Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Bestow on us, your humble servants .

We pray you .

We beseech you .

From here, Linno spots Anju standing closer to the front, her hands folded, her shawl draped over her head.

AFTER TWO SOMBER HOURS of church, Ammachi enjoys a bit of socializing. Aglow, she flits through the scrum of people that have gathered around the entrance, asking after children, parents, and ailments. But that day, every question pertains to Anju — when is her flight, which airline, who is to meet her? Restless, Anju excuses herself, claiming that she has several errands to run, while Linno stays behind to wait for Ammachi and, to her dismay, to act as Anju’s spokeswoman. The more Linno laughs and thanks everyone for their well wishes, the more it sounds to her ears as if she is laughing at an ugly, exuberant joke in which she has been made the fool.

While Ammachi gossips, Linno makes her way to the nearby cemetery, which is rounded by a short wall, brightly gilded with moss. Teak and tamarind trees fringe the border, shedding dead leaves over the village of crosses and tombs left to bake in the shadeless heat. Linno passes an ivory vault trimmed in pink, a bird-splattered cross planted on top. This is one of the many family tombs that preside aboveground, holding eight to twenty bodies in separate numbered drawers. Those who cannot afford the family tombs are assigned an earthen burial, a mound temporarily marked by a wooden cross.

Once, several years after her mother’s death, Linno visited the cemetery with Ammachi only to find strangers at the same gravesite, mourning their dead son. Ammachi told her that Gracie’s remains had been dug up and deposited in the Asthi Kuzhi, the Bone Pit on the other side of the church, more than twenty feet deep, gathering to its heart the generations of broken bones that would soften, gradually, to ash and dust. In time, the dead son would be moved to the Asthi Kuzhi as well, leaving the nameless mound to be filled with another body in need, and grieving strangers would continue to converge at the same spot to mourn their different losses. Sorrow was not a space to be bounded.

LINNO FINDS ANJU crouched before the wooden cross that once marked their mother’s place. Anju lays a few weak wildflowers atop the mound, her head bowed, her eyes closed as she prays. Her shawl does not match her salwar, two discordant shades of blue. An obvious mistake, but just like Anju to be so careless, and not only with her clothes. A hundred prayers would not change her.

As Anju rises, Linno asks if all is packed.

Anju whirls around. A smile follows, relieved and artificial. Almost done, she says, though she still has to convert her rupees to dollars. Ammachi knows a man who can give them a good exchange rate, under the table of course, since the banks will rob you blind—

“And my painting,” Linno says. “Have you packed that too?”

During the long pause that ensues, Anju’s hands fall slowly to her sides. “I promise I will be careful with it.”

“That’s only one of my worries.”

“Miss Schimpf wants to put it in some sort of student exhibition.”

“As if it’s yours.”

“Yes.”

The softness of her answer, delicate, almost inquisitive, only enrages Linno the more.

“She saw the tailor’s painting,” Anju says. “And she asked me if I had more.”

“You showed her my sketchbook?” The thought surprises Linno even as she says it, as the image returns to her of Miss Schimpf looking down at something in her arms, Anju beside her, hungry for approval. “You went through my things and brought her my sketchbook?”

Anju draws herself up and attempts an innocent expression, without remorse, if not for the way she is wiping her hands against each other, over and over, long after they are clean. “But I’ll bring all of it back.”

“With your name on it.”

“Not written on it.”

“So?”

“I’m trying to help us get somewhere, Linno. I’m trying to change our lives.”

“Your life first! By stepping all over mine! And then what will happen when you leave? You will go on and I will be here, only a chapter in your life.”

Anju stares at the ground, pained, but not pained enough. Linno knows the way her sister will continue, the way her temporary regrets, with time, will become trivialities, things she will assign to desperation and youth. If only it were as simple as that.

“Put that shawl back on its hanger,” Linno says without emotion. “You always forget.”

Anju looks up, cautiously hopeful, but Linno is already walking away.

Linno tramples over the mimosas that she and Anju used to tickle as children, watching the edgy fernlike leaves fold at the slightest brush. Praying Plants, Anju called them as they shimmered in the wind. After a while, Linno slows her pace, as there are people ahead who will notice her haste and ask her questions, who will hear the tears lodged in her throat. She walks, each step more leaden than the last, toward the distant thrum of voices taking their leave.

OR YEARS, Anju has made a habit of mentally penning lines to her autobiography. It is almost always the same line, a variation on the epiphanic flashes found in biographies she has read, most recently those of Franklin Roosevelt, Indira Gandhi, and an unauthorized tome on Oprah Winfrey. In each, the line always ends with: … I found myself at a crossroads .

And now, sitting in window seat 29A, selected for its proximity to one of four emergency exits, she thinks: In the airplane, I found myself at a crossroads . At the moment, there is no crossroads, only a gray runway leading in a singular direction that her tiny window will not allow her to see. But recalling the line gives Anju a modicum of control, a sense of promise. A crossroads does not end in a crash.

The sari-clad stewardesses are slim, pretty, irritable. The pleats of their saris are neatly stacked, like Oriental fans, giving the impression that these are women who never sit or slump or sweat. They poke Anju awake when she tries to sleep through a meal. Wrapped in blankets, she fingers the plastic knife and picks at the papadam, while reading the safety manual for the seventh time. She stares at the screen built into the space above her tray table, where she can track her journey as a jagged blue vein slogging along from Kochi to Mumbai, and eventually Mumbai to London, then London to New York.

After dinner, the child in front of her, demanding leg room, reclines to a nearly horizontal position, so that Anju is forced to watch the screen within inches of her face. A Bollywood actor is talking about his favorite restaurant, Lotus, near Juhu Beach. “I highly recommend the strawberry salad,” he says in dainty Anglicized English, pointing a forkful of salad at his fans, who toss and turn in their economy seats. “It’s succulent, truly succulent.”

THE JOURNEY BEGAN with a white jeep that arrived outside her home in Kumarakom, having miraculously navigated the scarred, narrow roads. While the driver roped her belongings across the top of the jeep, family and neighbors gathered in the sitting room. They bowed their heads and, facing east, murmured a prayer for safekeeping, each at his own pace, so that the disparate words—“servants” … “bestow” … “blessings”—floated around Anju’s ears like the slow pulsing of fireflies past her window, the ones she watched for hours the night before, unable to sleep.

Anju mumbled along, focused on the painting of P. C. Mappilla that hung on the wall opposite. When Linno was eleven, Ammachi had commissioned her to paint the portrait of their ancestor, a minor celebrity of his time, according to Ammachi. Having no other model, Linno painted a rosier version of Melvin, with the same hollows in the cheeks, the same bumpy nose, but a fuller head of hair.