Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Malayali anno?” Bird asks.

Anju looks up. The words are a stunning music that fuse the gap of unfamiliarity, which would otherwise take months to fuse between usual strangers. “How did you know?” she asks in Malayalam.

“Big woolly hair.” Bird holds her hands away from her head to demonstrate. “You ever thought about ironing it straight?”

Anju says no, though she has, countless times.

“I used to work in a beauty salon, but now I’m a secretary in a law office. Much more professional.” From her wallet, Bird pulls out a business card and places it on the corner of the open book. Rajiv Tandon , the card reads. Immigration Attorney . In the corner is an address. “You come there, and he’ll show you how to apply for a green card.”

“How did you know I need a green card?”

Bird fidgets with the buttonhole of her sweater. “Your accent,” she says. “Sounds like you came off the plane just yesterday. So you want the card or not?”

“Yes, thank you.” Anju slides the card into her pocket and writes her own number on a scrap of paper for Bird. “And where are your people from?”

“Me? Oh, from all over.” Bird glances at her wristwatch, too quickly to even read it. She switches to English. “Hah, time is flying! Enough happy hour, back to work.” Moving away, she bumps into a lectern. “Don’t forget to stop by the office. I will look for you. Okay?”

She waits until Anju replies, “Okay,” before leaving.

When Bird reaches the doorway, she looks right, then left, weighing each direction. She turns right and disappears. Anju waits. After a few seconds, Bird hurries back the opposite way.

STEP TWO OF THE CIRCUMVENTION: Duane Reade drugstore.

The cashiers wear plastic cards on their chests, one of which reads DANITA. Her nails are squarish and spangled in mesmerizing purple and red illustrations. She clatters them against the countertop while speaking heatedly with her coworker CHEYENNE. How strange, Anju thinks, to be on a first-name basis with a stranger before uttering a word.

“I know he’s old!” Danita is telling Cheyenne. “But he got a nice house, no kids. I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave and the other foot on a banana peel. Nothing wrong with planning ahead.” Cheyenne gives a laugh that shakes her shoulders.

Anju remembers a similar sentiment once uttered by her grandmother. “Is it so bad if Linno marries someone older?” Ammachi privately asked Anju. “At least she would be looked after. And probably she wouldn’t have to look after him for that long.”

When the conversation seems to have reached a standstill, Danita looks over at Anju, and in a blink Danita’s face goes from impassioned to passionless, like a light switched off. Despite the name tag, Danita’s expression implies that she and Anju are on a no-name basis.

“Ace bandage?” Anju asks.

“Aisle seven, I think,” Danita says. “Seven or nine.”

THE THIRD PART of the Circumvention takes place on Monday and requires that Anju arrive at school twenty minutes early.

Since her maiden voyage on the subway, Anju has learned certain matters of etiquette. On a gentle Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Solanki showed her how to buy a MetroCard from the touch-screen machine, how to slide the MetroCard to go through the turnstile, how to prepare for the violent rush of sound and steel as the train whines to a stop.

At the time, Anju committed a grave error, rushing into the car against the thin trickle of exiting passengers. She muscled her way through, earning herself a seat within a virtually empty car, and several irritated stares from those she had nearly body-checked. An old man in a sweater vest stared grimly into the middle distance, having seen many like her push and shove their way into his city. Mrs. Solanki took the seat next to her and, with undisguised irritation, said: “It’s not like over there. You have to wait your turn.”

But weekday mornings bring the third-world battle instinct, cloaked in first-world courtesy. Anju has learned all the moves — the grazing push, the “Not my fault!” group nudge. And now, with the subway moaning from afar, Anju prepares to utilize both tactics. Today is not a day for tardiness. After the doors sigh open, one passenger burrows out of the packed car just as Anju slides her way into the herd, the doors chomping at her backpack. People writhe and apologize. A woman groans into the folded newspaper held an inch from her nose. Fingers cling gingerly to clammy poles.

Anju stands so close to the short woman next to her that with a stretch of her neck, she could kiss the woman on the forehead, a surface so thickly plastered with powder, Anju would prefer to kiss the pole. She focuses on a sign near the ceiling that shows twelve pairs of eyes — sleepy eyes, saggy eyes, kohl-rimmed eyes, Asian eyes — and below this: BE AWARE OF SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES.

Eventually, Anju notices that the woman is glaring up at her with the same lethal intent as the old family dog back home, dead Jimmi, who used to stare up from the base of a tree and growl at the shuddering branches. This woman harbors that streak of animal fury, crackling just beneath her powdered exterior, her great swoops of blue eye shadow. She is either mad or a failed actress. Perhaps both. One stop later, it seems that the mad actress is pushing Anju, steadily applying a mounting force as if to eject her from the moving car.

“Madam,” Anju says quietly, “I cannot support you.”

The mad actress looks at her. They stand nose to nose.

“You’re an idiot,” the mad actress says.

“You are heavy,” Anju says.

The mad actress cuts her eyes at Anju, gathering herself as much as she can within her confines. “If I weren’t a lady, I’d smack the stank right out of your mouth.”

Smank the stack? Too confused to take offense, Anju means to ask what is meant by “stank,” though what comes out is: “Skank?”

The woman’s eyes grow wide. “At least this skank knows how to use deodorant! Ever heard of it?”

Startled, Anju almost declares that she uses talcum powder because, according to Ammachi, a body is meant to sweat. Instead she says nothing.

Pleased, the mad actress turns only her head, since there is not room to turn away completely. Everyone jostles along in silence, wearing blank expressions, as if discussions of stank are quite natural.

IDIOT! CLOWN! Suspicious package of lunacy! As Anju climbs out of the subway, she applies these words first to the woman, then to herself. Stupid to speak so openly, to wear her rage like a vulgar dress for all to see. There is no victory in declaring your true thoughts, but this is how people speak to one another here, candid madness in the air.

While walking, she tries to sniff herself discreetly. No odor that she can distinguish, but who can make out her own odor? Perhaps it would be wise to visit the perfume counters at the department store and hoard the scented paper samples.

She nearly collides with a blue mailbox before she realizes her school is looming in the distance, a boxy, joyless structure of cement taking up half the block, THE SITWELL SCHOOL declared in white letters on its side. Its roof is staked with an American flag too colossal to clean, its white stripes gone gray.

Before she came here, this school was part of a grand fantasy, one she used to carefully embellish in daydreams, never assuming that someday the actual sight of her school — the hard angles, the dark, secretive windows — would tense her stomach as it does now. She is free from outward torment and bullying, unlike Silas Bloom, a woeful boy whose pants pronounce his rear, whose face, last week, was driven into a toilet by boys whose names he refused to recall. But Anju’s torments are her own — her ridiculous rolling accent, her oblivious stank, her misuse of facilities, such as the time she tried to rinse her mouth at the water fountain after lunch and as she spat, Mr. Obata, the math teacher, said “No, no, no …” from across the hall, as one might order dead Jimmi to stop urinating in his cage. The prospect of committing an error looms over every morning, with each step, each word destined for mistake. For this reason, she sometimes lies sleepless in bed, dreading the moment of waking even before falling asleep.