Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

If she were to write a self-help book dedicated to children like herself, children whose memories made each night a burden, Linno would advise that control is the key. She once read of Jain yogis who believe that the span of a man’s life is a predestined number of breaths; hence, the yogic practice of lengthening and deepening the breath cycle. Control breaths and you control life. So in a way, she decides, control is closer to divinity than confession.

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NOT LONG AFTER the conference with Rappai’s mother, an envelope arrives in the mail, addressed to Melvin. He stands while opening the envelope and drinking a cup of chai, his hips sore from sitting behind Abraham’s steering wheel all day.

Inside is a photograph wrapped in a sheet of paper. He knows without looking that this is the blind suitor. Initially, Melvin was elated by the blind suitor’s interest, but now that his photo has arrived in the mail, Melvin suffers a quiet terror about presenting it to Linno. Marriage, all of a sudden, has acquired the shape of a man.

Before he views the picture, Melvin thinks of the woman he almost married, how she arrived in his hands twenty years ago, in the same flat fashion. At his parents’ suggestion, he had returned from Bombay to marry the wife they had chosen for him. But when he grabbed the girl’s photograph from Ammachi, giddy, almost breathless, and looked at their selection for the first time, his future seemed to fold.

Eight months before, Melvin had gone to Bombay with his friend Govind, a Malayali Hindu who said that the city abounded with “civil service jobs.” What the term meant, Melvin did not know, though it seemed to mean working for the government, behind a desk, hopefully beneath a fan. But when Melvin arrived in Bombay, he learned that whole fleets of small-town boys flocked to the city in pursuit of the same dreamily vague civil service jobs, only to find that to obtain such a job, one had to be either smart or willing to pay. And, as well, the network of civil servants seemed a twisted family tree of cousins granting favors to cousins; Melvin had no relatives perched in those enviable branches.

By luck, Govind found Melvin a job as a clerk at the Oasis Hotel. Govind knew the owner, but refused to take the job himself, arguing that a Brahmin, however unemployed and needy, should never have to work for someone of the mid-level castes, as the owner was. Telling Melvin of his plight, Govind leaned against a poster-covered wall, the sole of his chappal propped against the face of a pretty woman holding up a tube of Colgate fennel toothpaste. “Brahmins are doomed in this world,” Govind sighed. Melvin could think of a few Brahmins he knew working as cooks and cabbies, but kept silent on the assumption that Govind was simply homesick. “Where can I go but back to university?”

“Another degree?” From Melvin’s last count, Govind already had two, neither of which he was putting to use. “You would rather be unemployed than working in a hotel?”

“Or I could work for my father again.” Govind shrugged. “You are lucky, though, you Christians. Serve thy neighbor. Your own Jesus washes other people’s dirty feet, allay?”

Govind left a week later, while Melvin took a tiny airshaft of a flat and worked at the Oasis Hotel. Strategically positioned near the international airport, the hotel fielded a healthy amount of transcontinental clientele, many European businessmen and Indians able to travel abroad. The Oasis Hotel embodied its namesake, an island of modern, Western calm in the midst of Bombay’s shabby ruckus, where the breakfast buffet offered doughnuts and cereal alongside idli and sambar. The glass elevator was the triumph of the lobby. Gliding from height to height, it shuttled its passengers to a synthesized rendition of “Over the Rainbow.”

Melvin didn’t mind the job, mostly hoisting people’s luggage onto carts, which he then transported to their rooms. He hated the pillbox hat he was made to wear, complete with a strap that dug a welt beneath his chin. He also hated his tendency to nod and nod like a child whenever addressed by a resident, a tendency that would follow him into old age, even when addressed by his mother.

As he stuffed more hours into his schedule, he began to dislike Bombay, though he had seen little more of the city than his flat and the Oasis Hotel. His intention had been to climb the professional ladder through diligence and a good attitude, but the past few months had shown him that the ladder was not so much vertical as horizontal and the higher planes would be impossible to reach. Above the clerks was a supervisor who earned a higher salary, and above him, a manager who was godlike in both his power and his absence.

And then there was the bit of Bombay that he observed: the scant villages of people that sprang up beneath bridges; the hijras who paraded in saris while Melvin watched, transfixed by their Adam’s apples; the university students protesting a raise in tuition; the scrawny children weaving through traffic and selling plates of sliced coconut like wide, white smiles. In his later years, when he pictured Bombay, it was not a place that he saw but people, tide upon teeming tide, out of which he knew no one.

Upon returning home, he complained to his friends of the smoke, the congestion, the too-sweet tea, the food heavy with ghee, the beggars with sunken, bullet-hole eyes. But as he grew older, none of these reasons approached the real belief to which he clung like a zealot, that his presence in Bombay had kept him from his wife, thus severing the sweet, green years of his marriage. Every zealot has his target, and to Melvin’s mind, Bombay was to blame.

OVER CHRISTMAS, he came home to Kumarakom with the express purpose of finding a wife. Marriage was a stage of life to which he was resigned, an eventuality for which he had no way to prepare. He simply told himself that on his marriage night, either carnal knowledge would descend on him like a holy revelation or he would disappoint his wife. If the latter were true, at least they would already be married, and therefore compelled to work on it for the rest of their lives.

But once in Kumarakom, Melvin began to hope, and the thought of his future wife brought a delicious thrill. She would be there when he woke and when he returned home. Her words would break the tedium of days. She would prepare for him a tiffin of lunch to take to work, and when he opened it, his face would be lovingly caressed by steam. On his rare days off, maybe they would point to a place on a map and whimsically decide to take the train there.

Such innocent fantasies ended as soon as he saw a picture of Gladwyn, the girl his father had deemed a good catch because of her dowry and parentage. The only aesthetic quality that concerned Appachen was the girl’s fairness; he was otherwise blind to her buckteeth. Melvin felt too embarrassed to object, but he proposed that they let the girl’s family wait for a week, lest better offers should come along. “What better?” Appachen asked, genuinely puzzled. “Fine. A week.”

The week brought no new offers, and by Saturday, Melvin resigned himself to a future with Gladwyn and children with dental problems. That evening, he attended an outdoor play that was showing in town, wanting the escape of some pretty, fluffy fairy tale. He hoped that this drama troupe would be less depressing than the K.P.A.C. troupe, which performed Communist plays about the injustices of capitalism, or Geetha Theatres, which championed the opposing Congress Party plays. This was a new drama troupe called Apsara Arts Club; he had seen their show card posted on the wall of a tea shop. For tonight’s performance, they were presenting Kalli Pavayuda Veede , based on a European play called A Doll’s House , starring “the exquisite BIRDIE KAMALABHAI.” Melvin sat in one of the many plastic chairs arranged over the great green lawn of the Thirunakkara Maidan, beneath lofted strings of white lights strewn around the heads of leaning palms.