Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Before Alice could investigate the possibility of other women, Reji died on the job. There are few safety hazards in the invitation business, unless one brings the safety hazards into the building, as in Reji’s case — a length of rope knotted from a ceiling beam. The sweeping lady found him the next morning, his tongue fat and pink between his teeth.

From wife to widow, overnight. Alice sat at the head of his open casket as friends and relatives trudged up and down the driveway. With outward despair and longing, she looked on his body, though her thoughts were mostly congratulatory to the makeup artist, who had somehow erased the broken bluish capillaries that had spidered at Reji’s temples. Drained of fluids, cotton corked up his nose, he was already a ghost.

A few days later, she heard a radio personality explain why the suicide rate in Kerala was so high. “This is the paradox: in a region of such excellent educational standards, we see high unemployment, lack of social mobility, and incomplete families due to fathers or mothers working elsewhere. These conditions have an extremely negative effect on Malayali society, which values the concepts of honor and pride, so when this honor is made vulnerable, suicide appears to be the only option.” She flicked off the power switch with such force that the radio fell onto its back. What honor had Reji lost? And didn’t they share the same honor? Was she to follow him into the flame? No thank you. This was 2001. The other day, she had climbed onto a bus to find a thick-armed woman behind the steering wheel. When Alice paused to stare at her, the driver said, “On or off?” and thrilled by her authority, Alice hurried down the aisle to a window seat.

Her inner rally died down when she learned that Eastern Invites was falling apart. Nights she spent poring over wrinkled, swollen ledgers, dragging her finger across the lines of falling numbers. Loss, loss, loss, finally punctuated by human loss. New invitation businesses had sprung up across India. Most of them were doing a great proportion of merchandising on the Internet, catering to the masses of migrated Indians who held fast to their fancy scrolled invitations and stone-studded envelopes, even when their children were marrying white or Chinese or Jewish or atheist. Indian invitations were in high demand. The market was going global, the globe was going digital, and Eastern Invites was going nowhere. She remembered Reji’s ridiculous belief in the loyalty of customers who would continue doing business with him out of guilt, if nothing else. “What kind of guilt travels across countries?” she had argued. “They might not see you for years. Why should they be loyal, then?”

“Relax,” said Reji, with the blind smile of the eternally faithful.

There were other failures as well, like the multicolor printing machine that had broken long ago, leaving the necessary parts, from Germany, never to be replaced. At the time, Reji happily lost himself in the manual labor of screen printing, which accounted for only a third of their sales. He loved the fresh chemical smell of the ink, the pressing of joyful announcements onto a piece of textured paper. But while other shops employed whole R&D departments to produce a new crop of designs each month, Reji’s invitations remained the same.

Output slowed, business stalled. And there was the loan that was never repaid. And the rent that was two months past due. And the employee who had been steadily siphoning money until his recent departure. This must have been what finally tore Reji’s glossy belief in loyalty. Alice pictured a boy in the back of a train, gazing out the window at the passing scenery, fanning himself with a sheaf of bills, in blissful oblivion. That image left her with a recurring dream for months after Reji’s passing: Reji by the train window, fanning himself with the sheaf of bills, her beside him, sharing the moneyed breeze.

ALL THIS, even the dream, Alice relates while tearing off pieces of idli without a hint of discomfort. Linno feels smothered with someone else’s secrets, an unpleasant experience, much in the same way that a stranger’s body odor always smells far more repulsive than one’s own. In Linno’s home, and in the home of every other person she knows, families are stabilized by the preservation of secrets, the family honor maintained.

But the meal is free, the idlis plump and spongy. The waiter appears every so often with a sweaty steel jug of water or a golden bowl of sambar, spicy and sweetened with jaggery. Honor or no honor, why leave a plate unfinished?

“I sold the house and the car to pay off the debts,” Alice says. “I moved back home with Kuku. All this to keep the business running, but now I want it to grow.”

She has been evaluating her competition and found the flaws in their construction, the recurrence of mistakes, the poor advertising, the bland and identical websites, and worst of all, the lack of diversity in design. Ganesha this, Ganesha that. Same trunk and tusks on every card, same golds and reds and saffrons. Alice has retained half of her employees, a few salesmen to staff the shop and fifteen workers in the adjoining production house.

What she needs now is a visionary designer who won’t mind working for less than a visionary’s fees. She wants a breadth of designs to supply the Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain, Buddhist, Baha’i, mixed-marriage, secular, and fusion markets with equal appeal. The difference between her company and every other will be the personal touches, the innovative aesthetic.

And she has other ideas. Independent global vendors, like satellite salesmen, hawking their wares in the farthest wilds of Montana. Complimentary bridal packages, customized designs. Recycled paper invitations for the earthy types. Room to grow? Of course. The only way is up.

Linno watches Alice pause to draw a deep sip from her water. Where is Montana? Would she be sent there? If ever there were a time for the bathroom-excuse escape, it is now. But she thinks of the dull army of women she has yet to paint, ideal and identical and emblazoned across every window, causing her to say, with rare impulsiveness: “Where do we begin?”

THEY BEGIN with a rudimentary education.

At the production house, Alice guides Linno around three chugging machines that descend in size, introducing them with a wave of her hand. “These are the Heidelbergs. Appa, Amma, and Baby.” Alice pats the largest one, a sprawling thing that steals a sheet from one side and spits another out the other, faster than Linno can blink. “Papa cost the most. Fifty lakhs, but he can print fifteen hundred pages per minute. Multicolor offset, fully automatic, and includes foil stamping as well.”

Linno puts her hand to Papa, feels the raging pulse worth five million rupees.

Alice shows her the screen-printing machine, where a man is spreading black ink across a negative, and near this, a small table where two women are pasting gems to envelopes. “Kundan work,” Alice calls it. Then comes the die embossing machine, the die cutting machine, the stock of mill and handmade papers, before Alice leads her out the front door of the production house and into the back door of the shop.

The shop is much smaller than the production house, and the wall shelves are nearly buckling from the weight of all the albums they support, each bulging with outmoded designs and samples from previous events. Streamers and tinsel festoon the fluorescent lights, dangling over velvet benches, where a mother and daughter are seated before a sample album. A clerk stands on the other side of the counter, slowly flipping each page and explaining the designs, to which the mother says, “We’ve seen that one before.” The daughter dismissively nods along.

In a low voice, Alice points out the two clerks. “Prince is the one showing the album. Always wanted to be on the radio and has the voice for it too. Talks quick, scatters some English phrases here and there. None of them sound right to me, but he always persuades the customer.”