Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

LINNO ACCOMPANIES HER FATHER to the Fancy Shoppe, riding sidesaddle on the back of his bicycle, her heels held away from the spokes. They cut through mingled smells of dung, earth, freshwater, pesticides. They bump along between paddy fields that, in stillness, reflect the sky’s blue with such clarity that grass seems to spring from liquid sky. At the water’s edge, a medley of palms bends low, each falling in love with its likeness, while webs of light spangle the dark undersides of the leaves. Whenever a bus appears on the horizon, Melvin pulls over to the side and waits for it to groan past, spewing dust and diesel in its wake, before he plunges his foot down onto the pedal. Her view of the road is blocked by his shoulders, dark and tense all the way down to the unsettling clutch of his fingers around the handlebars.

Linno wonders what kind of gut feeling struck Melvin on the day her mother died. Perhaps he had seen her funeral face in dreams, with skin so spackled over with paint that she seemed a porcelain replica of the person she had been. Here was her lineless forehead, every wrinkle erased like a past swept clean. Here was her tiny smile, as though amused by a secret.

After the funeral, the albums were all packed away in trunks, but a single photo of Gracie remains within reach: the newlywed photograph, a black-and-white double portrait that every couple took in those days, tucked in a back pocket of Ammachi’s Bible. Gracie appears vaguely pretty but in a sharp, plain way, considerably shorter than Melvin, and cheerless. Husband and wife stand next to each other, shoulders touching, gazing sternly up into the camera as if being summoned into battle.

· · ·

THE ENTERTAINMENT COMES in a paper bag, folded down and stapled shut. Linno and Anju spend the evening dutifully guarding the bag from interference, though no one wants to interfere more than they do. Fixated on the bag, they shove wads of chapati into their mouths. They argue over who should hold the bag and how. Anju tries to educate Linno about a rarely read passage in the Bible, which suggests that younger sisters should always get their way. Anju is a strange little sieve of general knowledge, continually dribbling answers to questions that no one has asked. This one Linno knows not to believe, just as she didn’t believe it that last time with her Cadbury Fruit & Nut.

After dinner, the girls have no choice but to wait on the front step, swatting at mosquitoes, the Entertainment placed equidistant between them. Theirs is a small brick and stucco house with a thatched ola roof, humbly crouched among the slanting coconut trees that are charming by day yet spindly, looming and long-armed by night. Two lanky tree trunks span the brook in front, making a shaky footpath that the girls race across, testing their balance and bravery, light as birds on a branch.

AS THE NIGHT SOFTENS WITH FOG, the family collects on the front steps. Dragging a plastic chair behind her, Ammachi mutters that this is a show she has seen before, and what it has to do with Yesu’s birth she does not know. For the first time in history, Melvin allows Linno to assist him, while Anju is told to sit on the steps. In mute protest, Anju takes a pose beyond her nine years, legs crossed, head tilted, fingers laced around her knee, like a woman in a magazine.

From the paper bag, Melvin lifts a parcel whose label displays two words in red block letters: rainbow thunder. Out of the parcel, plastic crackling, Melvin pulls a bundle of sparklers.

These Linno lights as reverently as if she were lighting candles at church. All else around her dissolves into shadow and there is only the single captive star, its spitfire warmth belonging, however briefly, to her alone. Even Ammachi accepts a sparkler and, equally transfixed, begins circling hers in figure eights, watching the wild spray of orange light, frowning a little when it dies to a glowing ember.

And then, what fire! One aerial miracle follows the next. There is the Volcano — a small cone that splutters before erupting into a great geiser of liquid flame, rising, rising, borne on a splendid gushing noise. The Mouse, which Melvin lights from the throat of an empty toddy bottle, a faint sizzle before the white-pink bullet shoots into the trees and spirals over the branches. And finally, the Necklace, a length of tiny dynamite that Melvin ties to a low branch of the jackfruit tree. When he lights the fuse, everyone plugs their ears against the sound, a violent rifle crack, mercilessly loud as it pop-pop-pops all the way up to the branch.

A silky smoke roams over the ground as Ammachi murmurs, grudgingly, that firecrackers are not so bad. “But if it were me, I would buy a nice set of mugs over these light tricks any day.” In a rare embrace of Western custom, she cites the examples of other countries where the father gives Christmas gifts to the entire family. Even his mother.

Melvin points out that his sister, Jilu, is American. “When was the last time she gave us anything?”

“Hah, Jilu was American! Now she is in Canada. And what do you mean anything?” Ammachi rattles off a list of items: “Soap, socks, a fitted sheet, Tang …”

“Those socks were used. And that fitted sheet fit only half a bed.”

While Ammachi and Melvin argue over Jilu’s largesse, Linno begins untying what is left of the Necklace from its branch. Several links remain on the blown fuse.

Anju calls out, “Eh, Linno, we already lit that one.”

Linno is studying the remnants of the Necklace when she looks up at Anju, then at her father. She is pinned, suddenly, by the look of fear in a grown man’s face.

“Drop that—” Melvin says, or begins to say, she cannot tell.

Because from this point, everything happens with a slow grace, in the space of seconds. Linno feels nothing and sees everything, in all its strange clarity. The links exploding in her palm, fire flowering and blazing above the watch that she wears facing in so she can check the time discreetly when she is at school. The face of the watch, splashed with light, now a flickering gold coin and above it, her hand held captive by a star, the shifting folds of flame and heat giving way to that time when her mother slit her finger while scaling a fish, how astonishing it was, the scarlet simplicity of what dripped from her, wet petals on the edge of the sink.

And then Linno realizes that what she thought was the screaming of wind is a sound that only a girl can make, a girl on fire.

INNO’S RIGHT HAND suffers third-degree burns, the rest of her unscathed. Bedridden in the hospital, she winces if so much as a breath rakes the back of her hand, the pain racing up her arm. As a nurse reaches over her, Linno studies the burns, the cooked skin, the pink tissues, wet and peeling. Her stomach lunges. Vomit down the ruffles of her Christmas dress.

For days afterward, her hand is cocooned in gauze, the skin within laboring to forget its wounds. With pills, the pain lessens slightly but never leaves, a slow and steady throb that seems to possess its own resonance, a volume that drowns everything else in the hospital.

Ammachi brings her Bible, from which she murmurs Psalms, squinting and dragging her finger across the pages. While Ammachi is caught up in these verses, rocking back and forth as she reads, Linno recalls another: If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off .

Every time the doctor pulls away the gauze, he looks offended. The flesh has begun to rot. Infection is chewing at her hand and will climb its way farther through the body if left untreated. So two weeks after the accident, the doctor cuts off her hand, just above the wrist.