Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

By the time Anju pockets the perfume sample, Bird appears to have calmed a bit. Light, dull piano music wafts around them. “You should come to my house too,” Bird says abruptly. “Come and have tea. Okay?”

Anju hesitates. She is familiar with the warm, bossy aura of aunties back home, but to find it here is strange, and welcoming.

“Okay,” Anju says.

“Good.” From a nearby counter, Bird takes a stack of perfume samples and drops them into her purse. “This way I can wear a different perfume every month.”

Her lesson, delivered unapologetically, puts Anju at ease. She asks how Bird came to find her here.

“I called the number you gave me. Said I was an old friend of yours. That Mrs. Solanki, she said you would be here.”

Anju nods, slightly surprised and pleased at Bird’s decision that they are already old friends.

IN THE EVENING, Mr. Solanki wears a candy pink tie and Mrs. Solanki wears a sweater of the same color, as if matching renders them a united front against whatever news Rohit will bring. Anju scratches at the brassiere that holds her shoulder cutlets in place. At the store, she told herself that she was doing a service to the coat from which she stole the cutlets, and unless the future owner of the coat possessed concave shoulders, the owner would be grateful. Anju has decided to give the cutlets a test run today, to see if they might be wearable on Monday, but can one be allergic to ill-placed cutlets? Or perhaps the irritation is due to the Calvin Klein Obsession sample that she smeared around her collarbones, one from a whole deck of cards that she stuffed into her pocket.

Her conversation with Bird continues to bother her as well. Bird was right to scold her. All this time, Anju has been selfish, ignoring her original intentions and the family whose future she meant to shape. And why? Because of homesickness — a child’s excuse. And like a child, she needed to be rebuked, to have someone jog her sense of ambition.

Also, she has begun to think that there may be certain perks to the elliptical odyssey due to the many miles between home and here. The inspiration for her newfound optimism: Sheldon Fischer.

As a potential husband for Anju, Fish has two strikes against him, being both white and Jewish. No doubt Melvin would never speak to Anju again if, back in Kumarakom, she ran off with either. She knows of only a few Jews in Kerala, descended from those who migrated thousands of years ago from Palestine, fleeing persecution. Before most left for Israel, these Jews found their next-best resting place in Kerala, a land where many religious enclaves existed with little commingling, each enclave confident in its proximity to God. Diversity was fine as long as each clung to his own.

But if she were to agree to a life of here and there, if she were to accept the breadwinning role of the family, could she not demand a bit of romantic autonomy in return?

Wherever Bird came from, she is a blessing, a reminder of greater possibility. Next week, accompanied by Mrs. Solanki, Anju will keep her appointment with Mr. Tandon.

MRS. SOLANKI OPENS the front door while simultaneously using it as a shield, peering around the edge. Instead of hello, her first words are a dismayed, “Oh, Rohit.”

Rohit steps into the foyer with a large video camera where his head should be, or so it seems from Anju’s distance. The camera is strapped to his hand, its small screen flipped out to one side like a blunted wing. Immediately, Anju is impressed with his sparse safari style, a khaki vest with pieces of equipment jutting from the pockets, scuffed sneakers, a single duffel bag which he drops by the doorway.

Mr. Solanki smooths his tie. “Rohit, beta , can’t we wait until after dinner for filming?”

“Dad,” Rohit says, warmly ignoring his father’s question. He holds the camera away from his body, its red light still solid, as he hugs his father with his free arm. He does the same for his mother, adding a noisy kiss on the cheek.

“And this must be the exchange student,” Rohit says, turning his lens on Anju. She stands absolutely still, feet together, hands at her sides.

“I’m Rohit.” He extends his hand, which she does not take, tensed and frozen, until he reassures her that he is not taking a still photograph. “You can move or whatever you want. Just be yourself.”

AT DINNER, Anju marvels at the napkins, which have been contorted by the Colombians into the shapes of swans. They float on ponds of porcelain plates which Anju has never before seen, all of them gold-leafed and gleaming. Mrs. Solanki first fills Rohit’s plate with a colorful salad, all reds and yellows with a drizzle of dressing, but he partakes rarely, spending most of his time swinging his camera from face to face as the conversation skids along. Apparently, Rohit has filmed family scenes before, such as last year’s Christmas dinner and a few days in February, after his mother underwent a hysterectomy. (Mrs. Solanki seems irritated by this disclosure.) Still, no one is quite able to follow Rohit’s directive to “act normal,” not even Rohit, who sometimes asks his parents to repeat themselves: “I didn’t catch that. One more time, please?”

“I said,” Mr. Solanki sighs, “that Dr. Ummat’s daughter got into medical school.”

Rohit tinkers with the focus ring on his camera. Anju is fascinated by the camera and his ease with it, all the buttons and the lenses and the confidence required to fiddle with them. “So what are you saying, Dad? You’re saying you wish I had gone to med school?”

“I did not say that.”

“Then why’d you have to mention that Nirmal’s going to med school?”

“You asked how she was doing.”

“Yeah, but I asked about Nirmal the person, not Nirmal the doctor.”

Mr. Solanki stabs a cherry tomato with his fork. “I do not know about Nirmal the whatever. That you can ask Dr. Ummat yourself.”

Mrs. Solanki grabs Rohit’s wrist. “You know who Anju has for chemistry? Mr. Haskell, remember him? He loved you.”

Rohit swings his camera over, and Mrs. Solanki leans back in her seat a little, lacing her fingers over her plate with an air of false nonchalance. He pans over to Anju, who looks at the lens with no small degree of distrust. Videos do not allow for preparation. Only once has she seen herself on television, in the wedding video of a distant cousin wherein Anju glanced over her shoulder and then unsuccessfully attempted to stuff a gulab jamun the size of a Ping-Pong ball into her mouth.

“Why are you doing this shooting?” she asks.

“It’s for my current film.”

“Yes, Mrs. Solanki said you are making home videos?”

Mrs. Solanki stares at her greens, chewing industriously. Rohit turns his camera onto his father, then zooms in on the glass of wine that Mr. Solanki is refilling. Glancing at the camera, Mr. Solanki stops pouring and puts the bottle aside.

Rohit sits the camera next to his plate, though the red light remains on, its eerie surveillance apparently nonexistent to him, except for the moments when he looks into the viewfinder and jimmies a ring on the lens. In the form of a well-rehearsed monologue, he explains to Anju that he first caught the film bug in the late eighties, when he borrowed his father’s Sony Mavica to re-create historical events like the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, as told with G.I. Joe figurines. When he arrived at Princeton, he returned to filmmaking, and now he is in the thick of another project, his most ambitious to date, a personal documentary that he started on the day he decided to take an indefinite hiatus from school.

“What’s it about?” Rohit asks, intercepting a question that Anju had not posed. He bends over the camera and zooms in on Anju. His concentration is that of a scientist at a microscope, his focus broken only when he looks up at her. “I don’t know yet. You never know until you’re in the edit room. Loosely, it’s about my experiences as a second-generation brown man in a post-9/11 America.