Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

She looks for lighter stories. On the second page, she comes across a picture of a girl holding on to one side of a plaque, a white woman holding on to the other side. The headline reads KUMARAKOM GIRL WINS NEW YORK SCHOLARSHIP.

This is the type of article that Bird usually ignores. Triumphant parents constitute a high fraction of the Manorama ‘s subscribers, thriving in their dual roles as publicists, phoning in their childrens’ successes in spelling bees, national exams, synchronized swimming competitions. Someone’s child is always winning.

But this article confronts her with names she buried long ago.

… Miss Vallara is the daughter of Melvin and Gracie Vallara, and the granddaughter of Elsamma Vallara …

Three times in one sentence, “Vallara” bobs up like sea-swept flotsam that will not sink.

Bird looks at the waiter beside her, who reaches down to rescue the spoon by her ankle. His face is heavy with concern. What is his name? She knows it but cannot remember. When did she drop her spoon? She did not hear the sound. And even now, it requires some effort to hear his words, as though muscling upward from deep waters, breaking the surface for air.

“Are you all right?” the waiter asks, his forehead creased.

She could say that she knows the girl in the photo, but she does not know the girl at all. It is foolish to think so, from just the two paragraphs that the article offers. But she does know the name of the school, the Sitwell School, and the address will be easy to acquire. For now, the girl is little more than a picture to Bird, just as she herself must be to these waiters, a lonely woman in the corner booth, whose small, hard features bespeak an age older than her own.

O EDUCATE HERSELF on the social strata of the American high school, Anju watches several American movies on Mrs. Solanki’s home theater, a screen that nearly engulfs an entire wall, much like the tapestry of St. George at church. Many of the movies involve a nymph whose beauty goes unseen behind glasses, a bun, and baggy clothing, though during the course of the movie, the nymph removes her glasses, releases her bun, and tightens her belt, thereby wooing her classmates as well as her leading man. The lesson to be learned: assimilation is an equation that can be reduced to two variables — a short, swishy haircut and a few smooth lines.

At the Sitwell School, Anju finds it difficult to cast students into their proper roles, especially when she can hardly tell one from another. Most students come in shades of pink and white, plus the occasional orange of a girl who appears to have slept in a kiln. Most boys bear monosyllabic names — Matts and Mikes and Daves and Dans — while some scions stand alone, like Leland or Grayson or Jackson. Everyone wears the standard white collared shirts, the boys’ slacks slung low, the girls’ skirts hemmed high. A few, however, stand apart for unique reasons. Like Dena Geisler, who presses her hair with a flatiron that gives her a singed smell all day. And Shane Hootnick, a lumbering man-child who begins every Monday morning in homeroom with a report of the weekend’s beery excess.

At first, she expects the other students to ask her any number of questions about Sonia Solanki — what it might be like to eat breakfast with a celebrity, what Sonia looks like in the morning, before makeup. But Anju quickly learns that Mrs. Solanki is only a semicelebrity compared with some of the other stars who have traveled these halls and attended these Open Houses. Someone’s godmother is Barbara Walters. Someone else’s uncle is a movie director, the one who made the blockbuster about the androids sent to reverse the events of Pearl Harbor. To most of these students, Mrs. Solanki’s face is like the flag of a small European nation, vaguely familiar, obviously important in some way, but difficult to classify.

As for the other students, they are distantly welcoming, but often Anju feels that people are greeting her, chatting with her, smiling at her out of courtesy. She is constantly receiving thanks, for no apparent reason. If she answers a question about the time, they thank her. If she gives them a pencil to borrow, they give thanks. She wonders if this is part of a larger national psychology, a combination of good intentions and guilt. Or maybe thanks is simply thanks. She also wonders if her lack of thank-yous leaves the impression of thanklessness, when in truth the gratitude she feels for her classmates, her teachers, this country, all of this weighs so heavily sometimes she can but lift her eyes from the blond wood floors.

In gym, when someone passes her the basketball, Anju says, “Thank you,” and immediately another girl steals the ball from her hands.

THE ONLY ONE TO PAY prolonged attention to Anju is Sheldon Fischer, known to his classmates as Fish. His skin possesses a pale vitality set off by a shrub of dark curls, a style that seems to belong on a tortured doll. From time to time, he plucks the shrub with a black comb. Its handle is shaped like a fist.

Fish received the comb from one of his friends, Paz L. Mundo, who performs spoken word poetry at various Brooklyn venues of exclusive repute. “Everyone there is black,” Fish says proudly. “Usually I’m the only white guy.” Fish has never taken the microphone, but he plans to, as soon as he comes up with a good stage name. (Aided by her thesaurus, Anju comes up with suggestions — Waxy Alabaster, the Achromic Bomb, and so on — none of which appeals to Fish.)

His main concern is getting into Yale, which was attended by his mother, his father, and both sets of grandparents, their family tree well-watered by blue-blood educations. “Harvard and Princeton,” he says, “are for the socially deformed.” “Harvard” and “Yale”—she knows these words as she knows the word “Everest.” All are equally gauzy and mythic, names that hang in the air like mist.

She has no doubt that Fish will summit every goal. He is perhaps the smartest member of his class, a role he both relishes and rejects. During democratic circle discussions, he seems weary of the ping-pong of student opinion, and Anju feels similarly. When all the desks are in a circle, every answer is right. All are equal. Even the teacher sits among them like a big, conciliatory child. Through all this, Fish keeps his arms crossed and his expression unimpressed, as if mutely guarding a multitude of truths. From his posture, Anju learns that a certain kind of silence appears weightier and wiser than speech.

During Anju’s first week, Fish tells her not to worry. “I’m not going to ask if you’re betrothed or if you have a dowry or whatever else these fools have been asking.” The truth is that no fool has asked her any of these things at all. “So are you seeing anybody?”

She is not sure what exactly he means, but shakes her head.

“Cool,” he says.

How suprising that Fish is so relaxed around her — his new rival — and even seeks out the company of his greatest academic threat. Back home, her #1 threat was Manilal Iyer, a small scholar who clutched his books to his chest with a protective, hungry love. On the rare occasion that he looked at her, he did so with such intensity that he seemed to be lining her up between crosshairs.

But at Sitwell, there is space. One student’s success does not imply another student’s defeat.

Not only space, but choice, as revealed in the breadth of cafeteria options, a dietary freedom far evolved from what she experienced at her previous school, that virtually changeless trio of dal, papadum, and rice.

But here: a multitude of salads that taste nothing alike! Tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, potato salad, seafood salad, not to mention chef’s, Caesar, and Cobb. She samples some of each exotic entrée — a pot pie, a casserole, a complicated lasagna. No matter that the lasagna leaks a diluted juice that sloshes around the contours of its squarish bowl, or that certain cups of chocolate pudding come veiled with skin. The opportunity to turn something down, to glance at the achromic cauliflower and move on, to pick at a few foods, guzzle others, and then casually, guiltlessly, slide them all off the tray and into the trash if one wishes — this, Anju believes, this is the essence of Americana.