Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

According to family history, Mappilla descended from the first Indian Christians, themselves converted by St. Thomas in A.D.56 (“The Christian Christians,” Ammachi said. “Not like the latecomers over in Goa, all those Hernandos and Fernandos.”) In 1653, along came the Portuguese priests with their swinging censers of incense, their ribbons of Latin chant, intending to spread their brand of Christianity to the Indians, making Hernandos and Fernandos of whomever they could. So Mappilla, along with the rest of his congregation, tied a rope around an iron cross in the courtyard of their church. In protest, they held fast to the rope and swore on the Bible of the Church of Our Lady of Life at Mattanchery that they would never be subject to the Portuguese bishops.

“The Coonan Cross,” Ammachi called it. “To this day, you can see it in Mattanchery. Bent from the force of their pulling.”

“Why were they pulling?” Anju, then a little girl, had asked.

“The lesson is twofold. One: force of mind brings force of body. And two: the West is not the best.”

And now, years later, Anju stood poised and packed for the less-than-best West.

Ammachi mashed a kiss into Anju’s cheek, crying, clutching her granddaughter’s face as though she planned to pluck it off as a memento. Several times, Melvin reassured Anju that he felt no trace of inner itching, so the flight would be fine. When the jeep honked, he flinched.

“It’s only ten months,” Anju said, though uttering the time frame seemed only to lengthen it.

Everyone agreed: such a short time amounted to no time at all. But what was good-bye between those who had never spoken it? Awkwardly, Melvin folded his daughter’s face into his chest and kissed the top of her head, his red eyes all the while on the vehicle that would take her away.

LINNO WAS THE ONLY tearless one. She stood against the wall with arms crossed, a pose that told she was in no mood to be touched. Anju glimpsed the old woman Linno might become, thin and embittered, arms wrapped so tight she seemed to embrace herself.

“Linno,” Anju said gently, by way of good-bye. Linno did not move.

“Don’t look so jealous, chedduthi!” one of the neighbors called out. “Anju will come back and take you too!”

They all laughed, all except Linno and Anju.

The jeep rattled away. Over her shoulder, Anju waved and her well-wishers waved back. They prolonged the wave, palms wagging, faces growing blank until the gesture lost the luster of farewell. Anju wiped her eyes, weeping not for the people who were waving, but for the one person who wouldn’t. Not once had Linno broken her silence since leaving their mother’s grave. Her face remained as stony as it had been that day.

SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD and here is Anju, stepping on American tile with its slick, game-show sheen for the first time in her life.

The JFK customs officer asks Anju a series of questions. Many friends and acquaintances have prepped her for this interview, have coached her to insist that she has absolutely no designs whatsoever to stay in the States. Even if she has designs (everyone has designs), she is to be firmly bland in her lack of imagination and ambition.

The gatekeeper, a woman with a crispy-looking perm, opens an envelope that had been sent to Anju by the Chennai consulate, with the warning that should she open it herself, she would not be allowed entry. Glancing at its contents, the gatekeeper asks why she wishes to enter the United States, and then, how long she plans to stay. “Ten months only,” Anju says. She is about to explain how she was recruited by Americans, but to her slight dismay, the official stamps her papers and welcomes her.

After waiting an hour to retrieve her luggage from its carousel, Anju surrenders her bags to the poking and prodding of another official. He unearths a set of dolls that fit one inside the next, each of them a pear-shaped American president. Anju explains that these are gifts for her host family, while the officer unscrews Nixon and sniffs inside. Anju does not explain how she spent an hour in three trinket shops, hunting for the perfect present. Her father begged her to take frond-woven handicrafts, on the assumption that six dolls did not make an appropriate gift, but this series of presidents birthing smaller presidents epitomizes something unclear yet profound about America, about its leaders fattening with optimism, about growing toward the future while carrying the past in deepening chambers. Surely her host family will display them with warmth.

With all her bags and belongings intact, Anju pushes her cart toward the exit sign, where the glass doors part automatically. Once outside, a placard with her new name catches her eye: MISS ANJU MELVIN.

Her real name is Anju Vallara, but at her father’s insistence, she lopped off her last name and took his first as her last. “You need a name that people can pronounce correctly,” he said.

“Why can’t I correct people myself?” she asked.

Melvin cited the names of acquaintances who had gone abroad — look at Gopal Ananthakrishnan who anointed himself Gopal Ananth, or Johny Kochuvarkey who became John Koch. Everyone tossed and scrambled their names into something more globally palatable, so likewise Anju found her passport and visa bearing her new title under a picture that rendered her a bit lemurlike, with eyes surprised and far apart, the rest of her face receding to a timid chin.

“Miss Melvin?” asks the uniformed man holding the sign.

A regrettable change, she thinks.

She nods hello as he takes control of her cart. He is a young black-American. Or is it black-African? African-black? Blafrican? She experiments with several more hyphenates, all in her head, though none seems correct and her driver seems exactly the wrong person to ask. They walk out into a world of concrete and glowing brake lights, people clasping one another, a pink balloon floating into the rich blue sky, forgotten, and a couple that meet in a violent kiss, the man’s hands locking the woman’s head into place as if it, too, might drift away.

The driver opens the car door (For whom? For her!), and she enters to find them divided by a wall of dark glass. In the reflection, she examines her ensemble, the flowery blouse and skirt that swished with a chic nonchalance back home. The outfit has suffered from the journey, looking now like a flowery tent that collapsed into wrinkles all around her.

She shivers, assaulted by mighty gusts of air-conditioning on either side, and pokes her fingers into the empty cup holders. She reviews what she knows of her host family: the Solankis, a Gujarati family of three, with a mother and father whom she will call Uncle and Auntie out of respect, if not relation. Being Hindu, they will likely impose a beefless diet within the house, but she hopes that they will be more forgiving of fish. They have a son, several years older than Anju, currently attending a celebrated college named Princeton. The father is a doctor. The mother is somewhat famous as the host of an American daytime television show called Four Corners . Her name is Sonia Solanki.

Though Anju has seen it only once, she is well aware of Four Corners , named for four female hosts who debate various news topics and trends, from foreign policy to flattering swimsuit cover-ups. On the one episode that Anju watched, Mrs. Solanki was introducing the practice of Ayurveda to the studio audience. “Ayurveda,” she said, “abides by the principle that anything that enters our bodies can have three possible effects — as food, as medicine, or as poison — which is why I refuse to eat anything with high-fructose corn syrup.” Her usual antagonist, the spunky and highlighted Young Creationist, facetiously argued on behalf of Little Debbie snack cakes (of which she could “literally inhale a dozen”), earning applause from some members of the audience. As was her wont, Mrs. Solanki laughed and lauded the Young Creationist’s tiny waist: “If only we could all have your genes.”