Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Bird has recently acquired a job not far from her apartment, as a full-time assistant at the law offices of Rajiv Tandon, an immigration attorney. She photocopies papers, answers phones, and tells people to wait until Mr. Tandon is ready to see them. Usually, the visitors are new immigrants from all parts of the South Asian subcontinent, all of them anxious, hopeful, lurching at the sound of Mr. Tandon’s voice as it comes rumbling through his office walls. They are used to a bureaucracy that has proven as inconstant as a cloud. They blame and love Mr. Tandon in the same way that metereologists are held responsible for interpreting the weather.

She won the position six months ago, when she took down the number from a poster that read: NEED A JOB? SPEAK ENGLISH + HINDI?

At the interview, she found Mr. Tandon as well groomed as he was well educated. He did not speak Hindi, he said, because his parents had wanted him to fully acclimate to his private boarding school life at St. Albans, which was, by the by, home to the sons of senators and statesmen. “But that’s a whole other era, isn’t it?” Mr. Tandon smiled. Not so long ago, it seemed to Bird. The luster of his hair suggested that he was no more than forty. Bird used to work at an Indian beauty salon, so she knew the color of true black, not the stark, bluish shade found in a box or a bottle.

She had spent far too long at the salon, a job she took only because she knew the owner well, from the days when they traveled in the same drama troupe. Abdul Ghafoor is his name, a man whose shellacked hairstyle has not changed since he adopted it from the cinema star Amitabh Bachchan, tall on top with sturdy sideburns. Even as Amitabh’s star fell in the nineties, Ghafoor maintained the indomitable coif and was only too pleased to see Amitabh resurface as game-show host of Kaun Banega Crorepati , that enthusiastic Indian answer to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire .

Equal to his love for Amitabh is Ghafoor’s love for his now defunct drama troupe, Apsara Arts Club, which also lent its name, years later, to his Apsara Salon. Bird has been a key member of both. She prefers not to dwell on her acting days, but Ghafoor prefers to think about them daily, launching into the old roles at random, particularly the lines from Kalli Pavayuda Veede , an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House , which Ghafoor brought to the Kerala stage. Ibsen had long been championed by Malayali academics, but by the early eighties, Ghafoor was eager to free Ibsen from that stiff and distant realm. “Social realism” was a phrase of which he never tired. “What is more important than to explore the minds of ordinary people?” he asked, uninterested in answers. Taken with the central character of Nora, the repressed and rebellious wife of Torvald, Ghafoor pored over the English text for months. He turned Nora and Torvald into Neera and Tobin, finding the Malayalam words for the desperation and disillusionment that would lead Neera to leave her husband. As director, Ghafoor never had lines of his own, but he memorized some of Bird’s lines, which he still recites today while gliding a broom down the aisle, as easily as humming the tune to an old song:

Always I was your myna bird, Tobichayan, your doll made of glass. Only now do I see the truth: that I have been living with a strange man for eight years, that I have given him three children. Now I can stand it no longer!

The customers ignore Ghafoor’s lines as most of their concerns lie with their facial hair and how best to get rid of it.

Despite so much shared history, Bird left the salon over a matter of interior design. One day, she arrived at work to find an old show card framed on the wall. She remembered the poster well, the silhouette of a myna bird perched on a branch in the lower right-hand corner, while more birds were depicted in flight, aswirl around the words:

Apsara Arts Club Presents …

Kalli Pavayuda Veede

starring the exquisite BIRDIE KAMALABHAI

Bird stared at the show card, unblinking. In a strangely hollowed voice, she demanded that Ghafoor remove it. She would not say why. She would not mention the name on the cast list that plunged her into a pain so acute she had to look away and gather herself.

They fought over whether the show card should stay or go, which became an argument about Ghafoor’s poor managerial skills and Bird’s unwillingness to learn how to wax or thread. Ghafoor called Bird a prima donna. Bird accused Ghafoor of stealing Western ideas because he had none of his own. Enraged, he countered with Varghese Mappilai’s 1893 adaptation of Taming of the Shrew , the earliest in a long tradition of lending and borrowing, but Bird stopped him with an outstretched hand. “Just give me what you owe and I will leave.”

After he counted out the bills, she pocketed the money and collected her belongings from her station. There was not much to collect as she had never brought photos and frames to work, like the other ladies did, no small, portable windows into her personal life. The show card was personal enough. With so little to tidy up before leaving, it was as though she had never arrived.

THE OFFICE POSITION was a sitting job, clearly a step up. To prove herself, Bird was willing to take a typing test, but Mr. Tandon only questioned her about her commitment to the job and her ability to make chai.

“I am very loyal,” Bird said, wondering if she were making herself sound like a dog. “I speak Malayalam, Tamil, some Bengali, Hindi, and English. And I make my own chai masala, not like the gunpowder that comes in the plastic packages.”

“Impressive. How do you know all these languages?”

“I was born in Kerala, but I have been traveling since I was young. I was an actress.” She regrets this statement, as the response is usually one of amused doubt.

“I believe that.” He studied her. She felt semiprecious under his gaze until he added: “You have a certain grandmotherly quality. I think anyone would believe you.”

She wondered why Mr. Tandon had not tested her secretarial skills, but since then, she has learned the breadth of her job. Not simply a secretary, she is a presence. When clients give her their names, she can pinpoint their mother tongues with near perfect accuracy. She reaches out with their language, or the closest ones she knows, and the comprehending client relaxes into a chair and accepts a Styrofoam cup of chai. Over the past month, Bird has learned to tell when language and chai are the closest a client has come to home.

BECAUSE EVERY FRIDAY is a half day, Bird’s schedule leaves her free to enjoy the Manorama at leisure. As is her custom, she spends her Friday lunch at Tandoori Express, a narrow restaurant crammed with tables, the low ceiling strewn with so many disco lights and crepe paper mobiles that the space resembles some sort of electrified cave, thick with neon stalactites. During the day, thankfully, the lights remain off. The waiters know her enough to predict the small packet of honey that she prefers with her tea, and Arpit serves her regular order of dahi batata puri, four crispy disks as opposed to the usual three. Tea, honey, puri, and paper. At her age, consistency is all she hopes for.

She spreads the Malayala Manorama on the table for the first skim through. The front page tells of an ongoing fight between a Coca-Cola plant and tribals in Palakkad who blamed the plant for draining the drought-prone land of water and leaving behind toxic wastes. Pictures show the tribals gathered in a sit-in strike, the women’s pallus drawn over their heads, while another sit-in takes place nearby, among the families of laid-off workers who look not unlike their opposition. A few policemen in khaki uniforms hover around them, hands held behind their backs, looking off to the right or left but not at those seated below them. Bird knows these lands; her mother was from Palakkad, but it feels insincere to consider their struggle hers. She has not been back in twenty-two years. Who among them would consider her their own?