Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Who is doing what?”

“She. Anju. This … ” He shakes his head forcefully, deeply irritated. “This is for the best.”

The word “this” he pronounces with eyes closed, whether from reverence or need of sleep, she cannot tell. Linno knows, has always known, the definition of “this.” She wants an admission from Ammachi or Melvin, both of whom have gone about the house maintaining the careful pretense that Anju’s newfound artistry is perfectly natural.

With a hand pressed to the table, Melvin rises out of his incoherence and shuffles to the back of the house.

Linno wades her fingers into the bowl of banana chips. Is this the moment when she should knock the bowl to the floor, drag Anju out of bed, call her thief? But her rage will not come. Instead, she feels a slow-growing sadness in the pit of her stomach which she has tried, time and again, to uproot or ignore. She collects the few crumbs from the table and takes the bowl to the kitchen.

SITTING ON THE BACK STEP, Melvin thinks of what he wanted to explain to Linno, about an old friend known as Eastern Bobby. No richer or poorer than anyone else, Eastern Bobby had aspirations that began with a keen sense of destiny, a conviction that he had a starring role to play in the world. So he was disheartened at having to marry a woman double his heft; more than once his friends had asked him if his Dollie ever got tired of toting him around on her hip. But those same friends had no wives with visas, and it was Dollie’s visa that landed him in what he believed might be a dream destination: Normal, Illinois.

On his first trip back from Normal, Eastern Bobby brought a film camera, a heavy, monstrous machine that he set up outside his parents’ home. He then ironed one of his grandfather’s mundas with a care he had never invested in his own clothes and nailed the munda to the side of the house. At night, he invited all his friends and neighbors to watch the projection. Melvin sat back, his elbows digging into the hard dirt, listening to the symphony of crickets and camera noise beneath a crackling stretch of black. A huge, blurry eye burst onto the munda, watery and blinking, apocalyptic, but out of focus. More black. And then — Eastern Bobby’s top half appeared, his slight frame huge on the makeshift screen.

“Namaskaram!” on-screen Eastern Bobby bellowed at the audience. “Thank you for coming!”

On-screen Eastern Bobby waved the camera into the kitchen, while real-life Eastern Bobby watched with the cool appraisal of a film critic, frowning, his chin in his hand.

The cameraman followed Eastern Bobby to the refrigerator. Eastern Bobby opened the door to reveal a giant jug of milk, a blue carton of twelve perfect eggs, a brick of yellow cheese, and a box with several sticks of butter. In the freezer: a slab of steak and a whole chicken, beheaded and plucked, sitting upright like the guest of honor.

“He just bought all that food for show,” someone whispered.

Another audience member disagreed. “Have you seen his wife?”

The screening went on for an hour, beginning with bathroom and closet tours, and ending with greetings from various men and women whom Eastern Bobby had visited in Chicago, sending their best wishes to their relatives. Naming the relatives took up considerable time, and all the camera jostling made Melvin slightly nauseated, but still he watched the nouveau celebrities. Thrilled and sick, he imagined himself on-screen as well, with a fridge of his own full of milk and meat.

This was during a simpler time, when he had only himself to place at the center of his fantasy home in Illinois, with all its wide-open space and stalks of nodding wheat, the Normal supermarkets big as amusement parks. And while on-screen Eastern Bobby pointed out the items in the fridge, Melvin noticed through the window behind him a few children playing. Black children, but still, when Melvin squinted, he could imagine that they were his own.

THE DAY BEFORE Anju’s departure to New York falls on a Sunday, and despite the many minor tasks that have yet to be completed, the family attends Mass. It is only proper, Ammachi says, though even she harbors doubts about Anthony Achen’s proficiency as a priest. Anthony Achen has cultivated a roundish beard; its pure whiteness disagrees with his black eyebrows, fanning the general belief that he bleaches his beard in order to attain the semblance of divine wisdom. His sermons are lacking in that regard.

“And so,” Anthony Achen concludes, “when the angel Gabriel asked the Virgin Mary to bear the fruit of the world, the Immaculate Conception, did she doubt? No. Did she say, ‘Can I have a minute to think?’ No. Did she say, ‘I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Do with me what you will’? Absolutely yes. Because when God calls, we do not think. We trust. We go. We do.”

In the audience, the Kapyar nods along as if he and Anthony Achen are engaged in a private conversation. As right-hand man to Anthony Achen, the Kapyar keeps his robes as white as his superior’s beard, bleached with bottles of Ujala. Sometimes, when Linno is bored, she makes a habit of watching the Kapyar’s movements, to see what rowdy boys he is glaring down over his shoulder, which ears he is planning to pinch, a small brutality that has earned him the unofficial title of “the Crab.” He looks over the congregation, his gaze laced with disapproval. Just before he catches her eye, Linno returns to the conclusion of Anthony Achen’s homily: “And then there are others who have nothing better to do than to steal ladies’ shoes from the doors of our very own church. Whoever has Pearlie Varkey’s shoes, please return them.”

The congregation wears grave expressions, not only at Pearlie Varkey’s loss, but also the loss of trust among fellow Syrian Catholics. But maybe next time Pearlie Varkey will think twice about wearing her milk-white high heels to church, or any shoes whose insoles declare LIZ CLAIBORNE, and placing them at an obvious distance from the rabble of dusty sandals that belong to everyone else. Pearlie Varkey has family in Toronto and flies back and forth often, always with her tender feet buckled and belted into new styles. Not that theft is ever acceptable. But ask for attention and ye shall receive.

Someday soon, Linno thinks, Anju will return buckled into a shoe like that.

Ever since Anju’s plane ticket arrived in the mail, it has occupied a hallowed place behind the curio glass, nestled against her plaque along with her passport. And then came her suitcase, open-mouthed in the living room, collecting the clothes she would wear, the foods she would bring, including jackfruit that Ammachi specially fried and dried for her and hard balls of sugared sesame seed.

These thoughts weave in and out of Linno’s prayer, reducing its meaning to a stream of vowels and fricatives. She stands in the back, rows of heads packed thickly all the way to the nave. On the left stand the men, on the right are the women, crowns covered with sari pallus and shawls, and between them the long, wide aisle that leads straight to Anthony Achen. Above him hangs a massive tapestry of Saint George slaying the dragon. With his placid blue eyes, Saint George appears almost benevolent, aloft on his bucking white horse, lovingly plunging his spear into the writhing side of the dragon whose eyes look almost as human, but brown.

On the coir mats, the congregation rises and sits, rises and sits, the soles of their feet stamped with waffled patterns, so they can walk into the world weak-kneed but blessed. The hymns drone through the church like tides of music, a new verse beginning in the front row with the overeager Kapyar before the previous verse has finished in the back.

O Saint Yohannan Nepumocianos!

Your heavenly blessings, priceless blessings