Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Anju has never heard these words from her own mouth. They sound simple, the beginnings of a tragic fairy tale to which everyone back home has already written the end. There is fear in speaking of tragedy, as if doing so might invoke its return.

But now, speaking feels frighteningly freeing, one sentence unraveling the next as she tells him of everything until the day she stepped on the plane. How she used to feign studying while watching Linno draw. How her father made Linno the sketchbook for her seventeenth birthday, and how in a moment of desperation, years later, Anju lunged for it.

She goes on and on, while mashed potatoes and pork rolls are being consumed en masse. Every word keeps Fish in place as he listens, rapt, to the well-kept corners of her heart.

INNO WAKES TO FACE Ammachi on the adjacent pillow. Without support from her dentures, Ammachi’s cheeks have sunken into hollows, and her breath comes and goes in a chainsaw snore. In Ammachi’s face, Linno sees her own reflection fifty years from now, clinging to a pillow and little else.

Ammachi’s eyes flutter open. She smacks her lips as if trying to remember a sweet taste.

“Mai,” Linno says. “I don’t think it will work.”

“What work?” Ammachi mumbles, already settling back into sleep.

“With Kuku.”

At the name, Ammachi blinks herself awake. “You want to what with Kuku?”

“I don’t want anything with Kuku.”

Ammachi raises herself on an elbow. “But why?”

Ammachi’s questions follow Linno for the rest of the day. “If not Kuku, then who?” Ammachi will be satisfied only if Linno reveals that Kuku is a former convict or suffers from a brain-stunting syndrome. Neither of these excuses being true, Linno’s reason—“I can’t explain it”—continually leads Ammachi to ask with increasing impatience, “Explain what?”

Several days have passed since the evening of Linno and Kuku’s first meeting, and not once has Linno thought fondly of meeting again. She cannot blame her refusal on his lust for the immigrant visa and neither is his blindness all that troubling, as he seems to function with little help. But during the drive home, when Melvin told her to give Kuku time, to give Kuku a chance, Linno could not muster the slightest hope. Her husband, should she accept him, led her to feel nothing at all, and this seems reason enough to say no.

How to explain this to a woman who was betrothed at thirteen?

So Linno explains nothing. She issues a final statement, Not Interested, and goes on with her work, while Ammachi grumbles off to her room, reciting a verse about humility. In the meantime, Linno gathers the mung beans she scattered over a towel last night, sprinkled with water, so that by morning they have sprouted tiny shoots like piglet tails. Melvin loves to snack on the mung beans, but have they run out? Should she buy more? It is easy losing oneself in these tiny sorts of questions, immune to larger ones.

BY WORD OF MOUTH, an unfailing form of currency in these parts, Linno is hired to paint her largest window yet, at Ninan’s Sanitations Store, a purveyor of toilets and sinks.

Mr. Ninan maps the blank window with his hands, showing Linno exactly what he wants and where. He requests a soft-lipped nymph with peachy skin, slender in the waist, a sinuous black braid over her shoulder, a flirty twinkle to her eye, and below this, simply: NINAN’S.

“Maybe we should include a faucet?” Linno suggests. “Maybe the woman could gesture to the faucet?”

Ninan looks at her impatiently, tweaking the tip of his waxed mustache. He has a singular vision, and that vision is curvy, flirty, and NINAN’S.

Linno begins the painting early in the morning, the mist circling her softly while a cuckoo bird sends out its dawning call. She chalks the same face she has done time and again, the supple cheeks, the flaring lashes. The night before, she imagined that her artistic reputation would spread across the state, the country even, and by the time Anju returned, Linno’s signature would hover in the corners of countless billboards, reducing the red sketchbook to a mere relic of her talents. But Ninan’s demands deflate her dream, reminding her that this is a business, not art, and in business, success must be replicated rather than imagined anew. Her customers privilege predictability over creativity, and in the rendering of women, clients like Ninan believe that there is no such thing as unique beauty. A woman is either beautiful or forgettable.

Linno and Anju belong somewhere in the latter category, Anju drawing more from her mother’s features, Linno taking from her father’s nose. Still, they are similar enough so that when Linno looks in a mirror and blurs her vision, she can almost see her sister looking back.

But today, instead of seeing her own sister in the window’s reflection, Linno sees Kuku’s sister crossing the street. Linno freezes, hoping that a state of absolute stillness will throw Alice off her scent, but noting Alice’s quickening pace, Linno prepares herself.

“Linno!” Alice cries out.

Linno turns and feigns shocked joy.

“I thought it was you!” Alice says. She is wearing a mauve sari, as plain as the one she wore at their first meeting, a hefty purse at her hip. If she harbors any resentment, she does not show it, and seems elated over this encounter. Alice glances up at the window. “Another job?”

“Yes, Ninan’s. They sell toilets. And sinks.”

The conversation lulls, allowing a window for good-byes, but Alice lingers. “I’ve been looking for you. I thought about coming to your house, but I didn’t want your father to get the wrong impression.”

Linno steels herself against the oncoming argument, that Kuku would make a good husband, that Linno would be a fool to ignore him. If Linno is so perfect for Kuku, where is he to tell her so? Linno feels her cheeks growing hot as her mouth takes the shape of a polite but firm no.

Alice is rooting through her bag until finally she withdraws Linno’s napkin. She holds out the side with the fish. “You did this over tea, didn’t you?”

Linno’s resolve plummets. She tries to laugh and apologize, muttering about nervous habits.

“And you designed it yourself?” Alice asks.

Weakly, Linno nods.

Alice nods.

Linno wonders if she should hold out her hand to take the napkin, but something about the grave wonder with which Alice is studying the fish, biting her lower lip, makes Linno wait for her to speak.

Finally Alice looks up and asks, “Can you do it again?”

OVER LUNCH at Leela Café, Alice unfolds her tragedies, one by one, beginning with her husband, Reji. In life, he was the owner of Eastern Invites, an invitation business that specialized in wedding cards, mostly of the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian variety. Seventy years before, his grandfather had started the business, at a time when the bride’s family still made personal visits to invite each guest to the impending event. Reji’s grandfather took over an old-fashioned printing press left behind by the British, and cranking the handle late into the night, he pushed his small community into a new era of invitations. Over time, the invitations grew gaudier and gilded, even for those who could barely afford them. For a while, with Reji at the prow, business thrived. He and Alice bought a smaller version of the family home just ten miles away, and even a cobalt blue Maruti.

Everything was fine until two years before, when Reji began acting strangely, coming home later from work with poor excuses. He bought her an expensive turquoise bottle of perfume for no reason in particular; this from a man who bought her gifts on exactly two days per year — her birthday and their anniversary. Alice became convinced that he was having an affair. “It happens,” her aunts said, shrugging cryptically, and advised her to wait it out. Like rain, it would pass.