ATLAS of UNKNOWNS

by Tania James

  AFTER THE KAPYAR lowers the bolts on the two front doors, he can sit on the stone steps outside and open his thermos of tea in peace. A peace that dissolves when he sees a young woman in the distance, making her way up the road to church. He puts the cap back on his tea and rises, shielding his eyes against the sun. It is Melvin Vallara’s daughter, the elder girl who messed with firecrackers, who, by the Kapyar’s mental records, recently abandoned church altogether. But now there is something strange about her, something wounded in her eye and dazed in her gait. The closer she comes, the wearier she looks, and by the time she reaches the Kapyar, she looks as though she might collapse, as if the only thing holding her up are the words she is trying to expel between gasps.

  “Anthony Achen?” She swallows in a way that seems painful. “Where is he?”

  “Anthony Achen isn’t here,” the Kapyar says.

  “But …” She looks around. “But I came for confession. When will he be back?”

  “Not today. He doesn’t live here.”

  She stares up at the steeple, her arms hanging by her side. A slight wind could knock her over.

  By this time, it seems that this Vallara is benignly crazy. But do crazy women carry handbags? She is parchment pale, on the verge of fainting, so the Kapyar braces her elbows and guides her into a sitting position on the steps. “Have you eaten?” he asks.

  “Not today.”

  The Kapyar unscrews his thermos and pours a cup for her. “I only drank from this side—” the Kapyar begins to say, but she seems not to care as she drinks.

  She holds the cup in her lap and stares at the dregs for a time. It seems to the Kapyar that the young woman is regaining some color, that she seems almost able to rise and return home. He is about to encourage her to do so when the woman turns to him.

  “I still need to confess,” she says.

  “To whom? I am the only one here.”

  “Then you.”

  He argues against this, but she will not listen. “Don’t you understand? I am the Kapyar, not priest. Not even deacon.”

  It goes on like this, “please” and “no,” until it is clear that the woman has no intention of leaving. With a face like that, desperate and imploring, she might even follow the Kapyar home, and he is not the sort of man who would appreciate that. Nor would his wife.

  “Please,” she says.

  Days come in unforeseen shapes. The Kapyar thinks of his childhood, a string of pretty days until the one with the landlord and a blouse hook undone. It was not the worst of his memories but the beginning of knowledge that he did not want. And yet he never hated his mother for it. He treated her gently, aware that she deserved much more than what little this life had given her. So it is the thought of his mother as much as the plea of this woman that leads the Kapyar to nod in assent.

  “Parraya,” he says. “Tell me.”

  IT BEGINS WITH GRACIE, holding out a pair of white knickers, into which Linno steps while gripping her mother’s shoulder. One foot, then two.

  Linno is seven and old enough to dress herself, she believes, but her mother is anxious about the choice of outfit. Linno’s navy sailor dress with white piping matches Anju’s smaller, superior version, a matching-ness that renders the smaller girl cute and the bigger girl juvenile. But Gracie could dress them in twin rice sacks for all Linno cares. Her entire being cries out for their destination: To the beach! To the beach!

  Kovalam Beach. Linno’s father has told stories of sand so fine it can be sifted through a piece of silk, water as bright as the aqueous eyes of a porcelain doll. No real place can adhere to such standards, but with her father back in Bombay, Linno will forgive him his fairy tales. Her mother says he will return by the end of the month and then they will go to Kovalam Beach as a family. Until then, Linno loves the beach before she sees it because he loves it too.

  “BE NICE TO ABRAHAM SAAR and Mercy Auntie,” her mother says, while waiting for the van that will deliver them to the beach. She is wearing a rose-colored sari of a slippery material that will not suffer from the saltwater. In her arms is Anju, sucking on her white piping, showing off her muffiny diaper. “This trip was his idea. He is paying for the van as well. So make sure to thank him.”

  But a grown, bearded man like Abraham Saar roams above the world of puerile pleases and thank-yous. The other day, he and his wife visited Ammachi and Gracie to invite them for a day trip to Kovalam Beach. Gracie was as stiff as the chair in which she sat, but Mercy Auntie seemed warm and at ease, explaining how her father and Gracie’s father had been classmates long ago. “Just come,” she said. “Another couple is joining us. It will be a nice welcome home, don’t you think?” At first Gracie began to protest, but Ammachi encouraged her to take the children, and Linno nearly sprang out of her seat when her mother said, “All right.”

  But now, the imminence of Linno’s thank-you slightly tarnishes the day to come.

  When the van arrives, they squeeze into the farthest back seat. In the first row is the other couple, a dour man and his wife whose bun hangs like an overripe fruit on the verge of falling, pinned with a garland of jasmine. Behind the couple are Mercy Auntie and her broom-thin boys, who seem to believe that Linno and Anju are where girls should be—out of sight. She wants to ask if Shine feels pain when Sheen falls down, and vice versa, but Shine and Sheen glance at Linno with their round, froggy eyes and at once commit themselves to never look upon her again.

  As the van rumbles to a start, Gracie nudges Linno in the arm. Gracie raises her eyebrows at the front seat, where Abraham Saar is seated next to the driver. When Linno looks away, her mother taps her elbow. “Say thank you,” she whispers.

  From the back, Abraham Saar’s head looks large and hairy and indestructible. To squeak out a thank-you, to cause not only his head to turn but also those of his driver and his wife, Shine and Sheen, the dour man and the jasmine wife, seems suddenly a gargantuan task to ask of a seven-year-old.

  Her mother pinches her arm. Linno jerks away.

  “I thought you were a good girl,” her mother whispers, rocking Anju to sleep.

  “NO,” Linno says. She is quiet, not good. These are not the same things.

  Shine/Sheen glances at her, then whispers into his replica’s ear behind a cupped palm. Linno sticks her tongue out at the both of them.

  “Eddi.” Her mother’s voice is knife-sharp. “Do it again and I’ll drag you back home by that tongue.”

  “Everything okay?” Abraham Saar bellows over his shoulder. “Comfortable?”

  “Yes, very much!” Linno’s mother says. “My daughter, she wants to say thank you, but she feels embarrassed. She’s shy.”

  Linno stares at her knees, heat crawling up her throat. Every child knows that this exact sentence—She’s shy—inspires a litany of shaming responses related to Oh and Aw and Why so shy? On cue, Mercy Auntie emits an artificial awww, as if Linno belongs in a muffiny diaper of her own.

  And here, her mother says the kind of thing that can destroy a postcard-perfect day. “Just like her father.”

  Abraham Saar gives an awkward laugh.

  Linno stares at her window, where a moth’s wing is stuck to the outside of the glass. Into the hollow of Melvin’s absence, Linno’s mother has tossed a careless joke. She has laughed at him, at Linno, at herself and her life. Last week, Linno saw how her father had grown so sickly and sad around her mother, who only recently relented over the issue of moving to America. Linno hates the idea of America. She hates that country for casting such a spell over her mother, who for so long could imagine no other life than one lived there. She remembers waking in the middle of the night, searching for her mother’s shape on the charpoy. Gracie’s voice cut clear through the dark. “Go to sleep, Linno Mol. I am here, aren’t I?” And though it was a question not meant to be answered, still it seemed open to more than one possibility.

  9.

  N THE VAN, Anju takes a window seat in the back, next to Mrs. Solanki, while Petra swivels around in her row
to continue filming. The sound man wedges his fuzzy microphone by Anju’s knees, while Rohit checks the batteries. Roy sits up front, gripping the window frame to steel himself against the oncoming buses, which seem to swerve around them at the last possible minute. “They really come out of nowhere, don’t they?” he remarks.

  The driver smiles with his paan-stained teeth and youthfully whips the steering wheel around a charging auto-rickshaw. “This is old road,” the driver says. “No lanes, like in National Highway.”

  The National Highway. The Golden Colon. Ammachi’s voice drifts back to Anju like a sweet, stale smell.

  “How do you feel?” Mrs. Solanki asks, the same question she has been asking all along the way. If Anju possessed the proper words, she would say that the whole thing is strangely ordinary. The sunbright paddies and their healing greens, the buses panting plumes of smoke, the berms, the bridges, the Kalyan Silks billboard, the thickets of yellow bamboo, the coconuts and mangroves and the pile of burning trash, the rise and fall of her stomach mapping the hills and hollows of the road, the sweat and the dung, the rippling heat, the convulsed reflection of the sun in a puddle, and the ginger-colored road.

  But it is exhilarating, too, to feel so ordinary in these surroundings. It is a sign of coming home.

  For the sake of Petra’s camera, Anju resorts to her high school vocabulary list. “I am nauseated?” She looks to Mrs. Solanki for approval of this word.

  Mrs. Solanki looks deeply interested, yet perplexed by the answer. “Nauseated? Do you want to stop?”

  “Not bad nauseated. Good nauseated,” Anju specifies. Complex words for complex emotions. “I am inebriated with joy.”

  10.

  Y THE TIME they arrive at Kovalam Beach, Linno’s mouth is a fixed line and her lips hurt from the effort. She has privately decreed that a smile will not cross her face for the rest of the day, at least not for her mother. She imagines her smilelessness plaguing everyone in the van, a pox of guilt spreading over them until they beg her to cure them with kindness and smiles. To which, after taking a seat in the front, she does.

  Her father was right, of course, about Kovalam Beach. She sifts the white dust of sand through her fingers; she tastes the brackish air. The tide slowly sticks out its tongue at the coast, then politely recedes, leaving opalescent shards of shells in its wake.

  Abraham Saar spreads a large blue sheet over the sand and stakes the corners with stones. The boys run off to build a fort of sand, but seeing that they are too close to the shoreline, their mother walks over to advise them to move a few feet back. She bends over them, her braid swinging in the wind. With a stick, Linno draws her name in the sand, but Anju keeps waddling through her handiwork and finally demands the stick.

  Linno moves some distance away to write her name in peace. When she looks back, she picks out her mother from the small throng of adults. Gracie is leaning onto her palm, tilting her face to the sky, while Abraham Saar lies on his side and plays with Anju. Her mother’s eyes are closed, her face relaxing with every breath. It is strange to see this combination of three, a tableau of an alternate family. Stranger still is when Abraham Saar looks up at Linno’s mother without saying a word, mired in thought. Gracie does not notice him. Linno keeps waiting for him to look away but he does not.

  Just then, Gracie opens her eyes and sees Linno staring. They blink at each other, as if from across a great distance. Turning, Linno’s mother asks something of Abraham Saar, who shades his eyes and nods quickly. She rises, brushing off her knees, and approaches Linno.

  Her mother stands tall and shadowy, silhouetted by the sun behind her. “Shall we go play a game?” she asks.

  Quick as that, her mother offers reconciliation, but Linno does not want it yet. The impact of her anger should be more lasting than this. Despondently, she asks what they would play.

  “Hide-and-seek,” her mother suggests.

  “Where?”

  Gracie looks past Linno, at the sickled coast of the beach. “I know a place. I used to go there with my cousins.”

  Linno follows her mother down the shore. Of course she wants to play with her mother, fully aware of the precious rarity of such an event, adults agreeing to the rules of play, rules beyond their own making. But Linno deems it equally important to cling to her pouty indignation, at least for the time being, if that is what it took to get her mother’s attention in the first place.

  11.

  HILDREN, on their way home from school, scuttle along the sides of roads in chatty clusters, backpacks bobbing against their narrow shoulder blades. Anju recognizes the uniform of St. Anne’s Catholic, navy jumpers and light blue blouses like the ones she used to wear, worn by little girls with familiar faces. Every face, though belonging to a stranger, is familiar.

  Mrs. Solanki leans forward and taps Roy on the shoulder. “Shall we discuss how we will shoot the reunion? I’d like to make a plan so I’m prepared. Minimal surprises, you know.”

  Anju listens as Roy and Petra roughly outline the proceedings, who should stand where and say what. When they are within walking distance of the house, Roy says, the crew will travel on foot so as to better capture the actual moment of embrace between Anju and her sister. That moment is “key” to the reunion itself. Petra tells Rohit to cover Anju’s left side, staying wide and out of the way. “Just look for the open angle,” Petra says. “See where I am. Don’t crowd my shot.”

  Rohit says okay several times, clearly worried that he will never be able to satisfy Petra, let alone on this day, on this shoot, an event no less pivotal than a rite of manhood.

  Mrs. Solanki turns to Anju. “As for you, Anju, just remember: bigger is better. You know what I mean? Don’t be embarrassed in front of the cameras. Feel free to cry if you want to.”

  Anju nods and shifts her gaze out the window at the passing green. Bigger is better: she has heard this phrase before, in a sandwich place where the XL cup of soda had been replaced by an XXL tub. She wishes once again that she had called Linno ahead of time, at least to warn her of the camera carnival around the corner. Might Linno be frightened? Furious? It seems unfair to creep up on her with a lens or two, capturing her before she has assented. Anju said as much to Mrs. Solanki, days before, to which she replied, “Do you think Rohit ever asked me before he started shooting? With family, these sorts of courtesies can be ignored a bit.”

  But “courtesy” is too small a word in Anju’s mind. To take a person’s photograph without her permission or awareness seems akin to stealing. And hasn’t she stolen enough?

  12.

  HE SUN is slowly tucking itself into a lavender cloud as Gracie leads Linno to a solitary spot on the beach. It is a long walk away, over a small bluff, but well worth it, Linno decides, as the piles of slate gray rocks provide ample room for hiding. The water whips the rocks in great flares of foamy white. Storks perch on the higher peaks, and everywhere is the pleasant reek offish.

  Gracie names four rocks to delineate the boundaries, making it impossibly easy for the seeker to find her prey. “The ocean is out of bounds,” she says.

  “But why?”

  “No.”

  “Amma, I can hold my breath for a full minute. I was practicing.”

  Her mother is unyielding on the issue of dry land. “Want to count first?”

  Linno accepts with limited interest. In a drab tone, she counts from one to twenty, her hands pressed to a rock, her eyes pressed against her hands. She can hear her mother rustling off to her left. When Linno is finished counting, she turns around only to spy her mother’s toe peeking out from behind a rock not three feet away. She stares at the toe, irritated, her intelligence insulted. Here is her mother, trying to make up for betraying her in the van, but unwilling to play to the game’s fullest potential. Presuming, as always, that Linno is younger than she really is.

  When it is Gracie’s turn to count, Linno prowls about with feline silence and wedges herself into the crevasse beneath a giant boulder. She must keep her body flat a
nd her head turned to the side in order to fit. The stone smells damp and mineral, possibly the home of various wriggly things, but in true hide-and-seek, hiders make such sacrifices.

  At first, Gracie searches in silence and then begins to tease Linno aloud. “Whoever wants ice cream after the game, raise your hand! Just me? I guess I’ll eat ice cream all by myself.”

  After roaming around for a few more minutes, Gracie calls out: “You know you have to stay in the boundaries, don’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, Linno Mol, I give up. Come out. You win.”

  Three times Linno sees her mother’s chappals passing back and forth across the narrow sliver of her vision, and each time, her mother’s feet pick up speed. “Eddi! Come out, I said!” An irritated quiet. Then, the fading slaps of footsteps.

  Beneath the rock, Linno discovers how a game of hide-and-seek can make her mother love her better: a person is more important in her absence than in her presence. The longer Linno keeps herself hidden, the more frantic her mother will become, realizing finally that this is her family, whom she loves so greatly that there will be no more taunting or fighting, no more thoughts of running away to the States.

  Linno meanders down other lanes of thought, of chocolate ice cream, of stupid boys and their exclusive forts, before she remembers her mother. Only then does Linno realize how her mother’s voice has vanished, though she cannot remember when exactly it did so. She wiggles out from under the rock, startled by the gusts of wind that tug at the hem of her skirt, the needles of straight, gray rain.