Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

S A LITTLE GIRL, Linno daily passed a statue of the Blessed Virgin on the walk to and from school. She took these opportunities to channel prayers of intervention, that she be made invisible during the day’s oral exams, or that Sister Savio fall magically mute for a week. Only now, pausing before the statue, does Linno notice how years of sun have stolen the blue from the Virgin’s cloak and the blush from her cheeks. Wind and rain have whisked flecks of paint from her hands. Her arms are outstretched, but someone has made off with her thumb. Through all this, her mouth remains a ripple of patience.

Linno touches the hot stone toes and prays for divine clarity.

The blind suitor, so casually introduced by Rappai’s mother, has since taken center stage in Linno’s life. It began with a phone call from the man’s older sister, a woman named Alice whose voice burst so loudly through the receiver that Melvin had to hold the phone away from his face. They spoke for ten minutes, during which time Melvin mostly said “huh” and “uh-huh.” Before Melvin hung up, Linno distinctly heard Alice say “union,” a word that sounded like an alliance between tense nations.

Melvin told Linno that the blind suitor’s family had been speaking with Rappai’s mother. They wanted to arrange an introductory meeting.

Meeting. Alliance. Union. The near future rose before her like a steep flight of stairs.

A WEEK BEFORE THE MEETING, Linno and Ammachi visit Rappai’s mother, who hurries back and forth across her sitting room with glasses of tea in her hands, energized by the fact that she has been sought after as some kind of authority on the blind man. She smiles with what teeth she has left, both of them stained brown like a guava slice left out in the sun.

They sit at the table where mother and son take their meals. Though only two live in the house, the table bears six blue plastic placemats, bought by Rappai’s father decades ago. Occasionally, when no one is looking, Rappai’s mother will peel up the corner of a placemat and graze her fingers over the golden rectangle left behind, proof of the table’s better days. Those were better days for her as well, when it had seemed that six people would eventually fill the table, but her first two babies died in the womb. And then there came Rappai, a sickly child from whom no one expected great things, but whom she adored simply because he survived.

After teas are handed out, Rappai’s mother sits at the head of the table and gets down to business. There are some details that she failed to mention upon first proposing the match, namely that the blind man’s family has been derailed by a few tragedies.

“Curses?” Ammachi asks.

Rappai’s mother ponders this, and then decides on the word “accidents.” But first, Rappai’s mother reviews the factors working in the blind man’s favor:

1. He hails from a good family, long established in the rubber plantation business. They own estates near Kasaragod, great tracts of shady land with thousands of loyal rubber trees, dribbling raw materials for which the increasingly synthetic world will always have demand. Because of this wealth,

2. the dowry won’t have to be much, if anything at all. The blind man considers himself a modern man, and he finds this dowry business to be a corrupted tradition.

3. The blind man is fair-skinned. Not fair in the way that parents advertise in the newspaper ads, when their children are actually the color of scrubbed potatoes. But truly fair, Rappai’s mother guarantees. “Like the color of tea. Very weak milky tea. No. Yogurt.”

4. The blind man is not completely blind but rather blind to a favorable degree. Delicately, Rappai’s mother adds that this is a trait that works in Linno’s favor.

“The curses, the curses,” Ammachi urges.

“It happened like this. The mother wanted to go to Agra for her fifty-fifth birthday. To see the Taj Mahal, I suppose, or maybe to shop, I don’t know, not my business. So she and her husband took off in a plane, but they never made it to Agra. Collided.” She pauses for emphasis. “With a mountain.”

Ammachi puts a hand to her mouth.

“And then the sister,” Rappai’s mother whispers. “The one you spoke to on the phone? Her husband hanged himself.”

“Aiyyo, kashtam.” Ammachi shakes her head. “Someone put the Evil Eye on them.”

Rappai’s mother clicks her tongue dismissively. “People die when God calls.”

“God called them into a mountain?”

They begin arguing over the nature of curses and accidents, and at one point, Ammachi fake-spits to stave off any curses that the conversation may have attracted. Though Linno remains silent, she enjoys these discussions, how simple topics seem to take on such electricity between two old women in a dim kitchen. Until recently, she imagined that she and Anju would end their lives this way, echoing the arguments of the women who raised them. But now the world is much larger than the one she knew as a little girl.

SAFE TO SAY that the blind suitor must have researched Linno’s history as well. Linno wonders what he has been told and by whom. Yes, she has had her traumas, one in particular that could have crushed the spirit of a lesser child. She could have grown glazed and mute, living forever in her nightmares, feeding off her grief.

Linno has never recounted the story aloud, though she could, she is sure, if pressed. On the day Gracie died, Abraham Chandy had offered to take her and Linno and Anju on a day trip to Kovalam Beach, along with his own family. There, Linno and her mother took a walk farther down the beach, heedless of the oncoming storm that was tossing the tides. While Linno was playing by herself, her mother wandered into the waves in what was later deemed a suicide. A fisherman found Gracie’s body by morning. He told police that the beds of her fingernails were blue.

Being the last to see her mother alive, Linno was handled gently, as though at any second she might descend into a glassy-eyed delirium. She could feel the questions swirling around her: What kind of mother would leave this child? If anyone had asked Linno directly, she would have said that Gracie was the kind of mother who made the perfect shape for sleeping next to, like a spoon in a spoon. The kind of mother who hit only with the flat of her hand, to know exactly what pain she inflicted. The kind of mother who did not hide her sadness but let it seep into a whole day, unyielding and infectious.

Linno soon learned that the best coping tactic was one sold to her by a self-help cassette tape given to Melvin by Berchmans, urging him to “Live for the Now!” At first, she was unsure how to Live for the Now if Now had been ruined by someone who had Died in the Before. Her interpretation was to bury her mother in a well-tended corner of her mind. There, she visited her mother almost as often as she breathed, but only in brief moments, scraps of memory. Like the mole at the corner of her mother’s eye. Or the dryness of her elbows and the velvet of her ear-lobes. But Linno did not dwell. If she dwelled, she would have to apologize to her mother, and she did not know if she could survive those kinds of words. (“It is common,” said the self-help tape, as read aloud by a woman with a thick, oozy voice, “for children of the deceased to suffer a terrible sense of guilt.”)

Technically, Ammachi said, one should not take communion without first cleansing the conscience, but what was the point of confessing everything to Anthony Achen? Whenever he listened to Linno’s stuttered string of sins, he never even deigned to ask her name. While Linno confessed to coveting a classmate’s skirt, Anthony Achen kept his eyes somewhere on the window above her, his hands curled over his armrests as if he were sitting aloft a throne. By the end, he crossed the air in front of her with his hand and sentenced her to a lengthy recitation of rosary beads to be completed on her own time. Confession was nothing special. It all seemed rather anticlimactic.