Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

During Appachen and Melvin’s first visit, Gracie’s father poured a round of cognac for the men, which Appachen happily accepted despite the possibility that Melvin would shame him by taking wee sips. Melvin swallowed in a fierce gulp that tortured his stomach for the rest of the night. Equally unsettling was Gracie’s grave expression, not exactly the thrill that he had imagined. She sat on the sofa, flanked by her parents, silent as her father rambled on about the growing demand for geo-textiles and her mother affirmed his speeches with smiles and nods. The mother reminded Melvin of a porcelain miniature, with her changeless smile and her tiny doll hands folded over her knee. Or perhaps it was her husband’s size and volubility that so diminished her, but she seemed to be shrinking with age, best kept behind glass.

Gracie was dressed in her mother’s likeness. She was wearing far too much makeup, caking her complexion in a deathly hue, with rashes of blush across her cheeks. Later, she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a tray of teas. When she bent over to serve Melvin a glass, he noticed a strange discoloring at the corner of her cheekbone, a small swelling spackled over with paint. Catching his eye, she hesitated, then smiled. The skin wrinkled around the swelling.

For the rest of the evening, Melvin could not look at Gracie’s father, and instead focused on his two rings, thick gold bands of perfect proportion to bruise an eye.

Gracie’s father raised his ringed fingers. “Melvin, you like these?”

As soon as Melvin nodded, Gracie’s father began pulling and pulling on the smaller of the two rings.

“No,” Melvin said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t worry,” Gracie’s father said, still pulling. “This is just the beginning. More on the way.”

Gracie was leaning away from him with unveiled revulsion as he ordered his wife to bring the soap. Over Appachen’s protests, Gracie’s father finally soaped his finger and pulled off the smaller of the two rings, one with a small embedded sapphire. This he placed in the center of the coffee table.

And there it remained.

“I don’t want that,” Melvin said, barely aware that his palms were sweaty. The room went silent. In one glance, Melvin noticed how Gracie was looking at him curiously, with those pupils tiny as seeds, full of pent life.

Appachen broke the silence with a strained laugh. “He’s allergic to gold. Some luck, isn’t it? Breaks out in a rash every time.”

THE MEETING put Melvin in mind of Ammachi’s younger sister, Chinamma, whose husband sometimes beat her. Her bruises were a blend of colors, cloudy gray and plum blue, or yellow dappled with purple. He glimpsed them only in memory. Otherwise, the bruises were to be ignored.

Sometimes, Chinamma came to stay with Ammachi for a few days, which meant that things were going badly with Thambi, her husband. She always went back a few days later, but during their time together, Ammachi and Chinamma slept in the same bed, holding each other like little girls, whispering into the night. Melvin had assumed that his mother was healing his aunt, or maybe cursing Thambi and inciting rebellion. But once, while eavesdropping from the doorway, Melvin heard his mother’s words: No, you can’t leave him. You are married now. Be patient, it will get better .

It terrified him to learn that the people he loved most in the world could be such distant specters of the people he had presumed them to be.

But there was Gracie, the woman he could finally rescue, the wife into whose ear he would whisper sweet, healing things. They were not even married yet, but already her smile lines were inscribed in his mind’s eye, and thinking of her returned the inner itch to his stomach, a feeling that he thought to be the first stirrings of love. How an open palm could meet her cheek with anything but wonder, he would never understand.

N THE EVENING, Melvin sits next to Linno and pretends to take an interest in the serial she is watching on television. Sympathy , it is called. On the screen, a young woman is confessing to her father that she has decided to marry the neighbor’s son, even though the families have been feuding for the past six episodes. One modest tear sits on the apple of the girl’s cheek, though her immodest sobs resemble the squeaky scrape of a wiper across a windshield. Never will I disobey my heart! she shrieks. I may die of grief but at least I shall meet God with a pure and honest soul!

Melvin and Linno watch the screen, neither of them particularly moved. Melvin’s presence renders Linno acutely aware of the fake tear, the flowery pleas, the heaving, padded bosom. It is a world created for an audience of one. Two makes the experience rather embarrassing.

During the commercial break, Melvin casually places the photo on the coffee table and then examines the state of his fingernails. “That’s him.”

Linno snatches up the photo and hunts for signs of blindness. But there are no milky cataracts like the ones that have haunted her recent imaginings, no harnessed hound to lead him across streets. He stands with arms crossed, a magnificent red-roofed house with tapioca walls looming in the background. Every time she tries to focus on his face, her gaze slides to the circular driveway patterned in bricks of red and gray, hugging a fountain where a stone cherub fingers a lute. Mangosteen trees line the drive, thick with purple fruit, and ivy gourd vines wander up an elegant trellis. A sudden, wanton desire rises up within her, having little to do with the man. Though he is not so bad-looking. A full head of hair, his skin as dairy-fair as promised. She flips the picture over and reads the name several times before pronouncing it aloud.

“Kuku George?”

Ammachi approaches and looks over their shoulders, squinting through her glasses.

“What kind of name is that?” Linno asks.

“Maybe an accident,” Ammachi says. “I never really liked the name Melvin. I thought my great-grandfather’s name was Melvin, but he was not Melvin, he was Elwin. By the time I found out, the name was already on the birth certificate.”

“Thank God,” Melvin says.

They do not talk of the future. They do not talk of the house like a monument to all that is possible, nor the cherub like a baby Gabriel mid-prance in the center of the fountain, come to inform Linno of her destiny. Instead, Ammachi cheerily notes that Kuku does not look blind at all.

Linno wishes her father were more like the father in the serial, a man with so stoic a face that it belongs on a statue, demanding that she marry the blind man immediately. Melvin, at the moment, is scratching his armpit and looking to the window as a possible means of escape. If Linno were more bound and bullied by her family, it would be much easier to flail, to plead, to put up a fight in the face of familial pressures. But freedom of choice makes defiance far less attractive.

Over the course of the week, she begins entertaining other thoughts. What it would be like to eat in restaurants at whim. What it would be like to tuck a roll of bills between Ammachi’s fingers each month. Freedom from financial worry holds considerable virtue. She boils her debate down to its elemental parts: marriage means money, her money, and this is a freedom too tempting to ignore.

LATER IN THE WEEK, Melvin drives Abraham to his grandmother’s house in Changanacherry, and on the way back, Abraham requests that they stop at a house on Good Shepherd Road. While Melvin weaves around the bicyclists and auto-rickshaws, Abraham says, “I just want to visit with the son of one of my oldest friends. Bought him this nice bottle of brandy.” Abraham pats the paper bag in his lap. “Very expensive. From France.”