Tania James: Atlas of Unknowns

Gradually, the scars heal, but she will let no one, not even Anju, see the aftermath. Linno rejects all short-sleeved clothing in favor of long sleeves; the right cuff she cuts and ties into a knot. This she does in private, before school, an animalistic maneuvering of left hand and front teeth. She has Ammachi plait her two braids each morning, though the result is clumsier than she would like. The only hair Ammachi can do properly is her own.

These days, Linno rarely looks in mirrors if she can help it, for she knows what others see, not only a deformity of the hand but a deformity of fortune. Accidents belong to the unlucky, and ill fortune can travel along bloodlines, a gene that surfaces and sinks across generations but never disappears.

LINNO WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD when her mother died; Anju was three. Until then they had lived in Bombay as a family, in a flat where the suburbs were hardly less hectic than the city’s center. Their mother hung an orange sheet in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom, where they all slept together on bedrolls and a charpoy that the last tenant had left behind. The first thing Linno saw upon waking was a luminous red cloth tacked over the window, through which she could hear the magnified echo of the muezzin’s call to prayer. Once, she woke in the middle of the night and saw her mother’s profile, traced in dim light by the window. Her mother was perfectly still, a cord in her throat taut enough to touch; she seemed to strain for a view that the window could not afford her. Linno assumed it had something to do with the glossy postcard that had arrived that day, the one with the Statue of Liberty on it. “What is that?” Linno had asked, but her mother slipped it into her purse without an answer. Later, when Linno studied the postcard in secret, she was not especially impressed by the massive, mannish, sea green woman planted on the ocean. What held Linno’s interest was the writing on the back of the postcard, in Malayalam:

See? Their most famous statue wears a sari. You will have no problem here .

Bird

Where was her mother going and when? Who was this Bird? Every question led to another, none that Linno could bring herself to ask aloud. She was wounded by the woman her mother might be, and choosing not to know further, she convinced herself of the necessity for silence; such is the way that questions in the family remain unasked and unanswered for years. In time, Linno learned how to tuck all her questions away, like the fancy saris that her mother never wore, tightly folded between leaves of muslin in the bottom of a drawer.

AFTER LINNO’S OPERATION, Melvin calls several hospitals which give him the numbers of businesses that deal in prosthetic limbs; the nearest is a hundred miles away, in Thiruvananthapuram. The approximate price of the cheapest prosthetic, quoted to him over the phone, makes him want to laugh and cry at once. Not to mention that affixing such a prosthetic to his daughter’s wrist would be as inviting to ridicule as renaming her Hook. Still, he writes down the figure in small, careful numbers and folds the paper into his pocket. Later that day, he loses himself in toddy and cigarettes until he grows sick, then hurries half a mile from home, tight-lipped and retching, to throw up in a place where his children will not see.

For the sake of Linno’s rehabilitation, Melvin fashions himself into a general of optimism. Everything, he announces, is mental. If Anju, tugging at her sweat-stained blouse, complains about the weather, Melvin replies, “All in your head. Think positive. Think cool.” He once catches Ammachi weeping while praying in her room, asking God about fate and suffering and other not-positive topics. The next day, when Ammachi opens her prayer book, she finds a magazine clipping inserted between the Psalms. “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life!” She uses it to line the floor of the chicken coop.

For Linno, Melvin buys a new writing tablet whose cover displays a cartoon elephant in a tiny pink skirt. The pages are thin and gray, with faint blue lines. Using a ruler, he draws dashed lines across the page, like fences, and sample letters at the beginning of each fence.

While her classmates are reducing fractions, Linno is struggling with the alphabet. Until lunch, she sits with her right wrist fixed to the top of the page, the book drastically slanted, her left hand gripping the pencil so hard that the lead breaks. Trying to muscle a steady grace into her left hand — this is not unlike an elephant squirming itself into a skirt.

For months, Melvin makes her begin each day with penciling while he watches and offers bouquets of positive wisdoms loosely translated from the English: “Every cloud has silver in it.” Or: “If someone gives you lemons, make a glass half full of juice.” The quotations were imported straight from America, via a faded self-help booklet written by Dr. Roy Fontainelle that Melvin found in a book stall. The booklet inspires nothing in Linno but irritation. She hates Dr. Roy Fontainelle, with his fishbowl glasses and salesman smile, for using her father as a puppet of positive talk. Hers is a misguided hatred, she will later understand, but it is hate that steers her around the wallow of self-pity. It is resentment that pushes her pencil up and down her father’s fences while he sharpens her pencils with a kitchen knife. It takes months for her hand to fully relax around the pencil, but gradually her letters grow less wobbly. Full sentences begin to walk smoothly across the page with a measured calm, hardly a stutter.

Apologies and gratitude would embarrass Melvin, who, likewise, is not given to dispensing praise. There comes a day when he simply stops glancing over her shoulder and speaking on behalf of Dr. Roy Fontainelle. This is also the day he opens her elephant notebook and tears her new signature from the corner of a page. That scrap seems to him like a picture of her, more truthful than any on film.

· · ·

LINNO NEVER NOTICED how quickly the days were rushing by so long as she was swept up in them. But having spent the last two months of school homebound, she returns to find the classroom an altered ecosystem. Her peers have not only surpassed her in studies, but new inside jokes are leaving her on the outside. Girls are wearing jasmine bracelets around their left wrists. There are stories and memories to which she can only listen, popular film songs to which she does not know the words. Her classmates have grown at accelerated speeds, in ways imperceptible to the common adult eye. Linno, in the meantime, has changed only for the worse.

She trudges between classes, her wrist tucked into the pocket of her gray school skirt. She catches other children staring, if only to glimpse what is within her knotted sleeve. Linno is the only student allowed to wear long sleeves among the dozens of bare brown arms and ashy elbows.

One morning, during the earthworm dissection in science class, Linno excuses herself to the bathroom. Opening the door, she is welcomed by the dull stench of bat droppings collected along the sinks; her eyes go to the eaves, where the culprits are roosting. Asleep, the bats are a ceiling of fuzzy heads tucked within leathery wings, but startled by her noise, they ripple into a cloud and escape out the window.

Dank as it is, she takes shelter in the sludgy drains and slimy walls that she remembers, the white nub of soap whose cleansing properties are questionable. She tries to forget how her teacher has just impaled a long pink worm to the tray of tar, between two pins, its shiny ends still writhing. Soon she will have to return; every comfort has its limit. But she continues to rinse her hand beneath the faucet’s drizzle for longer than necessary.

Two girls enter the bathroom and, upon seeing Linno, lower their voices. Linno turns off the water. She has seen these girls and knows them to be older from their single braids.