Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

IN ADDITION TO three fresh school uniforms, Anju receives a student handbook and a schedule that depicts her week as a rectangle, each day divided into blocks of varied colors, a well-manicured garden of time. How she wishes her after-school time were equally plotted. But as she has no friends, no after-school activities, she often finds herself at home, alone, with Mrs. Solanki.

Mrs. Solanki’s voice has the dispersive quality of a gas, reaching into every room of the house even when she whispers. At first, Anju is reluctant to close the door to her own room, worried that this might seem offensive or suspicious, but she soon realizes that with her door closed or open, Mrs. Solanki’s phone conversations filter up through the vent in the carpet. “She’s from Kerala … Oh please, Jeff, it’s nothing … I’m just trying to give back.”

Through these overheard conversations, Anju comes to understand that Jeff, like the son taking time off from Princeton, is both a source of frustration and desperation for Mrs. Solanki. Jeff Priddy is one of the Four Corners producers, and Mrs. Solanki harbors a deep and unsubtle desire to be taken more seriously by Jeff and his cohorts. More than once, Anju has heard Mrs. Solanki complaining to her husband of the fluff pieces she must often introduce to the other ladies — usually about perfumes, cooking, or on one occasion hatha yoga. Regularly, she brings up Jeff’s failure to “push the envelope,” as with the Ayurveda episode, in which she wanted to focus on the economic debate between Britain and India over who should control the Ayurvedic market, and in her words, “the Western attempt to steal a global market worth two hundred seventy billion dollars! We are talking about five thousand years of Indian intellectual property here — how is that not riveting?” Jeff’s position: Let’s be pleasantly educational, not controversial. But during the taping, Mrs. Solanki insisted on mentioning in her otherwise pleasant segment: “And now, popularized by Madonna and Cher, Ayurveda is even gaining the interest of British Parliament, which, two years ago, ranked Ayurveda as hocus-pocus, about as useful as hypnotherapy. Now, it seems, everyone wants a piece of the pie.”

Despite these occasional tiffs, Mrs. Solanki is all sweetness and suggestions when on the phone with Jeff. “Oh, I’m happy to be a host parent if it means promoting higher education among young Indian women. Really, I consider myself a global citizen, Jeff, so I think of women’s rights on a worldwide scale. I’m sure that even in Kerala, the girls have fewer opportunities. Studies show that in a tiny Tamil village — I don’t remember the name — one hundred ninety-six girl babies were slaughtered by infanticide in one year alone…. Yes, China’s much much worse. But that would be a topic, wouldn’t it? Infanticide?”

At times like this, Anju wants to holler through the vent that female infanticide is about as popular in Kerala as Four Corners . But here among the lace and pulled-silk pillows, yelling would be unseemly, especially at the one who has provided the pillows.

IN HAPPY TIMES, Mrs. Solanki is girlish and warm, painting the bucolia of her life’s history in golden tones. “Varun and I had a love marriage,” she says to Anju on one occasion, her palms hugging a mug of Belgian hot chocolate. “A very big upset to his family. They thought I trapped him, you know, because they knew what I came from. A shack no bigger than an outhouse.”

Mrs. Solanki glances at the glass shelf fastened to the wall next to Anju. On this, propped among several other frames, is a small photo of a young Mrs. Solanki with eyes like large blots of ink lined with kohl. Her posture in the portrait tells that even in her youth, despite her circumstances, she seemed aware of her potential to rise in the world. Not a single picture of Anju possesses the magnetism of this one. Mrs. Solanki’s sisters must have stood by in jealous awe.

“Do you miss them?” Anju asks. “Your sisters?”

“Missing …,” Mrs. Solanki says softly. She taps her wedding band against the mug, like the double tap of a conductor rousing silence from an orchestra. “‘Missing’ is not the word for it. What is that feeling?” She looks at Anju with sincere concentration, and Anju, in return, finds herself hanging upon every word, as if her own future lies in the answer. “I miss what we were. I miss something that no longer exists. My sisters and I, our simple life among the jasmine and mulberry bushes.”

If Mrs. Solanki is just off the phone with one of her sisters, all of whom have remained among the jasmine and mulberry bushes, her tone changes considerably.

“All they want is a visa. ‘Bring me! Bring me!’ they say. ‘Don’t you care about your own kind?’ My own kind. My own kind are masters of manipulation. I sent my sister a pair of Nike sneakers last month, but her son is complaining that they aren’t Air Force Ones. I said, ‘You can’t get these for fifty dollars!’ And she said, ‘Fifty dollars? You spend more money to get your manicure!’”

“More?” Anju asks, not meaning to.

“Manicure and pedicure.”

The thought of her own kind plagues Mrs. Solanki in every way, the thought of them coming just as much as the thought of them never coming at all.

“I am a someone here,” she says, riffling through the mail. A newsletter from the Indo-American Arts Council invites her to a gallery opening of a Persian miniaturist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She often attends such events and writes checks to the Indo-American Arts Council, which she tears from her checkbook with careless panache. “If I brought my sister and her family, where would they stay? With me. Whose kitchen would they swarm? Mine. You don’t understand these people. It’s part of our culture. If you bring someone, they are your responsibility.”

But there are other times, such as the nights when Uncle is once again working late, when Mrs. Solanki seems to have no one to phone. She leaves a few messages on the machines of various friends or apologizes profusely for interrupting someone’s dinner, and then surrenders to a lone glass of port at the kitchen counter. On occasion, she asks Anju if she wants to watch a DVD in the home theater. Their first film is My Fair Lady , Mrs. Solanki’s favorite. By the time Audrey Hepburn is pulled from the gutter and pruned into the hourglass fashion of a lady, her fair face blooming from the petaled collar of her pale pink dress, tears are trailing silently down Mrs. Solanki’s cheeks.

Hepburn says, “You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.” And with this, overcome, Mrs. Solanki lets escape a small, animal whimper.

WITHOUT MRS. SOLANKI to guide her, Anju dives into the city.

None of it seems true. None of it possible. That a castle so sprawling, so full of books, guarded by stone lions, can be entered— for free . That men and women stand on sidewalks and beseech passersby to take wedges of fancy soap, cups of raspberry sorbet, movie tickets, soft drinks, and iced coffee— for free . That in the subway, an old man draws a bow across the strings of a violin almost as ancient-looking as he, creating a sound of piercing melancholy, a sorrow almost seductive while he sits, a boulder against the ebb and flow of commuters who sometimes toss a few coins into the balding velvet of his open instrument case, but otherwise listen— for nothing .

Land of the free indeed.

It is Saturday afternoon, and feeling adventurous, Anju treks down to the Financial District, toting Linno’s sketchbook in her satchel. On the way, she is nearly killed a total of six times, usually when she scampers across the street just as a car is beeping and barreling toward her. In Kumarakom, cars chat in short, giddy honks, as careless and common as the bleating of sheep. It is only from the long bellowing honk of a cab driver, along with his battery of roaring curses, that Anju learns to obey the orders of the traffic light.