”

  “Me?”

  “How else will I show you? First I will do the waxing to you. Then you will do it to me.”

  Anju watches as Powder stirs a stick in the pot of wax. When she pulls the stick out, a long, luminous band of honey clings to the end.

  “Keep your top on,” Powder says. And before Anju can protest, Powder has left the room to give her some privacy.

  Anju removes the paper knicker from her notebook and opens it.

  And so it has come to this.

  AT FIRST, lying back on the cushioned bench, Anju almost forgets her sous-navel ensemble, soothed as Powder smooths a cotton ball soaked with antiseptic toner around the area in question, keeping clear of the paper knicker. This is followed by a sprinkling of talcum. “Puts a barrier between wax and skin,” Powder says.

  Not barrier enough. Pain streaks across her mind like a color, a lurid splash of red across a white wall. The red flares, then fades like an echo, softening, subsiding, and just as she begins to breathe again—another rip. Through gritted teeth, Anju repeats the mechanics to herself: spackle the wax, smooth the strip, pull taut the skin, and yank. But it is nearly impossible to ignore the fact that she has never looked so closely at this region of her own body, let alone anyone else’s.

  Of course, there are more ways of waxing wrong than waxing right. Powder suffers most from this truth, trying to direct while keeping her knee hitched. “Never ever hesitate while pulling off a strip,” Powder manages to say. “Do that again and I’ll kill you.”

  When finished, Powder tells Anju to wait in the room while she convinces Surya of Anju’s good work. Surya remains unconvinced but agrees to let Anju wax her anyway. “I’m doing this so that girl won’t get fired,” Surya says. “But I can tell just how good she is from the way you limped in here.”

  By the time Anju does Surya, her technique has much relaxed and improved. She keeps her mind focused on the details—the thinness of the honey, the rhythm of the rip—rather than the larger concept of her task. If she lets her mind wander, Ammachi might invade her thoughts, shaking her head and covering her eyes as if no hell could contain the depths to which Anju has fallen.

  “Never write to your father about this,” Bird warns. “He would never forgive me.”

  Anju agrees. Even if she were in contact with her father, she wouldn’t know the words to describe this latest development. Perhaps she would call it a “promotion” and leave it at that.

  STILL, ANJU CAN APPRECIATE those rare days of fleeting warmth, softening the snow along the sidewalks, shedding hope for a shortened winter. An old Rafi song is billowing from the open door of the music store, and passing by, she feels herself diving through a gentle wave, the tune still in her ears as she rounds the corner.

  Over the past week, Anju had two clients seeking a bikini wax, and next week, upon Surya’s departure, she will be promoted to the leg and arm waxes as well. The bikini clients were Powder’s friends, one white and one Filipino, whom Powder had lured with a 25 percent discount. The first girl, a wispy blonde with a navel ring, knew exactly what to lift and how. She chatted through the entire process without even a wince, talking about the boyfriend into whose house she had recently moved. “He’s all like, ‘I thought Jackson Heights would be more diverse, but I feel like I’m in New Delhi or something’”—rip—“but I said, ‘Eff you, I just found a salon that’ll get me a bikini wax”—rip—“for ten bucks and I’m not going anywhere.’” This was the type of blessed woman, Anju decided, who would shoot her babies right out, one after another, with hardly a stretch mark to show for it.

  “Done,” Anju said, pulling off her gloves.

  “Done?” The girl looked down. “Cool.”

  The Filipino girl was not as lucky; she might have left claw marks in the bench had she any nails. But even with the Filipino girl, Anju felt a new certainty about her work, and no longer absorbed the pain that she inflicted. She felt instead like some sort of authority, midwifing each woman into a state of groomed well-being. Once finished, the Filipino girl even smiled at the results.
/>   And now, with the week come to an end and the Folgers canister a bit fuller than before, Anju has permitted herself a paper cup of payasam from the bakery. Back home, she would pluck out the boiled raisins and drink the sweet, milky remains; here she intends to drain the whole cup exactly as Ammachi would have made it, cardamom, raisins, and all.

  Standing outside the bakery, she takes her first sip and waits for a taste that never comes. It is a little bit like Ammachi’s payasam and nothing like it at all, each spoonful adding to the disappointment. She throws it away, not wanting to ruin what she remembers. To chase an old taste is impossible, it seems, a taste perfected by memory.

  IT IS MARCH. Anju flips through the calendar on Bird’s wall and wonders how so many days could have collected behind her already, without her having resolved a single thing about her visa or green card.

  On a legal pad, one of many Bird stole on her last day at Tandon’s office, Bird writes the amount of money that Anju has earned ($625) and calculates the total of her projected earnings by April. “In time, you will have a thousand, plus a thousand from me will equal two. That will be enough to hire a lawyer, at least to start things.”

  “Can you talk to Ghafoor?” Anju asks. “Ask him to give me more hours? I want to start the process sooner. I only have until June.”

  “I tried. He said he was already booking you for arm and leg waxings.” Bird sits with her head in her hand, absently breaking off the stale edges of a muffin. “What else can we do but continue as we are? I called several lawyers from the phone book and their fees were in the thousands, all of them. All we can do is wait and work.” Bird looks up. “What about your father? I’m sure if you asked him—”