Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Bird knows better. The muscles slacken. The flesh descends. The wrinkles frown around the knees. Why fight? Why should acceptance mean defeat?

“No thank you,” Bird says. “Not today.”

Ever upbeat, Dr. Bra swallows rejection with a smile and says that she will be nearby, if needed.

Turning back to the window, Bird’s heart falls. Students are pouring through the school doors like so many limes rolling out of a sack. Their noise carries across the street, the calling of names and good-byes, messages faintly penetrating the window’s glass. Her eyes are too slow to search them all. Has Anju already gone? Would she stay late? The stupidity of Bird’s quest suddenly seems obvious.

After the first clot of students pushes through the door, a few strays saunter out. Among them, a slight black-haired girl. Bird’s first thought is Grade , whose face seems to ripple just beneath the surface of the girl’s, the cheekbones, the small, sharp chin. But there is also a blankness around the girl’s eyes that renders her nothing like Gracie, as though she has quarantined her emotions from the world.

Her school clothes fit awkwardly. She needs a mother to stitch the hem and cinch the skirt by adding a button to the waist. These are Bird’s thoughts, at a safe remove from the actuality of Anju crossing the street, walking down the sidewalk nearest to the lingerie store.

Bird huddles behind the lacy shrubbery of the bra rack. In passing, Anju looks up at the lingerie displays, two tall, naked mannequins, hands on hips, impatiently waiting to be dressed by the clerks. Bird can see clean into the girl’s thoughts because those thoughts were once her own: Nipples? On a doll? Though Anju does not notice her, Bird grows short of air. She grips the envelope in her satchel, once again struck by the lunacy of her project, to approach a young girl with a sweaty envelope in hand, and happily, madly insist: I know you. Here is proof .

As Anju passes, Bird reclaims her breathing. Her shoulders relax. If, this time, her courage has failed, her patience will not.

She emerges from the lingerie store and follows Anju from a distance. Even while people block her path, waving fliers and pushing strollers, even when stoplights stretch a chasm between pursuer and pursued, Bird always finds her way, her chest pulling in a singular direction. Past Fiftieth Street, Forty-ninth, and Forty-eighth, they turn a corner, one after the other, as if tethered.

At last, Bird pauses before the New York Public Library. Anju is climbing the stone steps. If she follows, what then? She notices Anju’s calves, boyish and strong, above narrow ankles. Legs that belong to Gracie. Bird’s heart, deceived, goes skipping after those legs.

Was it ever clearer than now? Time is but a circle, and a person might run from the past only to find herself faced with it in the end.

N ORDER TO DROP OUT of art class, Anju has devised a tripartite plan, based on a term that she found in her pocket dictionary. Circumvention: Avoidance (of defeat, failure, unpleasantness, etc.) by artfulness or deception . She feels vindicated by the word “artfulness,” its favorable and unfavorable connotations coiled in an elegant word. Maybe she is not an artist, but she is certainly artful.

On Friday, after school, Anju begins with the first step of the Circumvention — the New York Public Library. She is unprepared for the library’s inner sanctum of marble and lowered voices, and grows ashamed of the amplified clops of her shoes perforating the cathedral quiet. Their echo carries all the way up the swerving stairways whose marble banisters are as wide as a footbridge. Giant candelabras stand at every archway, and not a hall goes without the engraved wisdoms and sculpted busts of notables. As in a museum, she is not sure what can be touched, but she strolls the corridors, light on her heels, with an expression of scholarly belonging.

In one of the smaller rooms, she pauses before a poster encased in glass, advertising a new exhibit called patterns of migration:

New societies, new peoples, and new communities usually originate in acts of migration. Someone or ones decide to move from one place to another. They choose a new destination and sever their ties with their traditional community as they set out in search of new opportunities, new challenges, new lives, and new life worlds.

What is a life world? And who is severing? Anju has always pictured her Pattern of Migration as an elliptical track, jogging from Kumarakom to the U.S. and back round again, gaining wealth and funneling money home with each revolution. She will continue orbiting until certain goals are met: an extra room built onto the side of the house for Ammachi, who has always cherished the idea of a second sitting room filled with viny houseplants. A tin or tile roof instead of ola. Enough income for her father to retire. An adjoining bathroom with a sitting toilet, more for show than usage, as the squatting toilet is more user-friendly. She finds it strenuous, looming over the sitting toilets, knees half bent, quivering against the possibility of contact. Sometimes she layers a wreath of toilet paper around the rim but still cannot bring herself to sit.

Mostly she engineers plans for Linno. Perhaps a visa, or a dowry, or tuition to attend some sort of vocational school. All or none or only part of the above, whatever she prefers. Then finally Linno will see that this elliptical odyssey was fueled by love all along, and she will be grateful and sorry for playing mute on the phone every single time that Anju has called and asked for her. And one day Anju will return forever, like a mythic ship gliding into port, and she will unlace her shoes and slip her big toes into her chappals and lie down on a bed all her own—

“May I help you?” asks a woman librarian, standing beside her.

The librarian’s eyes are as bright as the cadence of her question. She is fair-skinned, with a black kerchief over her head. She wears brown saddle shoes with rubbery soles that must have muffled her approach.

Anju turns away from the poster. The future will come, but first, the present, one muffled step at a time.

She says, “I am looking for medical texts, please?”

AS IT TURNS OUT, the librarian is a volunteer. Her name, at first, is confusing.

“Beard?” Anju asks.

“Bird.”

“Burt?”

“Bird.”

Back and forth they peck at the name until Anju finally understands.

On the way to the medical texts, Bird takes her on a tour, gesturing around as they walk. Consuming the height of one great wall is a mural of a white-haired man cradling stone tablets in muscular arms, his hair billowing about him as he glares down on two cowering figures below. “And here we see a painting of God,” says Bird, “writing His punishments for Adam and Eve.”

Anju reads a nearby sign: THE ADJACENT PANEL DEPICTS MOSES DESCENDING FROM MOUNT SINAI WITH THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

For a tour guide, Bird spends more time looking at Anju than at the mural-laden halls through which they pass. Bird is not only looking, but scrutinizing in a way that makes Anju suggest that they part ways. “I think I know where I am going now,” she says.

This is the best that Anju can do. Crazy or not, Bird is an elder, and to say more would be disrespectful.

“Nonsense,” Bird says, as if abandoning a youth would be equally disrespectful.

SOMEONE AT THE INFORMATION DESK directs them to a room with two long wooden tables and shelves of texts so fat that pulling one from its spot makes the shelf look as though it is missing a tooth. Sitting down at a table, Anju consults the index of a medical encyclopedia. Bird takes the adjacent seat, her chin in her hand, watching Anju as if there were volumes to learn in her face alone.